Hear From Our Teammates About How They Prioritize

1. Don't prioritize in a vacuum. Include your team and assess the criticality of their current focus, redirecting them toward what matters most. 2. Priorities are outcomes of principles. So first determine what principles should guide your prioritization.

Ted Delicath, Principal

Research suggests that the average person has 150 tasks on their to-do list at any given time. More hours in the day won't help us move the needle on that level of demand — the only sustainable solution I've ever found lies in creating systems. It is a discipline to remember that investing the time up front in building great systems frees our energy and focus for the priorities that most benefit from it.

Peden Gray, HR Generalist

Take stock of your immediate needs versus aspirational goals for your organization. Once you have bucketed your priorities into those two categories, use a method like the Eisenhower matrix to leverage your immediate needs' urgency and importance. Take care of those that are immediate and important, and then time bind the rest with their correlation to your aspirational goals!

Omar Abdalla, Analyst

Look back at your mission and be consistent with your priorities. We are in an environment with fast-paced development and constant changes, creating shifting priorities. Consistency is more valued than ever in such an environment, and sticking to priorities that directly serve your mission will help create this consistency.

Liz Pang, Analyst

  • Prioritize Preparing for Internal Meetings. Your Team Will Thank You for It

    Prioritize preparation. Whether it’s Amazon’s “Memo Culture,” Ford’s “Business Plan Review,” or, yes, Stan McChrystal’s “Operations & Intelligence Forum,” ideas of the best way to run effective meetings have long been front and center in management theory. However, one of the critical elements underpinning these approaches, and others, is something that’s rarely discussed – the importance of a leader investing the time to properly prepare for the meeting.

  • How to Orient Your Teams Around a Culture of Prioritization

    A lack of prioritization is the number one cause of organizational failure. While prioritization is a complex mix of people, processes, and behavior, it’s a mix that is completely possible to determine. Here are 3 simple actions leaders and teammates can take today to move the needle on organizational prioritization.

  • How Do We Prioritize When Everything Is a Priority?

    Healthcare and life science organizations remain steadfast in their mission – caring for and improving the lives of patients, but over time healthcare delivery has evolved. A growing set of complex objectives results in a plethora of services, programs, and technologies, layered one on top of the other, creating an avalanche of competing priorities. So how do we prioritize when everything is a priority?

  • Managing Your Priorities as a Leader: Balancing Expertise with Efficiency

    As leaders mature in their roles, the transition from expert to executive is a critical but difficult change to manage effectively. Many leaders progress through the ranks of their organizations for their indispensable knowledge and expertise. They may have become the go-to resource for information management, functional training, and even onboarding of new hires due to their experience and tenure.

  • Prioritizing a Culture of Inclusion to Drive Business Outcomes: A Conversation With Kelly Kuhn

    In a Q&A, senior advisor Kelly Kuhn gives tangible examples of ways leaders can strike the balance between being internally and externally focused while not losing sight of priorities. She also discusses what it means to center inclusion as a guiding principle and how it will impact the bottom line.

  • Communicating Shifting Priorities: A Conversation with Tom Maffey

    Leaders communicating priorities first have to garner the trust of their teams to ensure the vision is enacted. Tom Maffey, one of our senior advisors and a retired US Army Brigadier General, shares his insight into how priorities can be effectively communicated and why it's important that priorities are shaped by an organization’s principles.

Great Prioritization Resources

VIDEO INSIGHTS

Weekly Whiteboard: Technology and Prioritization

Afiba Edwards shares the crucial role technology plays in helping teams prioritize from the organizational level to the individual user.

Prioritization & Fusion Cells

Chris Fussell shares how fusion cells enable organizations to gather and react quickly to data points and changes in the environment and are useful tools for teams responding to crisis.

Prioritization & Strategy Alignment

Chris Fussell briefly outlines and discusses strategy alignment, organizational networks and the role of communications.

CASE STUDIES

State Governor COVID-19 Crisis Response

McChrystal Group worked alongside governors, mayors, and their senior staff to break down traditional hierarchies and departmental silos so that governments could implement an agile, targeted, data-driven response to the pandemic.

Enhancing Communications and Decision-Making

Read how McChrystal Group worked with the state of Nebraska to support them as they responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, enhancing communication and decision-making.

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