21 Day High Performance Team Challenge-Day 4

“Action expresses priorities.”-Mohandas Ghandi

This simple quote carries loads of meaning. Not that it needs it, but I am going to interpret it a little bit here. “What you do first shows what is most important to you”, so, if you read, and/or answer your email as your first work task each day, then that must mean that email is your top priority, right?  You must be an email salesperson, or an email technician at a giant email company, or you must have an email store?  Sounds ridiculous,right? Ask yourself:

-”Am I prioritizing my tasks correctly to maximize my own personal performance, and the performance of my team?

-”What messages are my actions communicating to my team about my priorities as a leader, and the organization’s priorities?

Obviously ,the examples above are a little extreme and possibly ridiculous, however, I have spoken with hundreds, maybe thousands of team leaders and team members who talk about responding to emails, sending emails, checking emails,” fixing” or dealing with emergencies that came to them in emails, etc. If you are a customer service driven company, or a company that receives orders from customers by email, then of course, checking email first-for customer needs-would make sense as a priority task.

This blog post is not intended to be a rant against email, it is really about setting clear priorities and sticking to them as much as possible. If you have been following the HPTC blog entries this week, you have probably spent a little time thinking about your Team’s Vision, Mission and individual team member behaviors, and hopefully those thoughts have helped you to get a little more clear on your priorities. Here are a couple of examples of High Priority Tasks (HPT’S) ( I encourage you to leave comments with your ideas for other HPT’s):

-Direct Revenue generation (taking orders,customer meetings, etc)

-Customer service issues (creating delight, fixing problems, etc)

-Product or service improvement

-Employee engagement

-Equipment maintenance

-?????????????????

Here a couple of  great priority setting tools:

-Stephen Covey’s Priority Matrix

-Uncovering your priorities:

1. On a sheet of paper, write your 10 top tasks or “To-Do’’s”
2. Now, if this list could only have 9 items on it, which would you cross off?
3. Cross it off.
4. If this list could only have 8 items, which would you cross off?
5. Cross it off.
6. If this list could only have 7 items, which would you cross off?
7. Cross it off…
8. You get the picture, continue this process until you are down to 1 item- that is your top priority.

Going through this process, forcing yourself to make the choice each time you cross something off, enables your brain to quickly weigh everything and make the best choice.

This technique can be used to determine your top 1-3 tasks each day- so that you are making progress on priorities and still have time to “fight fires” as needed. Try it.