Fortune 500 Whack-a-mole: Prioritize Everything and Stop Wasting Your Resources
April 2nd, 2007
Finding good goals is tough. Finding core activities that are aligned with and support your goals is very hard. But, the most important and difficult part is usually making sure that these goals are rated by importance. If you’re not doing that, you may very well be wasting your time… and your money!
I think if I could get this across to people I work with, more than any other idea, they might be successful. Fewer than 50% of the people I talk to really identify good, meaningful goals. Maybe 10% of them are working on activities that are really aligned with their core goals and organizational mission. But, this last part, almost no one is doing. Why is it so tough? I’d love your comments about this!
What I do know, is what the consequences are if you don’t do it. People who don’t prioritize their goals are constantly responding to the most urgent — or seemingly urgent — problems, and rarely find time to make progress on their important goals. Dr. Brian Higley calls this Frenzied Doing. I compare this in my discussion with the various business and government leaders I talk to, to playing a game of whack-a-mole. Remember that children’s game where you put in a nickel (a quarter or fifty cents these days), the moles pop up, and you take a big rubber headed mallet an bop them on the head. Lots of fun, quite engaging and entertaining, but you’re not getting anywhere are you?
The same is true of so much of what we spend our time on. Someone comes to us with the newest idea or newest problem, and it grabs our attention. We set aside for one more day our big idea, and focus on today’s small fire. we put out the fire, but we’re still sitting there, in the same place, when the next fire comes. And, instead of paying 50 cents to play this game, you’re probably paying a lot — ALOT — more. Often, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in lost productivity. But, there’s a way out.
The secret, I believe is two-fold.
1) Develop a system that includes importance ratings (like the Execution Boost Support System — or EBSS — does) and use it to track ALL of your goals. Including your ‘fires’. This will help you get a clear picture of where your time, and the resources of your employees are going.
2) Devote at least 30% of your time to what Steven Covey calls “the important” — not just the “urgent”. This isn’t by itself a secret — but, so many people fail to do it because they’re missing step 1. Without a solid way to systematically prioritize goals even the most sophisticated tracking systems are useless.
For more on this subscribe to the RSS feed, check back for comments, and read some of the other articles on this site. You should also feel free to contact me at BrianM at TBB2excellence.com or by using the contact button above.
You might also be interested in this free 5 minute execution assessment from The Building Blocks to get a quick sense of how much time and money you could easily save if you got your employees systematically on track.
Article Filed under: Business Excellence, Goal Achievement Weeds (Barriers), Personal Effectiveness
People may not be setting forth goals that are properly aligned for a few reasons. First there may not be a set vision or mission statement for the organization. Another may be that this vision or mission statement may not be clear. For example this is a mission statement from a community college.
Adding value to the lives of our students and enriching our community.
If you read this it sounds like giving money to each student would full fill the mission statement. Also think about this… replace the words of our students with the word people. It sounds like a bank mission statement. So make sure the mission or vision statement is clear. Also this person may not be passionate about creating goals that are aligned. As long as he gets his goals done, whether they are good or not, he looks like he is being productive. Or this person could not be very excellent at what they do so then they may not be performing and creating goals at the level needed.
[...] priorities should be… I don’t always know what mine are. But, when I take the time to get clear about by priorities, and make sure my goals and actions are in alignment with my priorities, things work best. You [...]
[...] Finding a systematic way to track goals that includes IMPORTANCE ratings is one of the first keys. [...]
[...] The frenzied doer. The frenzied doer is quite often stressed and distracted. He or she may have difficulty sleeping and cannot take time off without a certain level of guilt and/or fear. It is difficult for a person with this lifestyle to determine what is most important, so they simply continuously work at what is most accessible. The long term impact on the frenzied doer is burnout and dissatisfaction, and too often they leave a fall-out that goes beyond themselves. For more on Frezied Doing, read Brian Mistler’s article on the “Whack A Mole” phen…. [...]