Explain Again: What is Priority One?

When everything is the highest priority we cause ourselves stress. When that stress stops being a positive driver and starts being debilitating we make bad decisions. A little cortisol helps people move and get excited but too much means we revert to our freeze/flight/fight survival mode : overloaded people become unproductive and grumpy.

The current situation is applying plenty of external stress to our work teams.  We are asking many of them to work from home in almost extreme conditions: a national emergency, additional caring responsibilities, unaccustomed confinement and the myriad of other things in their household that we can’t yet guess 

Of course, team leaders have all of these pressures and a team to manage. It would be easy for them to become stressed and add stress to the team by becoming the nightmare boss: inconsistent about what is urgent now, not able to distinguish true priorities, unpredictable, indecisive and distracted.

As team leaders we have four competing high-level priorities:

• Business continuity, which for most people means cash flow
• Customer focus so that we can maintain a future business
• Supply chain management under very unusual circumstances
• The health and safety of our team

Nearly every decision a team leader makes today will be about balancing one of those against the others.  The intensity these priorities have reached is unusually high. There is often some slack in more than one of them but not much in any of them at the moment. In the past you might trade off a little bit of customer flexibility against a weakness in the supply chain, or ask the supply chain to support the most demanding customer. Those options may not be possible at the moment because:

• supply chains are having to work in very different situations
• customers may be worried about their livelihood and need more from you
• lack of flexibility around money because everyone’s budget is under stress
• the ‘go to’ solution has been to ask a little more of your team probably won’t work in the current situation. They have more constraints and responsibilities to juggle than normal. Some will have more pressing health issues to manage or be on furlough and others will have to take on those responsibilities.

Usually, I advocate being more ambitious and setting bigger goals to challenge the thinking of what is “usual”. We want to push through change and transformation to avoid atrophy and stagnation. But in a national emergency, those policies add stress and difficulty to the situation. Now is the time to scale things back for effectiveness sake.  Be ruthless about the top priority (singular!).

Communicate with your team and tell them that this is an unusual situation and you want to work together to make the best of it. That will mean some changes and you will find time to support them (perhaps even bring in expert coaches or trainers to boost efficiency). Make sure your team have the skills and training to deliver by investing any spare time in developing them. Be supportive of all efforts: appreciate what they do right and you will get more of that (and less of those things you don’t want). Constant criticism puts too much focus on the things that are wrong; focus instead on the positive whenever possible.

There will need to be some tough decisions to streamline what you can do. Look at your product and service offering and find those you can deliver most efficiently and effectively in the current situation. You may need to focus your diminishing team on those crucial to your business.  Talk to your customers and work out what they really need from you and what can be delayed until more “normal time”. Plan clear communication with customers to tell them what you are able to do in the current situation and what services you can’t deliver.

Simplify your business and ask your team to stop doing some things that don’t help delivery of your chosen products and services. Or those things your customers really don’t need now. There is risk in this -  you need to understand and log what is being stopped so that you can recover it later.  Put some effort into making sure those lines and processes are stopped in a tidy way and carefully packed away. Its like storing a winter coat: if you do it carefully, it is in a better state when this season has passed and you need it again. Keep talking about the customers’ needs – they are changing and may be the ideal opportunity for your business.

For team leaders, clear understanding of the organisation’s values and mission is important. They need to be transparent about what is important when they make decisions for the team. That helps reduce the stress in the team and removes any impression of consistency. In time, they can include their team in making the trade off between priorities: different experience, skills and perspectives may produce better solutions through innovation.

A simple way of  distinguishing between priorities might help. There are three basic grids that can clarify thinking:

• Values and Objectives
• Service /Product Selection
• Urgent and Important

Working out which business objectives align best with your values can help prioritise activities and, when resources are tight, which objectives need to be the focus. The service / product selection grid helps compare your organisation’s offering with your capability to delivery, customer value and profitability. It helps work out where to focus your operational capability.

By working out which tasks are urgent and important, a rough estimate of priority can be found quickly. This has been attributed to (USA general and president) Dwight D. Eisenhower or (UK Prime Minister) Winston Churchill but in both cases, it was simply what they said that inspired this technique. They acknowledged that there are some urgent tasks that have little long term value, and some tasks that are important but risk being neglected.

If  your business or team is becoming overwhelmed with too many high priority items and needs some strategies to deal with that, please get in touch.