What are your company’s strategic objectives? What could you stop to deliver faster?
Many executives find it hard to answer these two questions. It’s a challenge that’s costing them dearly. Lack of clarity about strategic objectives and poor prioritisation slow companies down, leaving them falling behind the competition. In an age where all organisations are trying to innovate at pace and rapidly gain market share, that's a cost they simply can't afford.
How can executive teams deliver on their strategic objectives faster, more effectively and at lower cost? By ruthlessly prioritising what they focus on.
Too often, executives aren’t clear on their company’s strategic direction and objectives. So they end up wasting time and resources on initiatives that may generate positive ROI, but don’t necessarily help them deliver on the strategy. This has a huge opportunity cost, but executives often fail to see it. Organisations have fixed capacity to deliver in the short term, so if they work on projects that don’t directly contribute to their strategy, they don’t have enough resources left to meet their strategic goals.
In this article, we’ll explain why ruthless prioritisation is the single most important task for leadership teams, and how they can do it better.
Enacting rapid change
Many companies have already had a glimpse of ruthless prioritisation. When COVID-19 hit, mammoth organisations that previously took weeks to resolve IT tickets managed to get everyone working remotely within days.
This left executive teams asking: How did our business manage to adapt so quickly? How can we bottle this and repeat it?
For many companies, it boiled down to setting a clear desired outcome, getting everyone focused on that priority, and empowering people to make the necessary decisions without going through cumbersome approval cycles.
We’ve condensed these insights into three key actions that executive teams can take to embrace ruthless prioritisation and foster organisational agility:
- start less, finish more
- create a golden thread showing how everyday activities link to strategic objectives
- move from tracking milestones to focusing on outcomes.
Start less, finish more
Frequently, organisations’ capacity and focus are split between too many initiatives, all running at the same time. So, what happens? Since the level of resources is fixed (in the short term, at least), everything takes longer to complete. And there’s a very long lead time before any real value can be delivered.
Organisations can go from idea to launch much faster if they focus their resources on fewer strategic initiatives, and finish some before moving on to the next ones. But for this to happen, leadership teams need to clearly articulate strategic priorities. They must focus on starting less, and finishing more.
Prioritisation is the single most important job for leadership teams. It’s also one of the hardest. Sometimes executives feel that they can’t drop or postpone certain initiatives, because they’ve already committed to the board or shareholders. But when clients clearly define their top few strategic priorities, avoid changing those priorities too frequently, and either postpone or drop other initiatives, they typically improve delivery costs and timelines by 30%.