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People who get little done often work a great deal harder. In the midst of tumultuous change, many managers are confusing "busywork" activity with results. They seem to live by the French Cavalry's motto, "When in doubt, gallop" — so everything becomes urgent. They are constantly setting action plans and making lists of projects, goals, and priorities, but seldom are these followed through to completion.
A key component of providing focus to an organization calls for leaders to identify "strategic imperatives" or "must-do's." These are the team's or organization's critical leverage points. Strategic imperatives are those vital few (three to five) goals, priorities, and improvement targets that — when reached — blast the team or organization toward its vision, values, and purpose. These are cascaded throughout the organization with a disciplined goal deployment system.
Common Causes of Priority Overload:
- Inflexible, long term strategic planning processes.
- Disorganized, reactive managers with poor personal time management.
- Weak goal deployment system with little follow through.
- Lack of focus, discipline, and sacrifice.
- No (or too infrequent) process for continuously resetting priorities.
- Not clustering goals and priorities through Affinity, Pareto, or such tools.
- A culture that rewards activities (like 24/7 availability and long hours) more than results.
Steps to a Goal Deployment System
- Agree upon three to five strategic (high leverage/impact) imperatives (do-or-die) for the planning cycle.
- Establish management ownership/accountability (and teams) for each imperative.
- Develop key measurements for each imperative.
- Have every team at all levels develop their three to five imperatives and measures that flow directly from one or more of the strategic imperatives.
- Set regular (e.g. monthly) review and follow-up meetings at all levels, and communicate the results broadly.
- Start the next cycle by agreeing upon the three to five strategic imperatives for the next planning cycle.
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Focus & Context
1. Vision, Values, and Purpose
Customers & Partners
2. Customers
3. Internal Partners
4. External Partners
Strategy & Direction
5. Strategy, Structure, and Roles
6. Goals and Priorities
Measures & Rewards
7. Measurement and Feedback
8. Reward and Recognition
9. Review, Assess, Celebrate, and Refocus
Processes & Systems
10. Process Management
11. Systems
Learning & Development
12. Education & Communications
13. Skill Development
14. Teams
15. Innovation & Organizational Learning
16. Improvement Infrastructure/Process
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