When your team needs help prioritizing: 5 steps to take
These are unusual times. I see as many " I have been laid off/let go" LinkedIn posts as I see "I am starting a new job/I just got promoted" posts. I love the promotion posts the most. It is so great to see people valued and invest in by their current organization.
The volume of posts about career transitions indicates a large amount of shuffling....still. With this shuffling comes not only significant levels of change but potential confusion about roles, responsibilities, goals, priorities, and even strategy.
Organizations are in a flurry of adjustments from downsizing to reorganizing to shutting down products or services that are not profitable. So, where does this leave the middle manager and their teams? When the bigger picture becomes a little unclear, how do you set priorities?
The first thing senior leaders need to do, as we discussed last week, is to ensure the why and what are clear, especially among major changes. Only then can middle managers and others on the team be able to align their work and focus on something larger. The absence of this critical information can create murkiness.
If this is unknown or senior leadership is not doing much communication, I would go to the highest leader in my chain and ask questions or confirm what I know. The quickest way to disengage is to not communicate with your employees and not connect their work to something larger. Knowing the bigger picture is essential to engagement and productivity.
Here are five steps every people manager can take to help their teams prioritize and stay clear on what we should focus on.
Do your own SWOT analysis.
I have led organizational SWOT analyses but I have also been involved in smaller team exercises. This never hurts to help get to #2. Holding a brainstorming session about our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (every team can have "threats" if you think about it), can help you see where you shine in support of the company and where you may have the opportunity to do less, re-imagine a process or pursue a different focus to add value.
Create your own vision and team charter.
Hopefully, there is a vision, mission, or charter of sorts for the organization -- what do we do, who do we do it for, and what outcomes we influence or create. Whether this exists or not, build this for your team. Using the SWOT analysis as input, create your vision and charter for what your team does, why, and how you create value. This will help everyone align to something greater.
Always build value.
This has come up now a few times in the points above, but we should be always creating or adding value. If we are working on things that no one asks for or needs, then we probably should be re-focusing our time. Work with each of your team members to see the value they are bringing. Ask them to articulate this in a non-threatening way, of course. This isn't a witch hunt, but a sincere conversation about the work they are doing and ensuring we are helping, improving, and creating something that drives efficiency, innovation, engagement, community service, compliance, or revenue. There are many ways to add value, of course; it isn't only about money.
Align the work.
After determining your team charter and individual value, ensure the work is aligned with the team's purpose in support of creating value. This is where you might need to wear a little organization/work design hat. Talk to your team about where they want to be, what they would like to be doing, and where their strengths and skills are, and then compare that to your team charter of what you are expected to deliver. Then, do a matching exercise. Everyone may not do everything they want to do, but you can have those conversations based on the intersection of team needs and skills/aptitudes.
Communicate.
Once each team member is aligned, ensure the hand-offs and boundaries are clear so there is no toe-stepping among the team. Sharing everyone's role and how they add value to the entire team is a nice exercise to do so everyone is clear about what they are doing, who they are supporting, etc. Sharing goals is also a good thing to do to continue transparency and understanding. This step will seem obvious to some, but I see it skipped often. We meet with George and he is clear on what he is doing, but Susan had no idea he was working on something she sees the need for and starts her own effort in parallel. Communication leads to clarity.
Prioritization is hard. We all struggle with this. If we focus on our team's charter and always build value, we can focus on the right things which leads to good feelings among our team. Communicating what each team member is working on is a great way to build the team and ensure role clarity exists. Role clarity is so important in engaging and retaining our staff.
Next week...we look at ourselves and how we can prioritize and decide how to spend our time.