088_Priorities Main Angle
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[00:00:00] [00:01:00] 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, it's almost the holidays and we're all trying to start to think about, okay, well, 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. And 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 personal place to start.
Is when we talk about important, okay. One of the most, most common mistakes I see teams make, I've lived through teams make in the [00:02:00] 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 got 37 priorities. They're all P zero, which, you know, and, and.
In tech and in 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 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 [00:03:00] away at, you know, the, the credibility that you see 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 it's 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 call and here's what's possible.
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 [00:04:00] 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. It doesn't compute. [00:05:00] 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.
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, 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.[00:06:00]
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, Oh, this is 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, 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, [00:07:00] 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. Not to confuse that with priorities. Priorities are actually really more like, what are the goals? Smart goals, 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 [00:08:00] 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, 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's 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 goals, setting kind of planning the work when it comes to priorities is having way too many of them. So we don't know which is the first most important thing or [00:09:00] 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 and 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, LeahGarvin.
com or send me a message. Talk soon. [00:10:00]
