How to push company priorities down through your organization so everyone stays aligned. Set 3-5 quarterly priorities with a clear number one and named owners, then have teams create 2-3 aligned priorities of their own. Negotiate them, track them on dashboards, and keep the whole company focused.
All right, I want to talk to you again about priorities, another layer or aspect of priorities. So you set priorities, but how do you get everybody else working on the priorities? How do you get all the people working together, aligned, pulling for the same kinds of things? This is where cascading priorities comes in. So once you start setting priorities for the company and you have owners probably in a leadership team for that, now we want to get everybody else engaged with priorities that actually tie together to the main thing. So if I share out, hey, these are the targets for the company in the quarter and these are the priorities that we're working on. And Bob owns that one and Susie owns that one and I've got this one, like whatever it is like that we lay these things out, then the question is, what do you need to do this quarter to support the fulfillment of these things that we're working on for the company? And that's where people create priorities for themselves or their department or their functional role. So my role, my department, I'm going to create parties that tie to the company priorities, that support those. And I want to name it or call out the connection. So the same discipline around how you create the priorities, who owns them, how you describe them, all that we've talked about, but I also now want to relate them to the top company priorities. So you want to probably have three to five company priorities per quarter, probably not less than three, probably not more than five. And. And you definitely want to have a number one. You always want to have a number one. We'll talk about that soon. Now I want to cascade them, so I want everybody in the company to support them in some way, at least down to like a supervisory level. So now I want to share the company ones and ask people what do you need to do? And then have a conversation, negotiate what their priorities are for the quarter. So they probably have some things that tie very directly to the company and then they might have a few things that feel a little bit unrelated, that's fine. If people have about three priorities for themselves and a clear number one that tie up to the company priorities, the top level company ones, we've got cascading priorities. Now we can build dashboards and displays, we can put them into your meeting rhythms in your agenda so we can track them and follow up on them. And everybody's working together really well and people see how their things they're focused on tied to the company and it all makes sense. That's how we get people working together really well, staying aligned on the right priorities. Aligning a little bit of practice doing that kind of work on the regular makes all the difference in the world. Before you know it, you've got a company that's working together well. People understand what they're doing and why they're doing it. And a whole lot of nonsense that goes on in less well run companies is not your problem. You don't have that anymore. So create great priorities. Do them from the future, then attend to them, but have them cascade down to the organization so that everybody's pulling together and aligned to the same kinds of things. Hope that's helpful. We'll talk to you again soon. Bye bye.
