Prioritization is both a skill and a practice. Set priority to leverage limited resources, time and talent to maximize performance and unlock potential.
Prioritization is critical as the alternative is a land grab for time or resources. Prioritization is about managing constraints. Here is a set of parameters to assess prioritization of individuals or organizations.
Focus: There are so many things going on on a daily basis. Today’s business leaders and professionals should learn how to “ignore,” in order to focus on top prioritized issues without getting distracted or inundated with overloaded information. Prioritization forces us to become more active and proactive in crucial activities and provide a focused approach to solve the most critical or urgent problems.
Upon increasing paces of changes, the reality is that there are a lot of things that can go wrong and it is not always easy to identify what is important. Laser focus on things that really matter, be selective on the knowledge you want to gain, the people you try to communicate with; the things you are interested in to do, the goals you intend to achieve; the problem you need to solve. Stay focused, continuously try to improve, develop, or change everything in a prioritized order as long as it not only keeps the lights on but also creates a more long-term advantage.
Resourcefulness: You can't do everything as resources are limited. To survive in the long term, do more planning and prioritizing, bring transparency, and keep optimization, to gain the visibility and traceability between costs and the assets consuming those costs. Being resourceful provides one angle to show that you have the ability to learn and gain fresh knowledge, so you have new answers or complete answers to the questions that interest you or the problems you met before.
From a business management perspective, a company has finite resources to apply to get the best yield possible to meet stakeholders’ expectations. There are always some constraints for businesses to balance a healthy portfolio of “running, growing, and transforming.” It’s important to set the right priority, align portfolio management with strategic business goals and objectives. It is also important to integrate risk into resource prioritization and planning processes. If companies don't make room in the prioritization process for business initiatives that have significant risks but also potentially significant upside results, it can, in fact, diminish the business’s unique advantage for the long run.
Innovativeness: When people get stuck in the old routine and comfort zone, they barely survive the whirlwind of daily busyness. Prioritization is critical to force people to become more innovative for change and problem-solving. Innovation is the mechanism through which you grow and evolve something to something better or something new. It is important to set priority for innovation management even if there is the pressure to "keep the lights on."
Technically, corporations do need to prioritize, embed prioritization mechanisms into innovation management, and learn to strike the right balance between increasing productivity and encouraging innovation; between setting standards and letting “out-of-the-box” thinking flow. They need a process by which evaluation of those priorities occurs and through that process review new ideas, revisions or changes. The objective of prioritization shouldn't be to work on only those initiatives for which you have staff, it should be to maximize what you can accomplish through creative leverage of your talent pool and build innovation competency.
Time management: People need to be very vigilant about time. Time management prioritizes actions. Upon increasing paces of changes, the reality is that there are a lot of things that can go wrong and it is not always easy to identify what is important. When people’s everyday experience is one of frustration, failure, and defeat, they use up all their energy and waste their time on trivial things, becoming unproductive or inefficient.
In reality, people’s time is stretched so thin that they do not allocate enough time to understand key issues or focus on true problem-solving. There are long-term, intermediate, and immediate actions you need to take, strong time management skills help you decide the course, and improve work effectiveness. It takes time management skills to enhance self management discipline for unlocking performance and unleashing potential, making themselves creative-oriented, mature, and accomplish more.
Delegation: Nowadays business professionals, especially managers, have so many things on their plate, micromanagement often leads to ineffectiveness and discourages innovation. It’s important to learn how to delegate, not micro-manage, let people do things in their own way. However, unclear, ambiguous delegation inevitably leads to unsatisfactory results. Know what you want before you delegate to someone else. There needs to be the real delegation of responsibility with well-defined boundaries and clear accountability.
Strong prioritization practices can make the delegation process frictionless and build trust. Accountability goes hand in hand with the delegation of authority or power. The delegation chain can be lubricated via communication effectiveness, responsibility clarity and self-management discipline. Find the right people with the right talent to do the work, trust but verify. Get agreement from the person to whom you delegate the task to accept responsibility and accountability for the job. It does not mean telling someone how to do it your way. This is giving them enough information to figure out how to do it their way to encourage autonomy.
Prioritization is both a skill and a practice. Set priority to leverage limited resources, time and talent to maximize performance and unlock potential. The challenge is to prioritize what you know about and keep an eye open for signs of things you don't know about. Continuously try to improve, develop, and change everything in a prioritized order as long as it solves the critical problems smoothly, and builds long term professional competency.
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