The real reason you keep repeating yourself is not unclear expectations, it is a lack of accountability. Lia walks through three concrete moves: working out of your task tracking system publicly, following up every single time, and communicating the “why” behind every process so your team actually buys in. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel like nothing sticks no matter how clearly they explain things.
This episode is part of the Accountability & Follow-Through series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…by definition, priority means like the one most important thing or the thing to do first. So we lose credibility with our teams when we have 37 of those items.”
“…when company leadership, team leadership is saying, Hey, we just got to agree to this no matter what, we’re just going to get it done no matter what. And we all kind of secretly know it’s completely impossible. Then the accountability starts to chip away.”
Episode highlights
Why “everything is a priority” destroys credibility
When you can see the importance of every task on your plate, it is tempting to hand your team a list of 37 P0 items and call them all critical. The problem is that by definition, a priority is the one most important thing, or the thing to do first. When your team gets 37 of those, they silently do the math and realize delivery is impossible. That quiet realization chips away at trust. People stop flagging problems because they assume leadership is too out of touch to hear it.
Lia draws on her own experience running operations inside large tech companies: when everyone privately knows a goal is unachievable but publicly agrees to it anyway, accountability collapses. The fix is not to lower ambition. Stretch goals still have a place. The fix is honest load balancing so your team can come to you and say, “We can hit 27 of these 37 things. Here is what has to give if we try to do all of them.”
What clarity around one or two priorities actually buys you
When a team has one or two clear priorities, something shifts. Each person can look at whatever is on their desk and ask, “Does this ladder up to the priority or not?” If not, they know it is probably not the most urgent thing. That one mental filter gives people the autonomy to manage their own time without waiting for direction on every task. Less oversight. Fewer status-check interruptions. More ownership. It saves time for the team member and time for you as the leader.
The second trap: priorities that are really vision statements
Having too many priorities is the first pitfall. The second is equally damaging: making priorities so abstract they function more as mission statements than actual goals. “Help billions of people” or “save the world” might be genuinely inspiring as a company vision, but as a weekly priority it means nothing to the social media manager choosing which post to write next. If your team cannot draw a straight line from their daily tasks to the stated priority, the priority is not doing its job.
Vision and mission matter. They give the company direction and meaning. But they are not priorities. Conflating the two leaves your team just as stuck as if you had given them 37 items.
The SMART goal fix
Priorities should be anchored to the SMART framework: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. When a priority meets those criteria, your team can see exactly how their role connects to achieving it. They can estimate how long milestones will take, scope the work, and track progress. When you hit that priority, you move to the next most important thing. The work stays plannable and the team stays motivated.
This is also where Lia starts when working through the Ops Playbook with clients. Getting priorities right is what makes the shift from a team that executes tasks to a team that actively participates in growing the business.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 216: Why your team isn’t following through (and how to actually fix it). When your team keeps missing deadlines and nothing changes, you don’t have an accountability problem, you have a follow-up problem. Lia breaks down the four-step loop of setting expectations, checking in, addressing misses, and giving feedback so that real ownership replaces passive agreement. This episode is essential for founders, owners, and managers who are tired of having the same conversation every single week.
- Ep 183: How to build a culture of accountability without micromanaging. Accountability is not blame or punishment. It is ownership, and when team members feel like owners they show up proactively, hit deadlines, and stop reopening decisions. Lia walks through a three-part framework covering the ownership mindset shift, clear expectations with psychological safety, and continual learning from missed targets. This episode is essential for any leader watching deadlines slip and conversations repeat with no resolution.
- Ep 151: The most important step of accountability you are probably skipping. Most leaders set clear expectations and stop there, but accountability lives in the follow-through, not the ask. Lia’s move is to flip who owns the reporting: instead of handing team members their numbers, require them to present the report and bring a plan. This episode is essential for any owner or manager frustrated that people agree to things and then quietly let them slide.
- Ep 135: How to stop repeating yourself and start holding your team accountable. The real reason you keep repeating yourself is not unclear expectations, it is a lack of accountability. Lia walks through three concrete moves: working out of your task tracking system publicly, following up every single time, and communicating the “why” behind every process so your team actually buys in. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel like nothing sticks no matter how clearly they explain things.
Want to go deeper?
The Ops Playbook. Systems and SOPs for teams that need to scale without breaking.
Full transcript (click to expand)
This is where we can go wrong as the manager, as the business owner is yes, all of the things are important in our mind. All the things are important for the business. All the things are critical, but by definition, priority means like the one most important thing or the thing to do first. So we lose credibility with our teams when we have 37 of those items. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant.
Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or a seasoned manager ready to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple.
