Prioritization or Burnout, You Choose
Throughout my entire career, I have watched teams and organizations struggle to prioritize well. Most of the time, to scale back goals and pare down tactics is not even on the radar of leaders and business owners. This is due to the visionary leader setting his or her eye on what will be in the future and recognizing the large gap between now and then. This catapults the leader into excited goal setting as they build the bridge for “how are we going to get there.”
The key step most leaders miss before they publish their list of goals in the company newsletter is to take a step back and assess the ‘bridge’ against a few factors.
Honest, Current State. Bring together 3-4 leaders with varying perspectives on business operations to discuss and assess the trajectory from last year’s performance. What items met or exceeded their goal targets? Which goals changed multiple times and why? What is still off target and in mitigation? With this review, ensure that the next building block toward the vision is truly a next step, not two steps in one or a major leap.
Steady State Projects. With the same group of operational leaders, review all the current projects planned to ‘keep the lights on.’ These projects are often overlooked but can take a tremendous amount of your team’s focus and energy. Next to each of these items, determine the priority of 1) must complete “must have” and 2) ideal to complete “nice to have.”
Skills to Succeed. Next, consider your leaders and employees skillsets and readiness to take on the goals you have determined for this year. What skills will it take to meet or exceed the goals and tactics outlined? What skills are represented on your leadership team and in key employee teams and which are lacking? You can put together a simple survey assessment for this or give an assessment to your leaders for them to survey their teams.
With these three sets of data – current state, steady state projects, and skills to succeed – review your goals and tactic lists for this year again. What is reasonable for your teams to complete? What are the one or two items that could stretch your team, would accelerate the momentum you want on your vision, and not overbalance the workload? If you are unsure how to determine the stretch items, use a priority matrix that groups items into four quadrants based on importance and urgency. It is often an employee motivator and a business accelerator to set stretch goals from items in the Important/Not Urgent quadrant.
To be bold, without prioritization you are contributing to your team’s burnout. If you consider where your company or department will be 2-3 years from now, the obvious choice is fewer goals achieved with depth and wild success as opposed to all goals started with few that met the desired outcome.