Goals and Priorities

People who get little done often work a great deal harder. In the midst of tumultuous change, many managers are confusing "busywork" activity with results. They seem to live by the French Cavalry's motto, "When in doubt, gallop" — so everything becomes urgent. They are constantly setting action plans and making lists of projects, goals, and priorities, but seldom are these followed through to completion.

A key component of providing focus to an organization calls for leaders to identify "strategic imperatives" or "must-do's." These are the team's or organization's critical leverage points. Strategic imperatives are those vital few (three to five) goals, priorities, and improvement targets that — when reached — blast the team or organization toward its vision, values, and purpose. These are cascaded throughout the organization with a disciplined goal deployment system.

Common Causes of Priority Overload:

1. Inflexible, long term strategic planning processes.
   
2. Disorganized, reactive managers with poor personal time management.
   
3. Weak goal deployment system with little follow through.
   
4. Lack of focus, discipline, and sacrifice.
   
5. No (or too infrequent) process for continuously resetting priorities.
   
6. Not clustering goals and priorities through Affinity, Pareto, or such tools.
   
7. A culture that rewards activities (like 24/7 availability and long hours) more than results.

Steps to a Goal Deployment System

1. Agree upon three to five strategic (high leverage/impact) imperatives (do-or-die) for the planning cycle.
   
2. Establish management ownership/accountability (and teams) for each imperative.
   
3. Develop key measurements for each imperative.
   
4. Have every team at all levels develop their three to five imperatives and measures that flow directly from one or more of the strategic imperatives.
   
5. Set regular (e.g. monthly) review and follow-up meetings at all levels, and communicate the results broadly.
   
6. Start the next cycle by agreeing upon the three to five strategic imperatives for the next planning cycle.

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