The Importance and Difficulty of Priorities

As your company gets to be a medium sized company, communication becomes exponentially more difficult and vision becomes exponentially harder spread. When you are smaller and only have a small handful of people working with you, it is easy to keep everyone focused on the same goals and for everyone to know what is going on in every part of the company. In fact if one department is running a bit behind, everyone is able to jump in to help them out.

As you get larger, departments become more defined, responsibilities more restricted and goals more divided. The daily goals of the graphics department may seem to be completely different than the goals of production, the goals of customer service or the goals of the software development team. This is, of course, not the case. The company as a whole has a united goal — to accomplish it’s purpose. This may be making money or some other more altruistic goal, but the board or the owners should be able to tell you what that goal is. The business then has certain milestone goals that will, if done successfully, lead the company down the best path to accomplish those goals. It’s these broader goals and even the milestone goals that tend to get lost as the company grows.

We’ve decided to really begin pushing our company wide goals across all departments and to make it simple we limited it to the top 5 milestone goals that we’d be pushing everyone to focus on for the given week or two week period — more of a company wide task list. This may seem like too few for a company with 75+ employees, but I think that if you really examine the ideas and goals that will be successful for your company, 5 at any one time is plenty.

Despite what seemed like constant repetition in all of my meetings and a company wide email enumerating all 5 milestone goals for the week, almost no one had the same answer when I walked around this afternoon and asked people to name me all 5. I even offered up $10 dollars so that it would seem more like a challenge and less like a “are you doing your job?” type inquisition.

Getting everyone on the same page is well worth it so that the companies resources are being used in the most direct and efficient way possible. It’s not enough for senior level management to understand where the company is going and in what priority; everyone throughout the company should know so that they can be doing their part to move toward accomplishing the company’s goals.

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