High or Low Priority; What Should Stay and What Should Go
As a leader, it's important to prioritize tasks and activities that have the greatest impact on your employees, teams, and organizations while minimizing the effort required. Here's a quick exercise you can use to help you identify your impact versus effort priorities and TOGETHER align with your teams to ensure you're all on similar pages.
List all of the tasks and activities that your team or organization is working on. This could include things like team meetings, one-on-one meetings with team members, product development, new processes, strategic planning, and so on.
For each task, have your team ask two questions: "How much impact does this task have on my team or organization?" and "How much effort does this task require?"
Score each task on a scale of 1-10 for impact and effort, with 1 being low and 10 being high. Be honest with yourself and don't be afraid to give low scores to tasks that don't have much impact or require a lot of effort.
Plot your scores on a graph (preferably on a whiteboard or we've used painter taped in the shape of the matrix on a wall and placed sticky notes with each task) with impact on the y-axis and effort on the x-axis. You should end up with a scatter plot that shows the relative impact and effort required for each task.
Analyze your graph and identify the tasks that have a high impact but require low effort. These are your highest priority tasks and should be the focus of your time and energy as a leader.
Similarly, identify the tasks that have a low impact but require high effort. These are your lowest-priority tasks and should be delegated or eliminated if possible.
Finally, identify the tasks that fall in the middle of the graph - those that have a moderate impact and moderate effort. These tasks may still be important, but you'll need to balance them with your higher-priority tasks to ensure that you're maximizing your impact as a leader.
Collectively get into alignment on the tasks and come up with action plans to move the priorities forward. Those priorities that did not get chosen right now, can definitely go into a parking lot to see if it is needed for the future (often times it never sees the light of day again).
By completing this exercise, you'll have a better understanding of where to focus your time and energy that will have the greatest impact on your team and organization and align with others throughout the organization for input and buy-in. These tasks should also align with your organization’s strategy. Don’t have one? Or maybe you don’t have the resources to successfully put one together? Contact us, we have a five-step Strategic Delta that we can plan, apply, and execute to get your organization headed in the direction of productivity and growth. We can’t wait to hear from you!