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Getting Our Priorities in Order
By Richard Hadden and Bill Catlette
What's really important in your organization? How do you know? Why does it matter?
We probably can't answer the first two questions, but we'll take a shot at the third.
A couple of years ago, we started doing a very simple exercise when conducting seminars with leadership groups in which everyone in the group is from the same company. We simply ask each manager to write down their company's top three business priorities on three separate Post-It® notes. We don't give them much time to think about it. Priorities, by definition, should come quickly to mind. We then collect the pieces of paper and tabulate the responses.
This kind of quick-and-dirty data collection technique has proven to be very enlightening, not only for our clients, but for us as well. It reveals in a moment the messages that have been communicated the loudest throughout the company.
To sort the priorities out, we usually group them on a flipchart or whiteboard.
Sometimes there are so many varying priorities mentioned that we run out of room on whatever surface we're using to sort them.
With other groups, the responses are so consistent that while we have plenty of room for the relatively small number of different answers, the "piles" of Post-It's become so thick that they fall off the surface under their own weight.
That's when we know we're dealing with an organization with clear priorities.
On one occasion recently, I was speaking to a large group of managers for a major retail clothing chain. Analyzing the Top Three Priorities exercise for this group was a joy. Monotonous, perhaps, but a joy. Fully 68% of the Post-It's said one of the following three items: Sales, People, or Profit. Not necessarily in that order, but those were the words.
What I'm about to say may seem at first like a subtle point, but believe me, it's not. The notes didn't bear a string of words that I'm paraphrasing to mean Sales, People, and Profits. They said precisely those words. They didn't say, for example, "Maximizing per store revenue" or "The employees who work in our stores" or "Getting the greatest return on our stockholders' investment" or anything like that. Their responses were clear, crisp, simple, consistent.
Somebody at this company (like the CEO, and everyone who reports to him) has been out there preaching the word that what's important around here is not difficult to describe or to figure out. We've got to sell our products, through careful and caring treatment of our people (employees and customers), and make a profit. With those priorities in order, the troops can march forward with unified purpose. And in the case of this company, they have, and their sales and profit figures, along with the growth of the company, are the envy of the retail clothing industry.
By contrast, we've also conducted the Top Three Priorities exercises in groups whose leaders were not so focused. In one such group, while the top answer was "Serving our clients", it won the prize by a thin margin. This group of 30 or so managers, when asked "What are this company's top three business priorities?" managed to generate a total of 46 different responses, ranging from the top votegetter to such ideals as "Maximizing executive bonuses", "Merging with competitors", "Complying with regulators", "Damage control/Public Relations", and no fewer than ten notes making reference to a recent decision to reduce cubicle size to squeeze the same number of people into smaller office space.
Not the most contented group we've worked with. Nor the most successful.
If you're a longtime reader of this newsletter, you'll recognize the message. But this is not a rehash. It's a re-emphasis on a critical factor in business success, and we bring it up again, because, frankly, most of us still aren't doing it.
We, as leaders, at whatever level we find ourselves today, must be out there constantly, covering the landscape with clear, simple, and compelling communication of our organizations' top priorities. People need to know what's important in our companies, and they get that message by both our words and our actions.
If we treat our people like expendable commodities, an expense to be minimized at every opportunity, we can rattle the saber all we want with banners, plaques, and T-shirts saying "Our employees are our most valuable asset", and we'll have wasted literally tons of ink, granite, canvas, and cotton in the process.
My cellular service provider answers all its customer service calls (when you finally get through) by saying "Welcome to (fill in the blank), where our customers come first." Pardon me for gagging, but the reality is that customers, in fact, come well down the line, after 1) Acquiring more subscribers than they can support, 2) Advertising and mass marketing, and 3) Making darn sure that they do all they can to prevent a customer from actually speaking with a real person who might help them with their problem.
Our actions, as leaders, drive the perception of our organizations' real priorities, in the eyes of the workforce. The amount of time we spend with our employees, for example, says a lot about where they come on the priority list.
And as to focus, whether you like him or not, former Dallas Cowboys football coach Jimmy Johnson said it best, "Confused players aren't very aggressive".
We management types think we're pretty important. And maybe we are. But probably not for the reasons we think. The greatest value we can provide to our organizations is to demonstrate clearly what's important in our organizations. When, and only when we've done that, will we be able to gain the critical mass of commitment necessary to do great things.
Please print the following attribution for this article: Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden, co-authors of Contented Cows Give Better Milk, help clients clobber the competition by having a focused, fired up, and capably led workforce. They deliver powerful conference keynotes and leadership training. They can be reached at 800-940-7006 (+1-904-720-0870 from outside North America) or www.ContentedCows.com.