How to Make Priority Calls

So, what’s the priority? If you are in a leadership role, there’s a good chance you get asked that question regularly. That question doesn’t bother me. I enjoy making priority calls. I don’t agonize over it at all. How do I do that? Well, that requires some explanation.

I was just in a meeting earlier this week where this subject came up. I started to talk through my thought process and afterward decided to write it down for you all in this blog article. Here it is.

Prioritization matters

Prioritization is a decision. It’s a decision to commit time, energy, and money toward a goal. There’s an opportunity cost to every decision. When we decide to prioritize something, we implicitly deprioritize something else.

We need to do this because our time and resources are finite. We’d love to do everything, but we can’t, so we must choose to do what makes the most impact.

Speaking of impact, I keep the 80/20 rule in mind. 80% of my results will come from 20% of my efforts. I can’t control everything, but with my discretion, I try to make room for things that I believe have the highest chance of making that big, noteworthy impact. This is the stuff that will matter years from now.

Prioritization questions

I like to ask questions to help me assess the situation. Here are some key questions:

• If we don’t do it, do we get worse? If the answer is yes, I usually think of this as a pretty high priority. Operational issues, security, and compliance items all fall into this bucket. If we neglect these, we degrade over time. I want to improve. I can’t afford to regress.
• If we don’t do it, can we achieve our goals? I like to keep our eyes on where we are going as an organization. Some things help us meet our goals, other things are just good ideas. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but if we’re constrained, we should prioritize the strategy.
• What matters most to our customers? We are in the customer service business, but we don’t always think that way. Letting customers influence our priority decisions is always wise.
• Is it ready now? Is it needed now? Sometimes, there’s an important thing to do, but the timing isn’t right. Perhaps we’re waiting for some other team to do their job first. Perhaps it isn’t needed just yet.
• Are we excited about it? Why should you prioritize work that you are excited about? That may seem like superfluous criteria, but it’s not. When inspiration strikes, you’ll do a better job in less time. This maximizes your productivity. It’s like riding a wave.

Prioritization happens at four levels:

• Individual: We all manage our schedules and decide what to work on and when. I wrote an entire article about how I manage my calendar. It’s called “The Art of Declining Meetings.” Check it out.
• Team: When I managed a team, I had a top 10 list of team priorities. I updated each week and we discussed it at our team meetings. Your team may use a backlog to manage this. There are many ways to communicate and manage team priorities.
• Cross-team: This is hard. I’ll come back to this.
• Organization: Most large organizations clearly communicate their top strategic priorities to all employees. Our CEO often discusses these at our town halls. These are great but always very high-level. Sometimes it’s hard to connect day-to-day team work with those organizational priorities. If you can, you might have several different projects that all support that big priority, and you may struggle to prioritize among them.

Cross-team Prioritization

The stark reality is that we do not work in isolation. Our teams are not completely autonomous. We must work together to get important work done. This is a tough nut to crack. I have my method, but before I get into it, I thought I’d share the ways that don’t work:

1. Central Control: I used to work with a Project Management Office that used a fancy algorithm to assign a priority score to every single project so they could be ranked against each other for priority calls. This failed for three reasons: (1) The priority rank process was onerous. No one wanted to do it. (2) You could game the system once you figured out how it worked. (3) It was a point-in-time priority assessment. It never changed over the life of the project, or as the business environment changed.
2. Top Control: Escalate every priority call to the top. This slows everything down and tends to incentivize politics. The top has limited time and attention to deal with these priority calls. Organizational productivity stagnates.
3. Survival of the Fittest: Teams advocate for their priorities and duke it out. Sometimes fouls get called. Sometimes they don’t.
4. Committee: Some committees function as decision-making bodies for priority calls across teams. In my experience, this is usually a formality and is typically preceded and supported by other problem-solving methods.

Negotiate Priorities

I recommend teams negotiate their cross-team priorities. This requires collaboration, relational skills, emotional intelligence, empathy, trust, and patience. When I use the term “negotiate,” I don’t mean like a hostage situation, but rather, a good faith, respectful discussion among colleagues.

I encourage teams to think about their mutual customers and shared strategies. I encourage teams to be transparent with their interests and creative with their solutions.

Whenever possible, this should take place among empowered leaders closest to the context. Escalate only when necessary.

I’m very intentional with my use of the term, “negotiate.” Some of my readers are afraid to do it, or they don’t know how. I once was that way too. Then I learned. Check out my article about that journey here.

Check alignment

This is easy and is a lot better than escalation. When you talk to your boss, tell her, “I worked through this priority call. This is how I worked through it. I involved these people in the discussion. This is the decision I made. Does this make sense to you? Are we aligned?”

Your turn

Those are my tips. As you can tell, I care a lot about making quality priority decisions. They matter. However, you won’t always get it right. Be kind to yourself when you make mistakes. Be kind to others, especially when negotiating cross-team priorities. This is hard work, but you are up for the challenge.

This article was originally posted on zachonleadership.com on February 17, 2023.