Every Decision is a Prioritization Decision
I was recently facilitating a nonprofit’s leadership team meeting, where the focus was on articulating the role of its leadership team.
Among the items proposed was this: “Support effective implementation of strategy by ensuring appropriate prioritization and resourcing of activities across the organization and by proactively reallocating resources from lower-impact activities to higher-impact ones.”
Everyone hated that line.
Previously, when reflecting on progress against its strategic plan, the team identified that they were successful where they placed significant time and attention, and unsuccessful where they had not. Despite that insight, the concept of declaring that some activities were more deserving of attention, or had a higher impact than others, was rejected.
To be fair, the reluctance to prioritize partly stemmed from the inherent difficulty of assessing “impact.” In a multi-service and mission-driven organization, there’s no unassailable way to compare activities’ impact. (This happens in the private sector too.)
But even if there’s no objective way to prioritize, the missing piece of that conversation was that every decision is a prioritization decision!
When we say Yes to any activity, we are, by definition, saying No to doing something else. In that sense, we implicitly declare our prioritization by how we spend our time and energy.
The problem with not recognizing that constant prioritization is that we miss opportunities to lean into it. For example, this team spends a lot of time responding to crises in the organization (there are many!). Leaning into that role of the team might mean organizing everyone’s time for a more effective response. For example, they could jointly hold daily calendar time so they had space to address the inevitable crises without interrupting the rest of their schedule. Or they could build capabilities in root cause analysis and organizational development so they could reduce the number of crises over time.
But without declaring that crisis management is a priority, they miss these opportunities.
We can also miss opportunities to deal with things that aren’t priorities. Like the clothes in our closets we haven’t worn for a year, the activities that we don’t spend time on can be out of sight and out of mind. But if we don’t proactively eliminate them, they cause clutter and distract from those items we really care about.
Leadership Wisdom
“I used to have a long, long to-do list, and I’ve always managed my life and managed time by using a to-do list. At the end of the day, I’d click through and see which ones got done and kind of mark them off. Then five more notes might be on my desk, and, as I’m cleaning up for the day, I’d throw them on the list.
“At some point, I realized that a lot of times I was doing what came to me as opposed to what was really important. So I started coming to work and saying, ‘O.K., what are the three most important things I need to do today?’ And I’m going to rank them 1-2-3. And if No. 1 is a 12-hour task, then I’ll just spend all day working on it. I need to decide what’s the most value-added thing that I can get done on this list.”
— Lawrence W. Kellner, former CEO of Continental Airlines in a New York Times interview