Priorities: Developing a Workable Road Map for Accomplishing Your Goals

(21807) Ram Charan says:

Priorities are essential. They tell people what to focus on and what doesn’t really matter. Part of having know-how is the ability to help everyone focus on the right things and ignore everything else.

Start at the Ground Level

Priorities are worthwhile because they keep the truly important things front and center rather than being bustled off the radar screen by day-to-day events and happenings. Good priorities provide clarity and focus and are the basis for how resources are allocated.

A good way to understand the distinction between goals and priorities is to remember that goals are set at a top-down level, as if you were looking at your business from 50,000 feet in the air. Priorities, by contrast, are set at ground level where there are loads and loads of messy details gumming up the scene. Priorities specify what your most important actions are and what the flow-on consequences of your decisions will be.

Take Current Resources into Account

The right priorities can generate a tremendous amount of energy within a corporation. And equally, the wrong priorities can generate an awful lot of confusion, duplication of effort, conflict, waste of resources and demotivation. It is possible to have the right goals but the wrong priorities. You have to generate buy-in for the right priorities for your business to move forward.

Never forget that it is people who breathe life into your priorities, and therefore it’s vital that you communicate with those who will be living by your preferred priorities. Whenever you want to set new priorities, there are a few questions you should be pondering carefully:

Do we have the right people available to carry these priorities out on a day-to-day basis?

Are we choosing our priorities based on what is popular with our staff or on what is good for the business?

Are we backing our priorities by moving the requisite resources into areas that are aligned with those priorities?

Do our budgeting systems tie in with our priorities seamlessly or is there potential for confusion and conflict?

Priority Setting Principles

Getting everyone on the same page when it comes to setting priorities is difficult for any organization. In practical terms, most business projects will fall into one of these four quadrants:

[High Revenue Growth–Low Margin] [High Revenue Growth–High Margin]

[Low Revenue Growth–Low Margin] [Low Revenue Growth–High Margin]

Obviously the ideal is for your organization to be focusing on projects that fall into the top right-hand quadrant. The process of setting priorities is all about decreasing involvement and expenditure in projects that fall into other quadrants and increasing the expenditure and effort that is put into the projects in the upper right quadrant.

Use This Opportunity to Build Consensus

All too frequently, businesses attempt to set priorities in a top-down manner, the same as with the budget process. This is unfortunate because not only is the top-down process potentially impractical but companies should be utilizing this as an opportunity to build rather than dilute consensus between the managers who compete for resources. The more people you have who understand the big picture, the better your organization will be.

Texas Instruments Method

Texas Instruments runs a three-day budgeting and resource allocation session every year where priorities are set and agreed upon by around seventy leaders. This series of meetings follows this kind of structure:

(1) The CEO and senior managers state what they believe the goals and priorities should be for the coming year

(2) Everyone discusses why these goals and priorities have been chosen until there is general agreement

(3) Using common spreadsheets and databases, all participants break the total forecast down into individual components

(4) Changes are made immediately, a new version is produced and discussed until there is a general consensus

(5) Everyone understands what decisions were made, why they were made and what assumptions underlie eachThe real advantage of following an intense, immersive process like this is that by the end of it, people have broken down their silo mentality. They understand that what they do in their silo may have unfavorable consequences elsewhere. It also means that since everyone understands the reasoning behind the decisions made, they will be better prepared to make modifications in the future as external conditions change.

Know-How