Congratulations! Your Team Has 47 Priorities!
I was working at a law firm for three high-powered partners, and it was the day time entries, bills, and a contract’s revisions were due. I had been asking the attorneys for their work all day, and at this point I had an hour left on the clock (and rehearsal afterwards, so I couldn’t stick around). Attorney 1 ran by and dropped off 29 days of time entry. Attorney 2 emailed me (with an exclamation point!) the draft of the contract. And Attorney 3 walked out of her office with a big stack of bills.
I suddenly had three equally top priorities and only an hour to get them done.
Sound familiar?
Too many of us are working with our hair on fire, where everything is labeled a priority. If it’s client-related, it’s urgent! If a deadline is nearing, it’s urgent! If it’s for the CEO, it’s urgent.
But if everything matters equally, nothing actually gets prioritized. Swirl and freak-outs start. And as a result, our workers are constantly switching tasks, scattering their attention, and progress is mediocre at best.
So how does our team end up with 47 priorities? Us. And our managers. And their managers.
Too often, leadership (either us or our higher-ups) adds new initiatives, but old priorities never officially go away. And many people now report to more than one person (that “dotted line” thing is so tricky), and those different leaders have different “most important” things – who gets to have the final say?
Those of us who use the Eisenhower Matrix recognize that urgent requests hijack important work regularly. And if you don’t book time for what’s important, day-to-day urgencies will fill in your entire schedule.
So what happens for our teams if we’re not clear (or not working with dotted-line leaders clearly) about our priorities? They’re left wondering what they should work on first, constantly context-switching, and they work on whatever is loudest. The important projects quietly stall, and everyone is busy, but nobody feels caught up.
As leaders, we have to make the trade-offs. We have to be clear about the 3-5 things that matter most right now, and we have to commit to them. We can’t make our employees responsible for resolving competing priorities that we haven’t clarified. (E.g., go schedule that meeting with your dotted-line partners now.)
Instead, start with clarifying what success looks like. What has to happen now, and what can wait? Find a way to make competing priorities visible – whether in your team meetings or in 1:1 – and revisit priorities as circumstances change.
But what if everything feels like it’s on fire for you, and you can’t narrow it down to 3-5 priorities? Go up a level and ask your leader to do that. Or ask yourself: “If we could only accomplish three things this quarter, what absolutely needs to happen?” Then do the trading-off: “What are we willing to deprioritize to make those things happen?”
Unfortunately, there’s a limited amount of time in a day. A long list of goals isn't necessarily reflective of ambition – it shows an inability to prioritize. Prioritizing isn't about deciding what matters. It's about deciding what matters most.
So how did I handle the three competing demands from my attorneys? Well, I knew that if time entry closed and Attorney 1 still had so many days missing, he wouldn’t get paid. So I got his minimum required time (15 days) entered first. I also knew that there was no way I could get the last mail drop of the day, so I put the bills aside for the next day and focused on the contract. I got about 50% of the way through it, so only 50% went to the overnight word processing team, and I got in the next day and got the bills out in the first round of mail. Phew!
Need help prioritizing? Schedule some time with me to talk. Want to offer some prioritizing training to your people? Check out my Achieving Goals course!
Comments