One morning, the CEO wakes up and in the fresh morning light, she has a revelation. She sees an opportunity for the company to develop a new product line that can push the business to a new stage of growth. She spends some time sketching out this vision and presents it to the rest of the senior leadership team. On board with this change, they begin to make the moves needed to make the vision a reality. But it doesn’t happen quickly. There are in-flight projects to worry about. Some things are almost complete, and it would be a shame to cancel them before they got finished. All of these concerns mean that the teams are slow to come together to work on the initiative, until suddenly the question comes down: so, why aren’t you working on the top priority?
Priority changes from senior management can sometimes happen without warning. Leaders who are removed from the day-to-day schedules of the teams can forget that teams have long priority lists that may have been mapped out weeks or months ago and may take weeks or months to complete. So when these leaders see an opportunity or feel that the priorities of the organization need to change, they often expect that change to happen immediately, without consideration for the reality of the current state of affairs.
This question may be asked of managers at every level, but most often originates from senior management. Expect to get this question from your boss. When you feel the need to ask it of your own teams, ask yourself why they don’t understand what the priorities are and what they should be cutting to address them.
Do you know what the top priority is? Do your teams know what it is? Do the developers on those teams know what it is? Sometimes the answer to this question is simply a matter of communication. You don’t know what the top priority is, or you didn’t communicate it clearly and urgently to your management team, and they didn’t communicate it clearly and urgently to their development teams. You didn’t explicitly go through the list of things in flight and kill or postpone work in order to make room for this priority. You need to do that, if it’s truly urgent. Saying something is top priority is one thing, but making the actual tradeoffs on the schedule to get people moving on it is completely different.
We forget that the people above us or in different organizations don’t have the same detailed understanding of what our teams are currently doing, and why. I don’t believe it’s necessary to constantly provide minute details to peers and your manager for every team in your large organization. However, when you’re taken to task for not focusing on the right priority, it’s a sign that you and the CEO have a misaligned understanding of reality, and you need to get on the same page. Your team may be crunching to stabilize a system that’s causing frequent outages, or in the last push of a major project that has been ongoing for a long time. If you think that the team needs to finish their current work before shifting to the new top priority, you must communicate that clearly.
Be prepared to push both up and down to maintain or change focus. If you think a big project should be finished before slotting in new work, get as many details as possible about the value of that project, its current status, and the expected timeline. Be realistic. If someone above you has changed business focus so urgently that he’s willing to have this conversation, expect that you’ll probably need to compromise on the current work in progress and cut some parts short or move some people off of it. Your team may not be happy with the change. People generally don’t enjoy being pulled off of what they’re working on for a new executive whim, especially if they believe their current work is important.
The more senior the management and leadership position you take in a company, the more the job becomes making sure that the organization moves in the direction it needs to move in, and that includes changing direction when needed. You do this by clearly communicating the direction to your teams, and making sure they understand it and are taking the necessary steps to change course. Ask your teams for the list of projects the change will impact, so that you can communicate it upward. This will force your management team to actually think about the new initiative and start to plan for it. Ask for the goals of the initiative from its originator, and see how you can combine those goals with work already in flight.
Finally, never underestimate how many times and how many ways something needs to be said before it sinks in. Communication in a large organization is hard. In my experience, most people need to hear something at least three times before it really sinks in. You’re going to tell your own senior management and leadership team. You’ll hold an all hands meeting. You may need to send some email detailing the changes as well. A little bit of communication planning can go a long way in such situations. Try to anticipate the questions you might get and prepare answers for those questions. Be as clear as possible about the projects or structure to be changed, so there’s little room for confusion. And don’t forget to sell this change as a good thing!
You’ll also need to repeat information when you’re communicating up. When you want your boss to act on something, expect that you’ll need to tell him the same thing three times before he actually listens. The first two times, the issue may still resolve itself, but the third time, it’s a sign that something bigger needs to happen. You may be surprised to find that you start acting the same way toward your team. Many problems will get raised to you and then resolved on their own, so you may decide you need a degree of sustained struggle from your team before it’s time to step in. I’m not recommending that you adopt the “three-times rule” as a policy, but it does tend to happen, whether you plan for it or not.
The larger the organization, the harder it’ll be to change priorities quickly. If you’re working for a growing startup with a founder CEO, this slowness will frustrate him. The best thing you can do to manage this situation is to proactively keep the CEO informed about what’s happening and why. Do your best to show that you understand his priorities and tell him about the concrete steps you’re taking to meet those priorities.