Setting Priorities For An Organization

Leaders of organizations are constantly facing the challenge of juggling priorities. Since most organizations do not train their leaders via a professionally designed and presented training program, many leaders are ill-prepared to use the concept of prioritization in conducting their leadership responsibilities.

The first thing that organizations need to do on a fairly regular basis is examine and reexamine their missions and Mission Statements, to assure that these missions are still relevant to the organization as it has evolved. After doing that analysis, and weighing all the ramifications of either keeping the Mission Statement static or altering it to adapt to changing times, leaders must set forth a set of priorities top adhere to during their tenure in office. These priorities should include short-term,intermediate-term, and long-term programs, objectives and goals, and a financial and time analysis of each of these. Once this analysis has been performed, leaders need to rate each program, project and event, in terms of both importance, perspective and relevance.

In my three decades of working with not-for-profits and other organizations, I have unfortunately observed that prioritizing tends to be one of the most overlooked items of leadership. The vast majority of untrained leaders tend to lead either based on some emotional attachment to an idea, a poorly conceived or understood notion, or as crisis managers. While every organization faces a "crunch time" which may or may not be perceived as a crisis, well trained leaders pre-plan for contingencies, and tend to be better able to cope when some difficult event occurs. However, when leaders do not properly use priority leadership as a core concept, very often ill-prepared leaders then spend too much time on non-priority items, and inadequate time on important ones. Using priority management techniques, leaders are far more capable of avoiding getting bogged down in minutia, and continue to see and understand the big picture.