Ruthless Prioritisation in Teams

Lately, across a few organisations, I've been hearing the desire for ruthless prioritisation. This makes my heart sing. Over the last few years, there's been an emphasis on well-being and resilience, which is great; but well-being initiatives that don't acknowledge workload issues are lip service at best.

Brené Brown speaks of feeling like a turtle without a shell in a briar patch, feeling exposed, desperately looking for a new shell when someone points out- you can get a harder, better shell or you can get out of the briar patch. Constant workload issues are the briar patch- we're living in thorny environments trying our best to get through- and well-being initiatives that don’t acknowledge that are merely shells. Ruthless prioritisation is the way out of the briar patch.

Qualtrics just released a report on 2023 Employee Experience Trends, the second top trend is: "Employees have been operating at surge levels for years. Now they're reclaiming boundaries." We can encourage those boundaries by prioritising work, figuring out which efforts will give us the results we're seeking and cutting out the rest.

Sounds simple but somehow the process of prioritising as a team can be complex and nuanced. Prioritisation requires teams to build clarity, lean into tough conversations and make decisions together. Moreover, in a world that is changing as rapidly as it is, prioritisation needs to be adaptive and dynamic.  

In order to prioritise ruthlessly together, a team requires: 

Clarity on outcome.

Sometimes outcomes are too vague or too high-level to be helpful. Greg McKweon gives an example of a great mission statement from Make It Right: “to build 150 affordable, green, storm-resistant homes for families living in the Lower 9th Ward.” What stands out is how specific, clear and inspirational this statement of intent is. Without a clear and concrete north star (across whatever time horizon), teams will flail and struggle to prioritise.  

How can you decide on what's important when you're not crystal clear on what you're trying to achieve? How can you make trade-off decisions if your outcome is too generic or high level? 

Alignment

The other trap I've seen teams falling into is taking a bottom-up approach to prioritisation. Leaders ask the team to figure out their priorities and bring all those together and stitch them into their activity for the future. When this is accompanied by a lack of dialogue and debate to focus the list of activity down to actual priorities, individuals start to privilege their agenda at the expense of the team's agenda. We've all seen this happen- people off on their own projects, disconnected from the purpose of the team or organisational strategy and the collective efforts end up being less than the sum of their parts. For a team to successfully achieve its purpose, team members need to align and have true buy in and engagement around the team priorities.

Psychological Safety

Often the individual agenda trumps the team agenda because there's a lack of buy in. To get to true alignment, teams need to feel the psychological safety to engage in rigorous debate and dialogue. They have to feel safe to disagree and unpack the tensions they're sensing. The differences in perspective about what to prioritise to achieve a desired outcome are incredibly valuable and need to be harnessed appropriately. By listening, asking powerful questions and seeking to understand, teams can harness their collective wisdom and chart the best way forward together. 

Adaptability

Prioritisation in the face of a VUCA world is a vastly different exercise. When we're dealing with complex problems, it's not always possible to know the right course of action ahead of time. Because we're in a changing landscape, we need to adapt quickly and reprioritise on a regular basis. We do this organically all the time; we've all experienced this in our personal and professional lives a lot the last few years.

In a team context, when this happens organically, it can often be reactive rather than deliberate. We refocus to the thing in front of us, regardless of its relative importance. High-performing teams have clarity on the desired long term outcome, and a ritual in place to check in regularly to prioritise and reprioritise to ensure there's focus and alignment towards the right things.  

Winston Churchill famously said, "Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential." It's the act of prioritisation that supports alignment, adaptability and accountability.  

Ultimately, even with discipline across all of this, we will be challenged by our very human desire to want to do it all. Ruthless prioritisation requires us to make trade-offs and own tough calls. It calls on us to choose progress over perfection, to take risks, fail fast and learn quickly. It pushes us to choose the vital few over the trivial many, and to determine those trade-offs together.

It's tempting to believe that our constant hustle and massive collective workload somehow indicates that we are making progress and moving forward, even if it comes at a price. But the reality is, teams that achieve the best outcomes are productive because they are focused. They are focused because they are aligned. They are aligned because they are clear. They are clear because they put in the work to have rich and tough conversations together. With these elements in place, teams can achieve some pretty amazing things.