Get Your Priorities Straight!

One of the most important things that managers do is set the priorities for their group.  As much as we would like to get everything done today, choices need to be made.  The effective manager will be very clear about how they want the choice to be made when an employee has to decide what to work on and what to set aside.  Without clear direction, employees will diligently do this:
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There are Strategic Priorities and Tactical Priorities. 

What are Strategic priorities?

Strategic priorities are the guiding principles of a company that tell employees the relative importance of competing principles. These give the values of a company and the general direction, but they don't tell a person specifically what to do on any given day.  The tactical priorities should be in alignment with the strategic priorities, but are much more specific and do tell an employee what to work on.

Typically strategic priorities are not what a worker thinks about when they are planning their activities for any given day, but they need to know what they are so that their daily activities support those priorities, or don't specifically contradict them.

Where can an employee find the company's priorities?
If a company structures their priorites correctly, and they are in fact part of the fabric of the company and not just lip service, they will be apparent in many places.  There are several places where a company tells an employee what they want them to do.  This is the company's "Priority System".  A person should be able to enter this system at any point and get the same direction for how they should handle competing priorities.  Here are a few:

1. Mission Statement - This is usually not very specific, but creates the umbrella that other, more specific priorities come under.  Creating a good mission statement is easy.  Creating a company culture that reflects that statement is very hard.                                                                                                                     Image Source: getentrepreneurial.com
2. Business Strategy - The company starts to give direction here.  What markets the company intends to pursue, where investments will be made, how the company will differentiate itself from the competition, etc.  The business strategy should be in alignment with the Mission Statement.
3.  Published Quarterly and/or Monthly Priorities - This is where the manager actually spells what is important for the group to work on, or achieve in the current period.  Each employee can use this direction to decide where to spend time on a daily basis.  This is what I am calling "Tactical Priorities".
4. Performance Reviews - There are only three things to discuss in a performance review.  They are:
1. What the employee did well.
2. Where the employee needs to improve.
3. The objectives for the next period - This is where the priorities are spelled out for the individual employee.  These priorities should be in alignment with the buisiness strategy.

What does a Priorities Document look like?
It is easy to make a list of priorities, but it takes a lot of thought to put these priorities in order of importance.  It is, however, important for a manager to do this if the priorities document is intended to be used as a tool for employees to make decisions.  Since there are many things a manager wants to accomplish, they must decide which ones are really important and which ones are not quite as important, or which should be moved forward incrementally.

Here is an example of the wording of an effective Priorities document:

From:  Manager
To:  Team
Subject:  Third Quarter Priorities

There are many challenges that each of you must address every day and it is important that I convey to each manager the priorities for the short-term future. Please share this memo and its content with your staffs. These projects are of the highest importance to the company, even if only a few people are actually working on them. Anyone who can influence the success of these projects should be working on them.

1.  
2.  
3.  
4.  

We must be careful not to over load our resources, which is the reason the above list is short. There are obviously many other items that must be done well for our company to be successful, so here is a prioritized list of items that are important, but do not rise to the level of the top five. 

2.  
3.  
4.  
5.  
6.  
7.  
8.  

_______________________
Notice that there are only a few high priorities, but many less important ones.  I would recommend keeping the high priority list to five and the lesser priority list to no more than fifteen.  Once this document is published, it should be reviewed frequently to make sure that everyone knows the manager is serious about the relative priorities and they are actually being followed..  It is also a good idea to have a formal review when the next set of priorities is published to review/celebrate accomplishment of the previous set of priority objectives.
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