When we don't set priorities, we find ourselves putting out fires instead of working strategically to grow our business. This is a real cause of major bottlenecks for most businesses because it's really hard to identify these issues because you're running around right in the middle of it.
So the question is, are you really focusing on "busy work" or "strategic work"?
When we are working on "busy work", we are finding that we are reacting to everything else that's around us. We begin to lose control and we start to feel overwhelmed. This is just a symptom of an underlying problem that we have not set clear priorities in our business.
I know what you’re thinking, and it's like “Yes, Steve I have priorities. We have tons of them.”
I'm going to let you in on a secret.
The truth is, if everything is a priority, well, nothing is a priority.
You might be trying to maybe go too wide and not deep enough into each of these issues.
I want to help you to understand right now how to set clear priorities in your business. Let us take a look right now at how we're going to do that.
The first thing we need to do is identify what’s the one single thing in your business that you need to see a change in. Just one thing. There might be many things but there's going to be one that you're going to find that is the most important.
The thing is, you have to give some thought to this. Maybe work with your leadership team or other key players in your business on this. Because it's really good to have multiple perspectives when you're trying to dig deep on this. So if you're not sure what that one thing is, reach out to me. I could help you figure that out too. But you have to decide on what is that one thing that you need to see some change in your business right now.
Next, once we have that identified we have to ask ourselves, “Why is this happening?”
You just can't look at it and say, “Hey, here's an issue that I'm not happy with.”
This could be just another symptom of a root cause that I spoke about before or it could really be or can't be the underlying issue of what's going on. So, for example, let's say, you do service work and your customers all of a sudden aren’t happy and you start getting complaints, in other words,
your service team and technicians, they're just not doing a great job.
Well, the first reaction that you might have, and most of us have is right, is to reprimand these service people or maybe we need to do better training. Well, that might be true. However, again, these might be symptoms. It could be that maybe you don't have an effective recruitment process and maybe you don't have your core values aligned with service and maybe, you're not attracting the right people into the job so you can train them well and then they're going to have a mindset that they want to do a great job. We are looking over “here” when we want to be when the problem is actually over “there".
So you need to make sure that you're not just fixing the symptoms, but you're really truly going after that root cause. You have to ask yourself, “Why is this happening?”
And when you determine the cause, ask yourself again, “What is this leading to?”
And that's really important.
You got to go really two levels deep on this because now you're getting closer to that truth and your real true priority.
So once you've identified that true priority everybody on your team needs to be on board. They need to set goals on how they can help improve that one priority for the company as well.
So when you start focusing on this one priority, you're going to find that you and your team are going to be working less on putting out fires because you're now working on fire prevention.
I hope this has been really helpful in understanding how to drill down on what you should really be working on in your business.
But if you're not sure, if you're maybe, one of those businesses that have a million priorities and you're going in all kinds of directions, let's talk so I know I can help you whittle down and really get focused on that #1 thing that truly needs to change in your organization so you can start moving forward and start scaling up.
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