Hi everyone, David here.
About ten days ago, I wrote an article on the Substack about something I’ve been seeing: we’re barely a quarter into the year, and already 90% of teams have a whole new set of priorities layered on top of the ones they came in with. New priorities from a customer meeting that forced a roadmap change. An idea from an investor that was too good to ignore. A competitor move that demanded a response. You came into Q1 with a plan that was probably already too ambitious, and now it’s doubled in scope.
That article got a ton of feedback. But the question I kept getting was: Okay, I buy the argument for reprioritizing. But how do I actually get my whole company aligned once I’ve done that? What do I do tactically?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and somewhat to my own surprise, I landed on a framework. Five things. They all start with C, so naturally I’m calling them the 5 C’s of driving focus. They are what I see consistently in the teams that actually execute: the ones that don’t just set priorities, but get an entire organization moving in the same direction.
If you want to hear my full thoughts, please check out the Pulse episode I just recorded. You can watch it here, via Youtube, or your favorite podcasting platform. If you prefer to read a summary, you can continue below.
1. Concentrate the efforts
The best-run companies I work with don’t have twelve priorities. They have one, maybe two. And the most impressive results I’ve seen, including from my own experience, come from quarters where the entire company was focused on a single goal.
The key is picking a goal that everyone in the company can impact. Growth is a good example. Not “the sales team’s number,” but total company growth: new logos, net retention, expansion revenue, all of it. When you frame it that way and put an actual number out there, suddenly everyone has a role. Marketing drives lead gen and customer upsells. Sales builds pipeline and closes faster. Customer success gets that three-year customer onto the new module. Legal streamlines the contracts. The deal desk removes friction from the approvals process. Executives join calls. Even teams that don’t think of themselves as “revenue-driving” can find ways to move the needle.
The discipline is narrowing. If you added new priorities this quarter, you have to remove things too. Probably more than you think. But that concentration is what creates momentum.
2. Communicate clearly and consistently
Once you’ve concentrated your efforts, the next step is making sure everyone knows it and keeps hearing it. The companies that get this right talk about their goals constantly. At every all-hands. In every update email. At board meetings. In team meetings. They repeat themselves again and again, and they always explain the why behind the goals.
I’m a big believer in monthly all-hands, but if you’re going through a period of intense focus, I’d shift to weekly updates. There’s something about a weekly cadence that creates urgency. People feel it. They understand that this matters right now. You can even go daily if the metric moves that fast. And here’s a subtle move that’s just as important: the less you talk about other things, the more people understand what actually matters. Addition by subtraction.
You can build an entire all-hands around this. Have a different team present each week: what they’re seeing in their part of the org, what they’re doing, how they’re moving the needle on the bigger goal. The communication itself becomes the alignment mechanism.
3. Foster an outcome-driven culture
This one is about what gets rewarded and what gets attention. The companies that stay aligned have a culture that rewards outcomes, not activity. They don’t celebrate the person who talks the most about how hard they’re working. They celebrate the person whose work actually moved the company forward.
It sounds simple, but it requires real intentionality. You have to hire for it, acknowledge it publicly, and reward it consistently. The question isn’t “did you work all weekend?” It’s “did what you did move the needle for the company?” When people understand that the standard is impact, not effort for effort’s sake, they start making different decisions about where to spend their time. They self-prioritize. They stop doing work that looks productive but doesn’t connect to the goals.
This is about culture, which means it doesn’t happen overnight. But it starts with what you, as the leader, choose to pay attention to.
4. Celebrate the people and teams moving the needle
This is related to culture, but it deserves its own spot because it’s so often overlooked. When someone does the right thing — when they close a deal during a growth push, or get a long-time customer onto a new product, or ship a feature that drives a wave of new trials — that has to be celebrated. In Slack, in email, at the all-hands. And it should come from you, the CEO, the leader of the company.
Here’s what I’ve found to be the most powerful version of this: if you’re in a company of 50, 100, 200, even 500 people, and you individually email or call someone to say “I saw what you did, and it really moved the needle”, that is incredibly powerful. People remember that. It costs you nothing and it creates loyalty and motivation that no policy can replicate.
Make sure the rest of the company sees what’s being celebrated, too. When a team gets up at the all-hands to present what they did, pump them up. Tell everyone why it mattered. The goal is twofold: the people doing great work feel seen, and everyone else sees exactly what “great” looks like. Your top performers and most critical people should have no reason to look elsewhere.
5. Compensate to align with goals
I put this last intentionally because I actually don’t think it’s the most important lever. The other four C’s will drive focus and execution on their own. But it is true that compensation drives behavior, and when used well, it can accelerate everything else.
Most companies only think about variable comp for their sales team or executives. But during a period of intense focus, you should think creatively about compensating anyone who’s driving the outcomes you care about. I know a company that ran a hackathon to solve a critical AI problem on the product side. They put a $5,000 bounty for each participant if the team cracked it. Ten people paid $50,000 total for a problem worth tens of millions in enterprise value. That’s a great trade.
For your leadership team, I feel strongly that everyone should have the same bonus structure. They should not necessarily have the same amount, but the same framework. When different execs are compensated against different goals, you create misalignment at the top, and it trickles down. For your GTM teams, I’m a big believer in quarterly comp plans over annual ones, especially in a market that moves this fast. Tell people their on-target earnings, commit to getting them there, but reserve the ability to adjust what you pay for each quarter. One quarter, you might pay extra for multi-year deals. The next you might reward the volume of new logos. The quarter after that, you might incentivize a specific product module. The point is to use comp as a steering mechanism that stays aligned to whatever the company needs most right now.
Stay focused for one quarter
If you concentrate your efforts, communicate clearly and consistently, foster an outcome-driven culture, celebrate the people moving the needle, and compensate to align with your goals, you will be surprised how fast you start to feel momentum. The pace picks up. People align. Distractions fall away.
I know this is hard, especially for founders. We’re wired to think about every opportunity, to stress about everything at once, to tell our teams about ten different things in ten different conversations. My challenge to you: try this for one quarter. When you have a new idea, don’t tell anyone. Write it down. Save it. Come back to it at the end of the quarter when it’s time to plan what’s next. When you see something not moving fast enough, go help unblock it. Don’t change the priority.
One quarter. The 5 C’s. Let me know how it goes.