From conflicts, to feedback, to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. So I was recently talking to one of my clients about, you know, what are their big priorities for the next year? Okay. 2024 is coming up faster than we think. Oh my gosh. Summer’s the holidays. And we’re all trying to start to think about, okay, what do we want to focus around?
And what we want to focus on also involves, well, how do we get our team rallied around that? But oftentimes when we talk about things like priorities, we fall into the two traps that I’m going to talk about today. So getting super clear on priorities, this is one of the first places I start when we dive into where your business is in the Ops Playbook program. And one of the biggest, most important places that we get everybody on the same page, because this is how you make that shift to having your teams be taking an active role in growing your business.
Okay. So this is super important. You’re going to want to tune in. And, and actually that’s the first place to start, is when we talk about important. Okay. So one of the most, most common mistakes I see teams make, I’ve lived through teams make in the corporate world, in big companies and big teams, I have been a part of it in smaller business, smaller teams, is having too many priorities. We’ve got 37 priorities. They’re all P0, which, you know, in, in, in tech and the corporate world can mean like the most, most important things, but how does most important and 37 of them, how does that align?
And I think this is where we can go wrong as the manager, as the business owner is yes, all of the things are important in our mind. All the things are important for the business. All the things are critical, but by definition, priority means like the one most important thing or the thing to do first. So we lose credibility with our teams when we have 37 of those items. And what happens in, in how I felt, especially in the corporate world, when we have pretty strict deadlines, we know what we’re like, we’re delivering your product on a shipping cycle or, you know, we have all these stakeholders involved.
You know, you, you, when, when there’s so many priorities, you start to know you can’t get this done. It starts to chip away at, you know, the, the credibility that you see in, in your manager and your leader, because they’re asking you to do something that’s impossible. And this doesn’t mean we don’t have stretch goals. It doesn’t mean that we don’t reach for the stars and we don’t really push ourselves hard. It doesn’t mean we’re not ambitious, but when company leadership, team leadership is saying, Hey, we just got to agree to this no matter what, we’re just going to get it done no matter what.
And we all kind of secretly know it’s completely impossible. Then the accountability starts to chip away. Right? Because we’re like, okay, I’ll do it. Knowing like, I don’t know what, there’s no way this is going to happen. So you don’t want to have that situation as a leader, as a business owner, because what you really want is for your teams to be upfront and communicate like, Hey, this is a stretch goal and here’s what’s possible. And we can do, you know, 27 of these 37 things, but we can’t get to these last ones because the consequence or what’s at stake will be the quality of the output.
You know, maybe we won’t be able to finish everything that we’ve signed up for. You know, the client experience will suffer, whatever that is. And when you have too many priorities, when, when it’s too vast, your team members start to see, well, like, Hey, they’re so out of touch with reality. I don’t think I can bring this up because they’re probably not going to hear it. So we want to talk to our team members and first do a load balancing, understand like, well, how do we know, you know, what’s realistic?
And that’s done by things that I’ll talk about on this show. And I have talked about like load balancing, goal setting conversations, expectations, work tracking, all these things are ways that we get inputs into knowing what’s a realistic workload. But I’m going to tell you right now, saying that the most important one thing is 37 items. That just doesn’t line up, right? Doesn’t compute. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been talking with a business owner or manager and they’ve said, I want to be a better manager.
I just don’t know the steps. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. And frankly, I’ve felt that way too. Even when I had been managing people for a while, because this stuff is hard and it changes all the time. So the last time someone asked me for the steps, I made a cheat sheet, head to Leah Garvin.com slash scorecard for 20 things you can do this month to be a better manager. This is literally your tell me what to do and I’ll do it steps to motivate your team and get better results.
There’s no time like the present. Grab the scorecard or right freaking out. LeahGarvin.com slash scorecard. So when we think about priorities, we want to think of, you know, what are the one or two things that we can rally around and then go from there. And when we solve that, let’s talk about what happens on the other side of that. And then I’ll go into the second problem. When we have clear things that people can really rally around, now they see, oh, okay, this is this one, you know, North star, there’s two things that we’re really focusing on.
This is how I’m going to prioritize my own time. I’m going to know that, oh, when I’m working on something that doesn’t ladder up to that, that’s maybe not the most important thing. So it allows our team members to be proactive and have autonomy in making decisions of sort of how to manage their time, what to do. And it’s going to make sure that you don’t have to be overseeing every minute. Like are they working on the right thing?
So it’s a huge time saver there because again, it allows people to really take ownership over managing time, making sure they’re not working on the wrong thing. When they finish something, they know what to kind of bring in to do next and they can really self manage. So that’s time they’re saving and it’s time you’re saving having to direct that. Win-win. What is the other problem that we face? And you know, I would say, I don’t know if this is a bigger one or more common, but it’s equally detrimental is having priorities that are very, very vague.
