Leader Alignment And Why It Matters

“Action Expresses Priorities”  – Mahatma Gandhi

Take a moment to write down your top priority at work and your top priority outside of work.

Now, consider how you’ve spent your time directly contributing to these priorities.

Have your actions aligned with these priorities?

If not, why? Do your priorities need to change, or do your actions need to be realigned?

I loved this article by Alicia McKay titled, The Consequences of Your Commitment where she writes:

“Are you struggling to make progress on the most important things to you?

Chances are, you’re not living in alignment with your priorities.

Unless you’re making trade-offs that channel your time, energy, attention and money into your priorities and away from competing demands, they aren’t your priorities. They’re hopes and wishes.

Whether you want to land your dream job, launch your business, run a marathon, write a book, have a family, buy a house, find your soulmate, or go on your big adventure, you’ll have to say no to the second-order temptations that will send you off-track.

Promise yourself to every path and you’ll fail to travel any of them meaningfully.

You probably know what you need to do. It’s not clarity you need, but the courage to live with the consequences of your commitment.”

The Challenge of Prioritization

In today’s fast-paced, virtual business world, what is being done to tackle the difficulty of prioritizing effectively? The usual approaches are still in place, but they often miss the mark:

• Umbrella Priorities: Leaders try to consolidate their focus, but this can lead to even more priorities revealing themselves.
• Personal Time Management: While still popular, this method overlooks organizational interdependencies.
• Elimination Approach: Leaders frequently discuss cutting back on tasks, but rarely do they officially deprioritize anything.
• Strategy Approach: Senior leaders decide what’s most important, aligning everything else with these goals. However, this can sometimes add even more priorities.

Sound Familiar?

How Can We Prioritize More Effectively?

All of the strategies above are important, but none more so than focusing on the human dimensions of prioritization.

The human dimension is essential to addressing this issue. In every organization I’ve worked with, the pace of progress is often hindered by a small group of key individuals overwhelmed with work. This usually includes executives and a few senior leaders as well. These people are at the crossroads where strategy and implementation come together. They are the ones who can turn ideas into action as fast as they can process the work. These are the remarkable senior leaders of today and I know firsthand, that they are talented, motivated, and productive. Because of this, they are also so dedicated that they keep accepting work, even when it compromises what is already on their plate. They can’t truly prioritize alone, and getting these key leaders together to look at their capacity through the lens of the organizational agenda, is where growth and sustainable movement forward are possible.

I often write about problem-solving, vision work, and strategy and how central the human dimension is to this organizational work. The same is true with prioritization. I wrote about this extensively in my blog, The Starfish and the Spider in relationship to leadership siloes. Here are some ways to support key groups of senior leaders in their success to prioritize so that the organization around them can benefit from their momentum. The effects are truly exponential:

1. Look at the workloads of individual team members instead of looking at strategy. Have each team member capture the biggest things they are facing in their own area (or silo).
2. Have leaders share their list with the others until everyone understands the current activity happening in each area as it relates to the overall business strategy.
3. Once leaders understand the whole of what the business is facing, it is time they go back to their list and revisit their scope, move work, delegate, eliminate, move people, and defer. This process takes time and sometimes multiple iterations before the lists look credible and possible to achieve.
4. I encourage leaders to hold their peers accountable if a list seems too lofty and to help them find ways to chop, change, and outsource.

The most magical thing happens during these meetings. There is a moment, after so much back and forth and difficult conversations, where individuals let go of personal priorities in service of shared, achievable priorities that span the organization and support the bigger picture in a sustainable growth-oriented way. When it happens, it feels like a foundation is finally poured and there is solid ground to stand on.

“Once, we built structures entirely from the most durable substances we knew: granite block, for instance. The results are still around today to admire, but we don’t often emulate them, because quarrying, cutting, transporting, and fitting stone requires a patience we no longer possess.” -Alan Weisman

This digging, quarrying, cutting, and transporting is time well spent. Leaders leave these sessions with a new energy that comes only from the type of support that can be found in the human dimension. It can’t be programmed, found in the cloud, or artificially sourced. It can’t be purchased or downloaded. It can only come from time spent caring about what another is facing, even when immense pressure is being applied to execute, and then finding a way forward together. Now that is worth prioritizing!

If action expresses priorities as the opening quote states, would an objective observer watching you go about your day be able to identify what matters most to you?

Please contact me if you would like to talk about how we can design and facilitate this process for your senior leaders.