If we communicate more than five priorities to our staff, we aren’t communicating.
The answer: Concisely convey what your organization must keep pressure on to be successful – and limit the number of priorities to five.
If five digits are sufficient to interact in all manner of human endeavors, I bow to the inherent wisdom involved and boldly proclaim that five is adequate in terms of describing intentions.
Five priorities: Too few?
An executive showed me a page where he recorded 35 different weekly financial measurements. “When am I supposed to find time to do my real job”, he said. Even as a CFO of a large enterprise, he failed to see strategic value since many measurements didn’t directly apply to business needs.
Why the abundance of measurements? A larger corporation had acquired his company, and a new consultant arrived to describe their required dashboard. The weekly flow of numbers was intended to help see trends in their, now remote, plant’s vital signs. Confused staff tried to make sense of 35 equally important measurements. The logic appeared to be “if a few numbers are good, then a wealth of numbers will be even better.”
Three problems with a proliferation of priorities:
1 – Many Priorities = No Priorities
Focusing on a few priorities lets people see the impact of their choices. A large number hides causal relationships instead of highlighting them. Staff can’t see what needs to be improved.
2 – Highest value roles rarely create meaningful, measurable transactions
SMG’s research found the converse to be true. We found strategic roles, e.g. innovation, market or product development rarely created numeric transactions that represented the roles’ future value to the company. When developing new markets, the number of meetings held is not important, but whether truly strategic meetings are held. In strategic roles activity continues over time with only occasional ‘transactions’, until a high-value outcome is achieved (e.g. a sale, new channel, new product, or a breakthrough, software version is released). This defines ‘knowledge’ work. What’s often overlooked is that unnecessary transactions look like extra work to those building your future, a burden, when they should be enjoying streamlined processes.
3 – The shift to managing metrics
While the effectiveness of an organization CAN be seen in a few well-chosen numbers, the effectiveness of key roles within an organization is not easily measured. There are ongoing, essential tradeoffs which are a challenge to model. Management and staff are tempted to stop watching today’s activities (the root cause of tomorrow’s successes) and await the previous period’s numbers. Poor managers soon believe their role is to watch reports instead of watching their direct reports, which hastens the condition where staff hide problematic numbers, because management is not really watching.
Recommendation
Don’t fog, focus – use the Rule of Five.
To clearly communicate to staff what is important, the best leaders pick five or less priorities to represent the year’s goals. Three priorities are often too coarse, while seven or more can frustrate. Communicate what’s truly important with five or less priorities, then hold leaders accountable for guiding today’s activities as their controllable lever to ensure they meet end-of=year targets. Targets are only ever a symptom of today’s actions.