Bill Gallagher shows how to cut through competing priorities by picking one focus per quarter and rallying around it. A roll-up company that narrowed dozens of goals saw faster results. Apollo 13's "Failure is not an option" shows how a single theme can drive outsized impact.
Do you just have too many priorities and maybe your team is all pulling together in different directions? It's pretty common. One of the companies that I was coaching a number of years ago now really struggled with this. This had been a roll up where they'd done a lot of acquisitions and then we had lots of leaders about with different ideas about what they needed to do that quarter. In the beginning, getting them to roll those things into three to five top company level priorities was extraordinarily difficult. And they just couldn't bring themselves to do it. They would roll out with 13 and they'd say, wow, we really made some progress because they'd come down from like 50 quarterly priorities. Well, that simply wasn't going to be great enough to put the right kind of focus within the company. But one thing did make the difference in helping them get down the road, and that was picking the number one thing and keeping that alive with a quarterly theme or round. So where they couldn't narrow their list down well, except a few months down the road, prioritizing them and picking a number one thing helped them to do that and keep that alive. Now, as the company picked the number one thing, then they picked a quarterly theme or a rallying cry to keep that alive and visible for the whole team, not just the leadership team, but the whole company over the coming quarter. And that kept that focus on the number one thing. And in many cases it turned out that the number one thing was really only being driven by one or two people, with only support and contributions from people, in some cases, almost nothing from the others. But it was critical to the company knocking down the most important thing that quarter. So we like to take and pick the number one thing out of many things, even though they can't say no to a whole bunch of things yet, knowing what the number one thing is and then keeping that alive with a quarterly theme or rallying cry can make a difference. Of course, we know this from popular culture and history, from movies and historical incidents like the Apollo 13 mission, where a crisis kept them focused and the rallying cry was, what was it? Failure is not an option. Right. Gene Krantz famously declared that at some point in the crisis, all of our teams will create these, and they'll typically create them from song titles, movie titles, popular phrases, and so on that easily capture and evoke something. So you think about what's number one and what's most important for the company, and then you pick something that's close to that and use it to keep that. You create a theme around it that you keep alive over the quarter. So there are hundreds of tools like this available and ideas. At scalingcoach.com you'll find all those tools along with low cost options for coaching support learning around business growth. Scalingcoach.com Go there now. Love to help you grow. No matter what the economy is doing, no matter what industry you're in or what part of the world you're from, scalingcoach.com is there for you.
