Some principles of management are so obvious that we assume they’re always followed. “Setting priorities” is in the job description of every people leader and other leaders too. It’s important, and it’s expected. But leaders don’t always do it. Why, and can that be fixed? Read on.
Nearly all organizations set objectives, and sometimes they mistakenly think that’s prioritizing.
In “The Art of Action”, a guide to achieving goals with big teams in changing landscapes, Stephen Bungay lists some typical financial objectives:
A typical list of things a manager has to achieve in a year might look like this: 1. Increase revenue by 8% 2. Raise average net margin to 15% …
Often, objectives are listed like this, implying that they’re all equally important. Yet simple lists of objectives aren’t enough. We need to know how to make trade-offs between them. Continuing his example, Bungay explains why:
…If come next December, someone is sitting in front of a customer ready to take a large-volume order which will lift revenue growth to 10 percent but with a low margin which will reduce our average net margin for the year to 12 percent, what should we do? Will we be congratulated for landing a significant order and beating our target, or told off for loading up our books with poor-quality business and missing the all-important profit figure? We need to talk and get some clear direction. It might be “Aim for revenue of 8 percent but on no account allow margins to fall below 15 percent,” in which case the margin figure is a hard constraint; or we may learn that a 15 percent margin would be nice but what really matters is that it should not fall below 12 percent. Whatever the answer, we need guidance. Good guidance allows us to make trade-offs.
Why would the organization care so much about which objective is met first? Because it might make the difference in achieving its ultimate goals. Bungay again:
If our intent is to gain market share in order to strengthen our long-term position, the main effort is revenue and holding margin at 15 percent is a constraint. If our intent is margin improvement, but we want to grow with the market in order not to lose position, revenue is a constraint.
So that’s an easy example of how sales priorities should support an organization’s financial goals. Yet surprisingly rare! Too often, organizations don’t want to choose between options such as margin and top-line growth.
How about other kinds of priorities, in development, or design, or customer service? They are all important too. (Some are more critical to financial goals over time.) The people enacting those priorities need to feel they are contributing to the central goals too, by focusing on the things that count.
And yet it’s equally rare for other functions to spell out tradeoffs. Prioritizing seems hard!
Only 12% of employees in a recent Gallup study strongly agree that their managers helped them set priorities.
You, me, and most people have probably worked at places in the past where people were unclear on what they should to focus on.
Many job descriptions require people who “have a high tolerance for ambiguity”. Does all that ambiguity go with the nature of the job, or could part of it stem from ill-defined priorities?
If priorities are so critical for an organization to meet its goals, why don’t organizations make them clearer? Three reasons I can think of:
Reason #1: Setting priorities is often a gamble. You never have quite enough information about the business and competitive landscape, so prioritizing is always a bet on what will turn out to be most important. Books filling shelves full of strategy literature try to break apart the problem. One of my favorites is Bungay’s Art of Action, from which I quoted above. (Chapter 6 has several practical examples of prioritizing.) But it is never easy.
Reason #2: It can seem like the safer option to not prioritize — to stop at listing objectives, without guiding tradeoffs. Certainly in a risk-averse organization, a way to minimize blame is to say that you did in fact tell people to do the thing that turned out to be most important (even if you also told them to do 9 other things!) Actually, if you don’t prioritize, you almost guarantee mediocre results. And in a competitive landscape, that could mean failing. But although people talk aggressively about winning, sometimes “not immediately failing” seems more attractive.
Reason #3: Setting priorities for teams might seem to limit their ability to plan work for themselves. It might even hark back to Taylor’s Scientific Management, when it was managers’ job to do the thinking, and their reports’ jobs to do the doing. But to say how team objectives relate and rank, is not to dictate how those objectives should be achieved, through what actions and in what order. Also, a manager’s ability to prioritize is largely due to the different viewpoint they get of the organization. A manager will tend to spend more of their time talking with other teams and upper managers. So it’s more about perspective, knowledge, and analysis than authority as such (though naturally, a manager will sometimes have to tie-break or otherwise make decisions for their teams).
