Deep Work: Why Your Focus Depends on Your Team with Shawn Vanderhoven

Most deep work doesn't fail at your desk. It fails in the team around you, which is what leadership researcher Shawn Vanderhoven spent three years studying.

Shawn is a partner at The Wiseman Group, where he works alongside Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers. With his wife and co-author, Anne Vanderhoven, he wrote Pause: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World, built on interviews with more than 400 people about the leaders who made focus possible for them, and the ones who made it impossible. Partway through the research, his own team told him which kind he was.

In this conversation, we cover:

• The table slam: the workshop moment that started the research, and why Shawn says personal productivity advice aims too low when one ping from a manager can undo the whole system.
• Permission vs. sponsorship: why "feel free to focus" crumbles under pressure, and what changes when a leader puts their own reputation behind protected time.
• Pausing up: a managing-up move anyone can make, asking your boss for advice on your priority list instead of quietly trying to do all fifteen things.
• Majors and minors: how to give important work you can't drop a smaller, fixed share of your time so it stops crowding out what matters most.
• Clearing your desk: how leaders lose good people first to distraction, then to departure, and what one act of full attention did for Shawn.

If you've ever built a system that worked right up until the first message from your boss, this one's for you. You don't need a title to start: Shawn's first step is to write down everything you're carrying, put rough percentages beside it, and talk it through with one other person. Less of your attention goes to work you never chose, and more is left for the rest of your life. Find Pause and the free resources at pausebook.co.

Connect with Shawn:

• Pause: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World
• LinkedIn
• The Wiseman Group

Connect with Erik:

• LinkedIn
• Threads
• Facebook
• Bluesky

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