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Identifying Your Priorities

Compare your priorities to your Boss, Peers and Subordinates on the most important things you are working to achieve.  If you are in Sales and Marketing you better add Customers to that list. If you are in a matrix-type organization you might want to add team members or team leaders on cross-functional or project teams in which you also operate. “Whoa, hold up I’m on overload and what do you mean by priorities anyway?” Okay, let’s back up.

Focus is what is really important to you, your priorities, and they should be based on input from your internal customers, their expectations. These are the things you see as the most important things you should be doing with your time.  To test your priorities make a list of the 10-12 things you feel are the most important things you should be doing. Now, go share this list with your Boss and ask if you have missed anything and what he or she may see as the top three things on your list from their perspective. This could be an interesting meeting where you build a better one-on-one relationship with your Boss and get specific feedback about what is important to them. Now, take your list to your peers and ask them about it. What do they see as the top priorities from your list. Then, do the same with your subordinates. Be sure you are open to allowing any of these groups to add items to your list and probe them about why these items are important to them.   If you’re in Marketing and Sales, then this is also a good discussion to have with your best customers although sharing your list is probably not a very good idea. Simply ask them what are the most important things you should be doing for them.  Once you have this data also compare it to your job description and performance measurements. It should be in sync, if not then something is wrong with the job description/performance process.  In most companies, what is measured can be managed and what is measured is what people usually consider to be their priorities, if these do not reflect the reality of the job then there is a performance process problem that needs fixing.

What you will have after all of this,  assuming you didn’t lose half your papers along the way or spill coffee all over them, is a list of the most important priorities or tasks you should be accomplishing.   Now, here’s a secret.  Important people only work on important things, that’s how they get to be seen as important people. If you are working on things that others see as unimportant then they will see you as wasting time, that your work is not important and your priorities wrong and they will discard you. Those people who want your job may use sightings of you working on the wrong priorities as evidence against you in the court of water cooler gossip. Supervisors may see you as confused about priorities and rate you lower on evaluations. Peers may see you as struggling and not carrying your fair share of the weight. Subordinates will be frustrated that they are working for a bad supervisor. In short, you might accomplish a thousand things you thought were important but if no one else thinks they are important, then you may as well have accomplished nothing.

Always establish your priorities based on the most important things as viewed from your internal and external customers, or develop some very good persuasive skills and collect sufficient data to demonstrate to them how and why what you are working on really is more important.  [Keep in mind this could be a very steep hill to climb and first ask yourself if it is worth the effort, and what will be the impact of failing to convince them.  Will you look like an idiot or a determined executive. ]  If they still see it as unimportant after your best effort, then you will be better off adopting their point of view.

There are exceptions, of course, let’s say you have your thumb in a dyke to keep it from leaking but no one else sees a hole in the dyke (and how could they while your thumb is in it), so it may be necessary to remove your thumb from the dyke to enable them to see the hole and imagine the coming flood,  so you can go back to plugging it and saving the town from certain death. In other words, you still need to make your case and help them see what you think is important and why or you will still be seen as working on unimportant stuff.   Unimportant workers do not become important people, except in fairy tales.  Important people are those who are seen as working on important things.

Misplaced Priorities & How to Fix Them

•  Doing something else that seems important may actually be easier and more familiar than working on unfamiliar, new or challenging tasks.  Once you identify the most important tasks, seek the advice of others how best to organize it and attack it.  Learn more about the task, read a case study, look for others who have conquered the same  or a similar task and learn from their efforts.  Ask a specialist.
•  Someone else told you it was important, maybe someone in the same job from another company, or a training guru or consultant, maybe you read it in a blog.  What might be important somewhere else does not mean it is recognized as important where you are.  If it isn’t important to anyone else then it should not be important to you.    Keep in mind your internal customers and focus on what is important to them.   Turn important tasks into a well-defined process and describe exactly what happens and in what order, dependencies and integration with other departments or staff.  In order to eat an elephant you have to take one bite at a time so break the elephant down into bite-size chunks.
•  You may have a need to have things organized or established in a certain way to make you comfortable.  Okay, we all have our quirks but sometimes we have to survive in a different situation. Learn to adapt and work on the most important things even if you are working in the middle of chaos.  Or, as you have some extra time expand your zone of comfort and move the chaos a little farther away from you, but keep working on the most important things first.  If you need a PDA, certification or new software or something else to help you work more effectively ask for it and relate it to the important job or one of the priority tasks you are accomplishing and how it helps the organization.  If it is truly a priority then it should be easier to show that the benefits outweigh the costs.
•  Are you putting out fires all the time?  Unless you are a fire fighter,  you might be focusing on doing the “urgent” tasks because urgent tasks seem important. This is a falsity.  Some urgent tasks are important and its okay to work on those but many urgent tasks are simply urgent and not important.  Delegate these or learn to say no to accepting responsibility for urgent tasks that are not important.  Do not imply to others that you have lots of time on your hands or they will be delegating all of their urgent tasks to you.   You want to be able to say, “I’m working on something that is very important now.  Is there someone else that can do this for you?  If you are always available to help someone else you might feel good about yourself but you are also conveying the impression that you do not have anything important to do.  This is not a good idea.
•  Put all of your important tasks into a plan.  Prioritize them.   Think about how much time each week each of these tasks will require and organize your day to allow you to work your plan in order to stay on top of and to excel at accomplishing your most important tasks.  You will be seen as a very important person in your work environment, someone who survives down-sizing and gets considered for bonuses and promotions.

With over 30 years of leadership and management experience, Gregg Sterett provides executive and life coaching services to clients in the anywhere in the world where English is spoken.  We use an online course for our Life Coaching which is a rich content, multimedia training program supported by personal coaching sessions that can help anyone achieve their dreams and goals.