Okay. Having priorities for the team or the business that are really more vision statements that are really more, you know, what are your guiding principles or what’s your mission or how do you want to change the world? And you know, when, when our priority in our team, in our company is save the world, save billions of lives, you know, help billions of people, these, these really like vast vision sort of unattainable, but like aspirational things, I don’t connect to that.
I might care about that cause. I might wish I could do that. But as a team member, I’m like, well, what the hell am I supposed to focus on? Like I don’t, one, I don’t see how my role connects to that. Like, okay, I am the social media manager. I’m creating posts, I’m creating copy and figuring out what hashtags to use. I don’t know how that has to do with like ending world hunger. It doesn’t compute for me and it doesn’t feel attainable.
Okay. So when we think about priorities, you know, we, those anchor to a vision statement, those anchor to a mission and a broader, you know, where we want to be as a company, what our big aspirational dreams are, but the priority, it’s not that. So we first want to do the work to establish like, what is our vision? What are our values? What’s our mission? Right. Okay. We got that. But then not to confuse that with priorities.
Priorities are actually really more like, what are the goals? Smart goals. You’re right. Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. That’s what SMART, SMART goals stands for. The priority we want to have anchored in that framework. So our team members then, right, like I said, they can see, oh, I get how my job connects to achieving that thing. And then once we’ve achieved that thing, we say, okay, well, what else is the most important thing? Right. Or what’s the next most important thing?
But again, if it’s too abstract, it just like with having 37 priorities there, you lose credibility and being able to accomplish that and having, you know, a sense of what it takes to get there. We, then it becomes really hard to plan. We don’t know how big the milestones are because saving the world is going to take a lot longer than one quarter. Okay. So having a more like, right, timely and measurable, right. Using the SMART goal framework set of priorities, that’s going to allow you to really plan.
And then, like I said, we’ll talk about work tracking and everything like that another time. But then you can start estimating how long things take and start scoping out the work. Okay. So those are the two biggest challenges that I see when I work with folks on priority setting, goal setting, kind of planning the work when it comes to priorities is having way too many of them. You don’t know which is the first most important thing or having them be way too vague.
And when we make those shifts, having one or two most important things and having them grounded in more of a SMART goal framework, now everybody can get rallied around it. Okay. So if you want support on figuring out really what are those priorities for your business and how to connect the dots between those priorities in every single person’s individual role. Right. So they see, okay, here’s how my job ladders up to that. If you want support, let me know.
This is a huge part of the Ops Playbook. It is something that overnight can get everybody seeing their individual role in growing the business and can start to be really transformational for bringing in new revenue, bringing in clients and saving so much stress on you for the business owner. So if you want support, you know who to call, LeahGarver.com or send me a message. Talk soon. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.
With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why is having too many team priorities a problem?
By definition, a priority is the one most important thing or the thing to do first. When you tell your team that 37 items are all top priority, it stops computing. Team members start to see that leadership is out of touch with reality, accountability chips away, and people quietly agree to goals they already know are impossible. You lose credibility not because you're ambitious, but because you're asking for something that genuinely cannot be done. Cutting to one or two real priorities is what lets your team self-manage and make smart decisions without you having to direct every step.
How is a team priority different from a company vision or mission statement?
A vision or mission is your big aspirational direction, where you want to go as a company. A priority is not that. Priorities need to be grounded in a SMART goal framework: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. When a priority is something like 'help billions of people,' a team member has no idea how their actual daily work connects to it. When the priority is concrete and scoped, people can see how their role ladders up to it, plan the work, and know when it's actually been achieved.
What happens when team priorities are too vague?
Vague priorities feel like vision statements, not action plans. When a team member cannot connect their specific job to the stated priority, two things happen: they feel disconnected from the goal, and planning becomes nearly impossible because there are no milestones to scope against. Saving the world is going to take longer than one quarter. Without a timely, measurable priority, you cannot estimate how long things take, you cannot track progress, and you cannot tell your team what winning actually looks like.
How many priorities should a team actually have?
One or two. That is the number that allows your team to rally, self-manage, and make proactive decisions about how to spend their time. When there are only one or two clear priorities, team members can recognize when they are working on something that does not ladder up to those priorities and course-correct on their own. That means less time spent on the wrong things and less time you have to spend directing every task. It is a win for the team and a win for you as the leader.
How do clear priorities help my team work more independently?
When your team has one or two concrete, SMART-goal-style priorities, each person can look at their own work and ask whether it connects to those priorities. That gives them a framework to manage their own time, decide what to tackle next when they finish something, and flag when they are headed in the wrong direction. You no longer have to oversee every task or constantly redirect people. The priorities do that work for you, which saves time on both sides and lets your team take real ownership over growing the business.