Priorities
A first-rate leader I know once shared a story about prioritization, and her story has stuck with me ever since.
In a former role, this leader found herself in crisis mode. Her company didn’t have the luxury of a healthy balance sheet, and they were bleeding cash profusely. There was pervasive anxiety across the organization as people wondered whether the business would survive the rest of the fiscal year. Employees were not just exhausted; they were deeply afraid.
The CEO called an emergency session with the executive team over the weekend. They gathered in a conference room on a Saturday morning and he laid out a simple agenda for the next few hours. “We’re fighting fires on multiple fronts,” he said, “and the flames are only getting hotter and higher. Our goal today is to clarify our priorities. Let’s start by asking what’s top of mind for each of you right now.”
He went around the room and elicited contributions from everyone. He wrote down each priority until the whiteboard was densely packed with initiatives. He stepped away to contemplate the gravity of this visual, and he let the seriousness of the moment sink in.
Then he took a hard right in the discussion. He said, “I have a filtering question for everything we see in front of us. Which of these initiatives will drive revenue between now and the end of our fiscal?”
He went through each of the items one by one. For some it was immediately obvious whether they met the qualifying criterion. For others, he took as long as the team needed to reach consensus. If something wasn’t revenue-generating, he wiped it off the board. By the end of the discussion there were wide open spaces and a vastly diminished list of activities.
One of the items crossed off was a recurring executive team meeting. One of the few items remaining were customer meetings. Underscoring his commitment to the team’s newfound focus, the CEO immediately packed his calendar with client visits.
Little by little the flames were extinguished, and the business survived.
It’s often helpful to learn from such extremes. For most of us, this story is an exaggerated version of what we’re currently experiencing on the job. But there are very likely some commonalities.
It is in the nature of management to create needless complexity. When smart people come together, each of them earnestly seeking ways to contribute, the process of incremental optimization begins. Each new initiative is easy to justify on its individual merits, but over time the system takes on a character of its own. “Constructive busyness” becomes an emergent property, causing deviations from the team’s central responsibility.
Emergency weekend sessions shouldn’t be the only way to keep this natural human tendency in check.