Set Priorities or Perish

It’s looking like our dear little start-up is going to survive.  According to the latest AP reports (that would be Anonymous Perceptions, not the other), all that’s left is for the lawyers to nod and the checks to clear.  Which would be a relief to my family and many others…

I’ve taken advantage of our hiatus by catching up on all the “nice-to-dos” that I did not have time to complete when I was playing all the parts on Sgt. Pepper’s at the same time.  We hope you will enjoy the show.  I feel a little guilty about it, but it looks like things will ramp up to 11 again soon.

Those of us who survived the purge sat down and reviewed all the tasks necessary to get the plant back up and running.  Towards the end of the bogsat we discussed the changes we thought we needed to make to ensure things go more smoothly than before.  We’d like to take you home with us; we’d love to take you home.  The longer it went, the madder I got.

If you have ever read back through the posts on the blog you may come across an entry written back when I worked at the gulag for one of the five bosses I had in the space of about 30 months.  This was the young one who I liked at first until I realized that he would do anything to move up the chain.  That anything would include driving over his subordinates in a concrete mixer truck and then demanding to know why they left faceprints in his new sidewalk.

My peeve with him, and the reason for his ultimate failure, was that he refused to set priorities.  He wanted everything now.  Now I don’t mind a little multitasking, despite the fact that multitasking actually adds time to every task.  Randomness is a good thing now and then.  But if a boss wants everything now, now! NOW! there is absolutely no way his/her underlings can succeed.  I know why he did it – he probably felt like the little Dutch boy and the way the gulag did business it didn’t take long to run out of fingers.  For him to get to VP he had to plug all the holes quickly, but before long we all had all our fingers in and we were all stuck.  Then he gave us lousy performance reviews because we were all stuck.

His logic (if you could call it that) was that if he gave us priorities then we would only work on the first priority and not get to anything else.  Well…duh.  That’s why you choose them.  It took me far too long to figure out that he was batsh_t crazy.

The moral to this is that as a manager you need to figure out what is most important to the org and set your folks to work to make it happen.  I mean, hell, everybody has the written laundry list of “goals” and the unwritten laundry list of thou shalts, so finding grist for the mill is easy.  Getting grain out of this is admittedly difficult, because your manager (like the d-bag former boss above) doesn’t use the brains that God gave him/her.  They know all this stuff; they really do.  If they say they haven’t learned it in b-school, hard knocks, some travelling symposium, anything, then they are lying or stupid or both.  In these cases it is up to you to figure it out and manage up (something I don’t do particularly well, honestly) and tell them what you’re going to do and why you are going to do it.  It isn’t easy, but you’ve got to fill the chasm because if you don’t your body will join those at the bottom of it.

I don’t really want to stop the show, but I thought you might like to know…  So based on the extended sidebar you probably figured out that the reason I got madder and madder at the meeting is because I perceived a distinct unwillingness among those at the table to raise any issue above any other.  Granted there are more things to do than cat hairs stuck to my sweater (get off me you idiot feline!), but we all knows the goals of the org.  Yes, it is a start-up and the goals change weekly, but the wind generally blows out of the west and we all know it. 

In any exercise such as this, there are things you must have and things you’d like to have.  A few of the musts might be mustier, and those are your priorities.  In other words, some of the musts might have constraints (often of the time variety) that lead you to focus on them first.  Then you knock out the remainder.  The like-to-haves are a little tougher, but the same process applies, only this time you have to weigh the want versus the corresponding available resources (money, people, time) and do some sort of value analysis to see if you really want it or not.  There are a million ways to do this – I prefer a Kepner-Tregoe approach because it’s simple yet effective.  (Beware of the gifts irrational people bring to a rational discussion though.  Look!  A squirrel!)

Before I got too mad and allowed Mt. Vesuvius to blow, I gave them the patented “musts and likes” speech along the lines of the preceding paragraph.  Although there was some reluctance to go along, eventually all agreed that we needed to list out the various initiatives and decide where they rank.  It took work and thought, but we have the beginnings of a much better plan.

I’m happy, because I know what I need to do first and what I can leave off my plate for now.  Let me introduce to you, the one and only Billy Shears, with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…