Prioritizing Value & Risk: It’s Critical
Over my career, I’ve found that one of the most important roles of leadership is to help ensure that critical tasks are prioritized. It is not hard to find work to keep people busy, as most projects and workplaces create endless “to-do” lists that can be overwhelming or practically unachievable. What is even worse, is when a customer, co-worker or boss makes all tasks “critical”!
As important as it is for a leader to provide strategic direction and set corporate priorities, it is also essential to provide some tools for everyone in the organization to execute with alignment. Here are four simple things to consider when ensuring the tasks that your staff are working on are prioritized correctly:
1. Is the task adding value or reducing risk?
First, determine if your efforts are adding value or reducing risk. Tasks that add value will contribute to the success of your company, so it is crucial to understand the magnitude of the value for each task. Inversely, many companies ignore risks and are sometimes ignorant of critical tasks that could have a significant impact to the company if not addressed.
2. Adding Value: Importance vs. Urgency
Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said, “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important” and further broke this down into a 4-quadrant decision matrix of Do, Decide, Delegate and Delete. In order to help determine the priority of tasks is can be useful to further quantify the "value-add" by assigning criticality values.
3. Reducing Risk: Impact vs. Likelihood
A Risk Matrix is a familiar tool for most corporations, but it is not often applied effectively across an organization. A matrix that is scaled to match the potential risks for a group of workers can complement a Value Matrix with the same relative scales. When considering tasks that reduce risk, it is possible to quantify the potential impact such as cost, safety, health, environment, reputation and other factors that can be scaled proportionally to the size of the company or department. The Likelihood is ideally quantified by available data, but in many cases the experience of managers and employees can be used to determine the probability that a negative event will occur.
4. Prioritize Based on Criticality:
Using both Value Matrix and the Risk Matrix for determining the criticality allows leaders to work together with their staff and teams to prioritize tasks. This can be done prior to a project or as an ongoing tool to ensure that all tasks are prioritized on a regular basis.
Successful companies manage time, energy and resources effectively. Managers who practice a simple and consistent approach to ensuring the critical things get done first will achieve extraordinary results.