Do you and your leadership team find that you're overly busy putting out fires and gently running around and not getting to any of the strategic things that you really want to be working on?
In this business tip, I'm going to guide you to understand how to set and execute your most important priorities.
Senior Leadership Teams seem to always be super busy. Unfortunately, it's not on the strategic priorities. They're putting out fires and dealing with issues that pop up all day long so they are just being reactive instead of being proactive.
In most cases, this is because we have not set clear priorities for our organization. I know what you are thinking. "We have priorities... we actually have tons of priorities". Well, let me be clear -- if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. You might be just going too wide and not deep enough into the issues to gain momentum.
In this tip, I want to guide you understand how to set clear priorities.
First, start by identifying the one single thing in your organization that you need to see a change in. Just one thing. I know there may be many things, but there's going to be one most important thing that you need to focus on. Give some thought to this and take some time to work with your leadership team on this. This is important.
If you're not sure what that one thing is, reach out to me I can guide you to figure that out too. But you have to decide on one thing that you need to see some change in that will have an impact on your organization. Once we understand your "one thing," you have to ask yourself, why is this happening? You just can't say I'm not happy with this. You might just be looking at symptoms and not the root cause. We don't want to put a band-aid on a situation, we want to improve it.
Take a look at it this way. Let's say your customers aren't happy and they're not coming back for repeat business. Maybe you're getting complaints, or maybe not. For whatever reason, they are not coming back. In other words, your team just isn't doing a great job. You might think that we've got to reprimand the people serving these customers or maybe we do some more training. Well, that may be true. However, that could be just the symptom. Could it be that you don't have an effective recruitment process and/or have core values that are aligned with serving these customers? This leads to you not attracting the right people into your organization so that you can train them well and that they have the right mindset that they want to do a great job.
I'm sorry to say that it might be on you and you have to be better at attracting the right people to work for the company. Someone once told me that we get the people we deserve. The point here is that if we are not aware of the core issue we are just putting a band-aid on these symptoms and are not truly going after the root cause.
Going back, you need to ask yourself, "Why is this happening?" And when you get to an answer, ask the second question, "What is causing this?" So you have to go at least two levels on this, to start getting closer to your true priority.
I hope that this tip has been helpful in terms of how to drill down to find the root cause of issues to guide you to know what you should really be working on in your business. If you're not sure or if you're one of those leadership teams that have a million priorities and you're going in all kinds of directions, I invite you to schedule a free strategy session with me. Let me guide you to whittle that down, to get focused on the number one thing that truly needs to change in your organization so you can be moving forward and scaling up.
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