What Deserves Your Best Yes: Prioritize What Matters

Leadership has a funny way of making everything feel important.

A new initiative lands on your desk. An employee needs your help. A customer has a request. A department wants your involvement. Leadership above you has another priority they want completed immediately.

Before long, your team is juggling ten "top priorities."

But here's the problem... When everything becomes a priority, nothing truly is.

One of the defining characteristics of exceptional leaders is not that they accomplish more than everyone else: It is that they become incredibly skilled at discerning what deserves their team's time, energy, and attention.

Busy Is Not the Goal

Somewhere along the way, many organizations began celebrating busy: Busy calendars. Busy inboxes. Busy employees. Busy leaders.

But remember, busy and productive are not the same thing.

I have worked with and on incredibly hardworking teams that felt like they were constantly running yet we struggled to point to the meaningful progress we were making. It wasn't because we lacked talent or motivation... It was because every new request immediately became the next priority.

Exceptional leaders understand something different.

The goal is not to keep people busy.

The goal is to make meaningful progress on the work that matters most. Sometimes that means accomplishing fewer things exceptionally well instead of accomplishing many things adequately. Doing that and leading that way requires discipline.

Exceptional Leaders Become Filters

As we've talked about in past blog posts, an incredible gift that a leader can give to their team is clarity.

Your team should not have to decide which of fifteen competing priorities deserves the most attention. They should not be guessing what leadership values most this month. They should not feel like every request carries equal weight.

That is your job to sort out for them!

Exceptional leaders become filters:

Ideas come in.

Requests come in.

Problems come in.

Opportunities come in.

The leader's responsibility is to organize that information and determine what deserves attention first.

This is one of the most valuable things leaders do, even though it often goes unnoticed.

When leaders fail to filter, teams become overwhelmed, but when leaders filter well, teams become focused.

Not Everything Deserves the Same Level of Attention

A big leadership mistake that I made earlier in my career was treating every task as equally important.

... But they aren't.

Some work moves the organization forward.

Some work simply keeps it moving.

Both have value, but they are not equal. More on this later in the blog post!

Exceptional leaders continually ask questions like:

• What moves us closer to our goals?

• What creates the greatest impact?

• What absolutely has to happen this week?

• What can wait?

• What can be delegated?

• What should we stop doing altogether?
  

Prioritization is all about working intentionally.

Translate Vision Into Daily Work

A frustration I experienced as a leader was watching incredibly talented people work incredibly hard...on different things. As a member of a senior leadership team for an organization, I continued to ask what the priority across the entire organization was, not just each of our individual workgroups. Unfortunately, I could never get an answer to that question, and I saw so much inefficiency, waste, and frustration across the organization.

Everyone cared.

Everyone was busy.

Everyone wanted to contribute.

But not everyone understood how their work connected to the bigger picture.

While I couldn't change that problem for the entire organization, I could for my workgroup. That realization eventually led me to develop what I called a Strategic Work Plan.

I loved strategic planning, but I often found that strategic plans ended up sitting on a shelf after they were adopted. They identified the vision and goals, but they didn't always answer one critical question:

"What should I work on today?"

The Strategic Work Plan became the bridge between strategy and execution.

It connected organizational goals to specific objectives.

Objectives connected to strategies.

Strategies connected to projects.

Projects connected to individual responsibilities.

Every major initiative was assigned an owner, a timeline, and a priority level. And event more importantly, every person on the team could understand how the work they were doing contributed to the organization's larger mission!

That created alignment. And alignment creates momentum.

When people know what matters most, they make better decisions throughout the day without constantly needing direction from leadership.

Protect Your Team's Time

One responsibility of leadership that I don't think gets enough attention is protecting your team's time.

As leaders, we often feel pressure to accept every new request, attend every meeting, and support every initiative.

But every additional priority comes at a cost.

Time is finite.

Energy is finite.

Attention is finite.

If you continually add work without removing something else, eventually quality suffers.

People begin rushing.

Creativity declines.

Details get missed.

Stress increases.

Eventually people become exhausted, not because they dislike the work, but because they never have permission to focus. I have worked for what was once an exceptional organization that held a culture of "produce work at all costs." "Find a way to get it done." This is an organization with some of the most talented people I had worked alongside in my career, but the lack of prioritization has slowly chipped away at the exceptionalness of this organization and it became more and more apparent as time went on.

Exceptional leaders recognize that protecting priorities also means protecting people.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your team is defend their ability to focus on the work that matters most!

Priorities Should Be Visible

If I walked around your organization today and asked every employee the same question...

"What are the top three priorities for our team right now?"

...would I get the same answer?

If not, you probably don't have a prioritization problem. You have an alignment problem.

People cannot align their work with priorities they do not understand, which is why priorities need to be visible.

Talk about them regularly.

Review them during meetings.

Tie projects back to them.

Celebrate progress toward them.

When priorities become part of everyday conversation, they begin shaping everyday decisions.

Leadership Is the Discipline of Choosing

A good leadership lesson I have learned is that leadership is not about doing everything... ...It is about deciding what deserves your best energy.

That requires discernment.

It requires discipline.

It requires the willingness to continually ask, "Does this move us closer to where we are trying to go?"

Exceptional leaders understand that people can accomplish extraordinary things.

They just cannot accomplish everything at once.

When leaders make priorities crystal clear, align work around those priorities, and protect their team's time to focus on them, something remarkable happens:

People stop feeling busy.

They start making meaningful progress.

...And that is how exceptional organizations are built!