Generally, team members do appreciate when the team lead, the team manager, or at least the manager of the work, guides priorities. (At least, they appreciate it when that person does have some knowledge and insight rather than just deciding things because their job title says they ought to.) And the Gallup research I mentioned above also found that employees engaged much better with their work if their managers helped them set priorities.*
*Quote from the Gallup Study on the State of the American Manager:
Finally, establishing priorities is not all the manager’s job — the team should certainly be involved too in the decision-making process. Teams will naturally contribute to gathering knowledge and insights of the real, ongoing situation (rather than the upper management view which sometimes lacks the on-the-ground perspective). And they often have insight on which tasks are most important.
More about teamwork on priorities: Jessica Gilmartin from Calendly talks about the group process of “forcing priorities”:
…it's really great … These moments where all of us have to work together to focus on the customer… I love priorities. I love forcing priorities. I love forcing everybody to really think about the work that is most impactful to the customer and the company.
Notice that word “forcing”. Prioritizing isn’t a case of being nice and accepting every goal, every requirement as being equal. It is a struggle, but a productive, creative one. And at the end it empowers teams to act and be confident they are acting on the right information (or at least the best bet with the available knowledge). The irony is that to be truly “nice”, you have to make tough choices.
Gilmartin goes on to say:
The core [leadership] value that really resonates with me is striving for excellence. To me, that starts with empowerment … The way about it is that my role as a leader is to give my team all the information they need to be successful. So I am definitely an over communicator. So I share executive priorities: What are the company priorities, and what I do is I set very clear goals and milestones.
Perhaps you say “all this is great if you have leaders like Gilmartin, but what if priorities aren’t being made clear to me as a manager? How do my team know which objectives come first, so they can act with confidence?
Even if organizational priorities aren’t clearly stated, we have to do something to help our teams. We have to figure out the priorities we are going to stand by.
Three steps could help:
Try to put yourself in the shoes of your boss’s boss. Not just in terms of their situation, but also the knowledge and skills they have. Take all the opportunities you can to analyse the information they provide. Even if your objectives aren’t directly financial, it’s well worth paying attention to financial updates. Of course, to help you analyse, it’s great to read some useful strategy and planning resources. There are many mediocre ones and a few really good ones. Cedric Chin’s CommonCog Site is a great place to learn about the useful ones, and in the context of strategic business prioritization I suggest starting with this post: Prioritise The Highest Order Bit. As for the more specific prioritization approaches that go with the game you’re in: products and services of all kinds, there is much material. For software (the business that I reckon that more than half readers of this piece are in), here’s a nice piece I just read from John Cutler that synthesizes a couple of approaches well: The Magic Prioritization Trick.
With that sense of the upper management perspective, and with all the other information you have from your team and stakeholders, set priorities provisionally. It’s worth writing out the reasons for your tradeoffs, in actual sentences. (Using sentences, with verbs, forces you to think through your reasoning a little more deeply than if you just put bullet points next to each other.) I apologise if this sounds patronizing. It is one of those obvious bits of advice that is hard to stick to in practice. Perhaps by my repeating it here, it will encourage us both, you and me, to do it more consistently.
Present these reasoned priorities to your boss, for their thoughts. This will achieve one of two good things: In the best case, they will be able to confirm, enhance, or constructively change your priorities. In the worst case, if they are not able to do this (or do not feel able), at least you can say you’ve checked with your boss, so it is clear that you’re not just working on your own (some kind of maverick who runs about getting things done!) Another thought about the written word here: writing is good for thinking, but also for record-keeping.
And then, priorities set, you “just” have to communicate them with your team, communicating the intent and the background and the main actions and the constraints, and checking that each team member understood not only conceptually but practically, and each team member is able to take your direction and run with it, run with it in a way that’s not rigid but adapts to the changing circumstances on the ground…
Well, it’s a lot to do. But, setting priorities is the first step, a hugely useful step, so obvious, but so often neglected.
