A few nights ago we woke up to a call from a neighbor at 1:30AM who is a single mom. She was in a panic and begged for me to come over and see if someone was in her house. After a quick look around the perimeter I called the police to check inside reasoning that their guns probably worked much better than my dog as a threat deterrent. Within minutes I was greeted by 3 police officers.

Now I do not claim to understand all the reasoning of everything a police officer does, but I was flabbergasted when all three came over and talked to me in a casual conversation before going inside. They were not asking about clues or what I have learned so far. Instead I got a lecture on how I should have stayed away and called the police. After about a solid minute of lecturing I had to interrupt the officers to remind them of the potential threat that STILL might be inside and that maybe it was a smarter decision to lecture me AFTER insuring that my neighbor was safe. It was an iconic case of not clearly understanding what the highest priority is.

Are you and your staff constantly evaluating what your highest priorities are? Sure the gut instinct is to say, “Of course we are!”, but are you really?  My experience leads me to believe that when people are given a choice of what type of work to start they will tend to lean towards the easy stuff (also known as low hanging fruit) or the fun stuff. The issue is that very often the easy and fun projects are not necessarily what are needed most by the business.

It is essential for you to better understand the direction your management team is trying head with the company. From there it usually makes sense to translate those objectives into tangible measurable goals. For example if your CEO tells you that by the end of the year, he wants to insure that customer’s data is much more secure, what does that really mean? We all know that every level of data protection you invoke will cost exponentially more to put into place. Its your job to translate the high level wish list into associated costs of those choices so that a decision can be made as to how much risk is willing to be taken for the costs.

For many managers it’s very easy to get stuck in the day-to-day shuffle of issues being passed around. You can get to a point when you start to feel like you are making progress when you go a whole day without a fire to put out. Some managers will put in 60 hours a week, demand heavy hours of their staff, and just about come to a breaking point of fatigue and burnout, and yet their management team is still not satisfied. If you feel yourself in this situation you need to insure you are working hard at the right things. For example putting resources towards an HR tool that is not business critical that saves one person a few hours of data entry time a month is not going to hold a flame to using the same resources on a project that has been requested by a few hundred customers and could possibly be a decision point on whether they renew their contract with your company. This sounds so obvious but you’d be surprised how office politics can alter the business reasoning skills.

Here are a few process bullets that can help you insure that your staff is working on the right stuff:

1. Define high-level goals from your executive team
2. Translate these goals into initiatives that are measurable. Define what success looks like.
3. Insure that your own team understands these goals and further breaks them down into the projects/tasks needed to achieve them.
4. Secure the resources needed to achieve the goals. If this cannot happen then readjust the goals to fit the resources you have.
5. Insure timelines are a little conservative to accommodate the unknown especially when resources needs to support legacy systems at the same time.
6. Have regular progress checks to identify issues as early as possible
7. Be transparent about your progress on the various goals from day 1
8. When things are not going right, establish corrective actions as soon as possible.
9. Constantly monitor for “pork barrel”. These are small initiatives that are not inline with the business objectives and take place at the expense of the business objectives being accomplished.

 These bullets obviously just graze the surface on some steps that can be taken, but they offer a very simple methodology on how to keep your staff aligned with business objectives.

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Do you have some simple steps you have learned to help your staff stay inline with working on the right objectives? If so, leave a comment below and share them with others.