HOW TO INCREASE EFFECTIVENESS, DECREASE CONFLICT AND MAKE PROGRESS

I want to talk about busyness and priorities and being completely overwhelmed. This is the conversation I am having, on repeat, with leaders at the moment.

‘We are frantically busy.’

‘We have more to do than we could ever get through.’

‘We have so many priorities, and they're all priority one.’

‘We have conflicting priorities.’

‘We're finding it really hard to make progress because we're not all focusing on the same agenda.’

‘We are all highly reactive rather than being strategic.'

'I’m worried if we keep going the way we are, we're actually going to be no further forward in six or 12 months’ time than where we are right now.’

‘We are in a perpetual cycle of busyness.’

And based on what I am seeing, I would say this is valid.

Sometimes we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, particularly when it is frantically busy, to understand what is going to make the most difference with the limited time, resources, money, and head space we have.

Where can we get the biggest return that is going to make a difference for ourselves, our teams, our organisation, our industry … wherever you are focused?

You need to make smart decisions, and you need to focus specifically on those things that are going to make a difference. Otherwise, you will be on this roundabout of busyness, actually not making a lot of progress, despite the best efforts and intentions.

“

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

~ Karen Martin, Author

”

Let me share with you a story of a time during my corporate leadership career in an organisation that was undergoing radical growth and change in a highly competitive market. and was trying to shake things up. In addition, there was a new managing director, there had been some changes in the executive team, and lots of people had been promoted or were jockeying for ever more senior leadership positions in this refreshed organisation.

The problem was that people were focused on their own patch. Trying to pursue their own individual or own business unit agenda, rather than looking at the collective of the organisation and contributing to the overall purpose and agenda of the organisation. This created friction. There was challenge. There was competition. It was not effective in terms of having an aligned, congruent leadership.

So the managing director pulled together the top 50 leaders in the organisation for a full day, to define the organisational priorities, and it was eye-opening. We had a back-to-basics process, and this is how it worked.

To start with, he set the scene:

‘Our challenge is we have a lot going on.

We are trying to do the things that we should be doing.

We are also focused on things we maybe should not be doing.

We are trying to do everything at once.

And, we are not doing any of it as well as we could be. ?

So we are taking this opportunity to reset.’

“

The shorter way to do many things is to only do one thing at a time.

~ Mozart

?

To set the context of the day’s activity and objective to get us focused on a single, shared, companywide set of priorities, he reshared our company vision and strategy.

He also shared his belief that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.

The right 20%. ? Here is the high level approach we followed to develop a single shared set of priorities: ?

ROUND 1 ?

Every individual leader brainstormed out every single project being worked on in their part of the business. Some were major cross company projects, some of them were medium-sized, some of them were long-term, some of them were short-term, and some of them were tiny and just happening within their part of the business. Some of them were big and still just happening within their part of the business. So that was step one, just brainstorm everything out.

Next was to identify and cluster your individual projects into high priority, medium priority, and low priority. High priority representing high impact, medium priority, medium impact, and low priority, low impact.

Everything that was not high priority was put to the side.

ROUND 2 ?

Now groups of people came together to compare their high priority projects. And amongst all of the high priority projects in each group, they had to agree which were truly the highest priority, the medium priority, and the lowest priority.

Once the highest, medium and lowest priority had been agreed, the medium and low priority were put the side.

At this stage, we had agreement at a high level of what the highest priority projects were in these half a dozen groups of leaders.

ROUND 3

The next step was to take the high priority projects from each of the groups and share them onto a great big board. To cluster and group those that were duplicates and see what the collective high priority projects were. And the interesting thing was that even at this point, after 2 rounds of filtering projects out, there was still more than 100 projects listed as high priority across our organisation.

But if there are 100 high priority projects, which one do I focus on? Which one do I allocate resources in my team to? How do I know what is the right thing to do? Good questions.

ROUND 4 ?

So the next round was to prioritise these 100 projects. To determine which project was the number 1 project in the organisation. Which was the #2 project. ?While each of these projects was identified as high priority, this part of the process was about understanding which one was the single highest priority project in the entire organisation.

And let me tell you, it takes a bit of time to have this discussion with 50 leaders in the room. Yet it was an amazing and illuminating process. There were side conversations and group conversations, questions asked, and challenges made. By the end of that day, there was an agreed list of project priorities that started at number one. The single highest priority.

The interesting thing was, and I think this is important too, that at a point in this list of priority projects, the managing director drew a line through the list . He said ‘This is our focus for the next three months. Only when we have made progress on these top 10 items will we have space to do something else. And that is when we will move on to priority number 11.’

This created complete clarity about where we all should focus, how we could all move to support each other, be aligned in our decision-making context, determine how we allocated resources and budget. As a result, our teams were also very clear on what their priorities were.

“

It's not enough to be busy. The question is, what are we busy about?

~ Henry David Thoreau, American philosopher, poet, environmental scientist, and political activist

?

Following this exercise, we made more progress on this set of projects in the next three months than had been made in the prior six to 12 months. And true to his word, once sufficient progress had been made on some of those top priorities, then more were kicked off as others closed down.

We leaders need to create clarity. We need to clearly articulate what has priority so our people can make informed choices about where to spend their time and energy. So we can be productive, efficient, and effective together. We are enabled to collaborate because we are all working on the same agenda, rather than conflicting priorities.

So when you hear someone talking about busyness and competing priorities maybe this is an opportunity to step back and really assess what the priorities are. To get everybody working together on the same priorities.

I'd love to know your thoughts.

SUNSHINE COAST BREAKFAST

A light breakfast and an engaging networking opportunity with Senior peers in a small group setting. Hosted by Stacey Ashley & Ally Nitschke.

Date: Wednesday 2nd October

Time: 7:15am – 8:45am

Location: Novotel Sunshine Coast Resort, Sola Restaurant 270 Ocean Drive, Twin Waters, Sunshine Coast

REGISTER HERE:?https://www.staceyashley.com/event24

Do you want to be a leader who inspires, influences and has impact?

Discover how to develop your practice of leadership, find your zone of genius, and lead in possibility.

Find out how I can support you.

FIND OUT MORE

I share?simple, practical & actionable ideas for developing Big Leadership, helping CEOs (and their teams) future proof their leadership, their people, and their organisations.?

Helping leaders move from reactive to strategic leadership by developing their competence, confidence and credibility.

To book me?to speak at your next event, click below.?

EMAIL ME

Focused on future proofing CEOs, Dr Stacey Ashley CSP is often described as the leader for leaders. With over 30 years’ experience, Stacey has helped 1000’s to develop their leadership competence, confidence and credibility. With 14 international Stevie awards, Stacey has been named twice in LinkedIn’s Top Voices. The author of six Amazon #1 best selling books on leadership, Stacey has a talent for translating complex concepts into simple and practical ideas for immediate application.

She typically speaks at conferences, develops leadership strategy and programs, consults, and coaches.

* Enjoyed this article? Have them delivered weekly directly to your inbox - Subscribe

Enquire about working with Stacey:

? [email protected] or ? + 61 2 8006 1733.