Two teams. Same industry. Same talent level. One team consistently delivers impressive results, while the other struggles to meet even basic targets.

What's the difference? What makes teams efficient?

I've been struggling with this question for many years. There are countless books on leading high-performance teams. However, I wanted to distil all this knowledge and uncover the essence of what makes teams highly efficient.

I think I understand it now. And let me tell you, it's not talent. It's not any fancy methodology. It's not working long hours. And it's definitely not Scrum.

The secret ingredient of all efficient teams is Clarity and Focus.

That's it. That's all. It's my new motto. You can write it down.

When I sit down with high-performing teams, they can tell me exactly what they're building, why it's critical, and which tempting projects they deliberately turned down to stay on track. I ask the same questions to struggling teams, and I get a word salad of vague priorities and an endless inventory of "urgent" requests they're juggling.

This is a fundamental difference in the team's mindset.

Clarity and Focus are what make some teams thrive while others merely survive.

Clarity

Ask yourself these simple questions: What is your purpose? What is your goal? How do you expect to achieve it? How will you know if you've succeeded?

Can you give clear answers to those?

Surprisingly, many teams and many leaders can't. Their priorities are vague, goals are blurry, expectations are unclear, and everything keeps shifting every few weeks.

If you don't know what your goal is, how do you expect to reach it?

I've been in such a situation. My team was being thrown from one topic to another, shifting the direction every few weeks. We were grinding hard, delivering a lot of work, but we could not shake the feeling that we were running in circles. In the end, we felt that all our hard work was dispersed, and our impact was minimal.

We were permanently stuck in what experts call treading water. Not drowning, but never making meaningful progress toward the goal. No breakthrough innovations. No deep expertise. Just an endless cycle of starting, stopping, and starting again.

Very frustrating experience.

Wasted effort and lack of clear goals weren't just inefficient. They were demoralising.

How could I ask someone to pour their heart into a project they know will be abandoned next month? After the first few times, they eventually stopped caring about "yet another new priority." They lost their spark, their drive, and became passive and apathetic.

The death spiral of unclear goals

Teams that lack clarity dilute their efforts. They do many things at once, shifting their priorities, jumping from one topic to another, scattering their energy across a dozen half-baked initiatives, never diving deep enough to create real value.

Every stakeholder request becomes an emergency. Every industry trend becomes a new priority. Every customer complaint becomes a reason to pivot. They're reactive pinballs bouncing between other people's agendas.

Sharp like a spear

Instead, highly efficient teams are like a spear.

I needed to help my team regain clarity. We needed to have a clear vision. Have a clear goal. I had to make sure that all my team members have a clear understanding of what the goal is, how their work contributes to it, and how they'll know that they've succeeded.

Clarity is often as much about knowing what not to do as about doing something. We needed to stop scattering our energy across every opportunity that crosses our path. Instead, together with my Product Manager, we had to make brutal choices about what we won't pursue, even when those opportunities look tempting.

We worked with our stakeholders to agree on what should be the number one priority for our team and ruthlessly eliminated anything that didn't drive us toward our target.

And once we locked onto that target, we needed to stay focused on it.

Focus

If Clarity is your direction, Focus is your engine.

Knowing what your goal is is one thing. Staying focused on it? That's a completely different challenge. Distraction is the most dangerous productivity killer, and every workspace is full of distractions.

Distractions, distractions everywhere

My team's focus was under constant assault. Scope creep, urgent feature requests, piling bugs, excessive meetings, and hundreds of big and small issues were stealing my team's focus, diverting our attention away from our goal.

It was my job as a manager to help my team stay focused. I needed to do something...

I needed to say no to stakeholders who were used to hearing yes. I disappointed people who consider their requests urgent. Some of these people had corner offices and strong opinions about our priorities. I've learned that refusing requests gracefully without burning bridges is an essential skill for a manager.

And yet, distractions that I could refuse were the easy part. They were visible, obvious, and relatively manageable. There's a whole other category of distractions that's much harder to eliminate.

I called it The Bloat, and it was quietly sabotaging my team's effectiveness every single day.

The Bloat

Death by a thousand paper cuts: slow deployment pipelines, broken tooling, missing documentation, tangled technical debt, production incidents, and endless spaghetti of dependencies between teams.

These issues were often so normalised that they were invisible. "It's just how things work around here." But every hour my developers spent wrestling with flaky systems, waiting for approvals, handling incidents, or deciphering undocumented code was an hour stolen from our actual goals. An hour wasted.

The math is brutal. If your team spends two hours daily fighting these invisible productivity killers, that's 25% of their capacity vanishing into thin air. You're not building toward your vision. You're constantly firefighting problems that shouldn't exist in the first place.

To retain my team's focus, I needed to be absolutely ruthless about eliminating the bloat. Treat every friction point as an enemy of focus and systematically hunt them down.

Sometimes it meant investing heavily in better tooling or documentation. Other times, it required difficult conversations with other departments about streamlining processes. The key was recognising that protecting my team's focus isn't just about saying no. It's about actively removing the hidden obstacles that drain their energy every single day.

Keep your eyes on the target

Eventually, my team regained their Clarity & Focus. We've become a well-performing, efficient engineering team. Not by luck, but through countless tough decisions. Choosing to say no when everyone expects yes, investing time upfront to save hours later, and having uncomfortable conversations about what really matters.

I've learned that as a manager, my job is not just delegating tasks or tracking progress. I needed to become the bringer of clarity, the guardian of focus.

Tomorrow morning, ask your team this simple question: "What's our single most important goal right now?" If you don't get a clear answer, you know where to start. See the target clearly and remove everything blocking your path towards it. That's when ordinary teams become extraordinary.