Everything Is Priority One

Shifting priorities is awful practice. Too many priorities is just as bad. Most new leaders know this. Most new leaders do it anyway, usually with good intentions, because every problem they see looks like it deserves to be on the list.

Greg McKeown points out something funny in Essentialism: when the word “priority” came into English in the 1400s, it was singular.¹ It meant the very first thing. It stayed singular for centuries. Only in the last hundred years or so did we start saying “priorities.” We changed the word without changing reality. You can still only put one thing first.

Pick a few, and stick with them

When you step into a position, it’s important to figure out what the focus points are. Then pick your top few, and set your unit on the path to accomplish them.

The authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution spent years watching teams try to execute goals on top of their day jobs.² Their pattern: teams that focused on two or three goals tended to hit them. Teams with four to ten goals usually hit one or two. Teams with more than that lost focus entirely. That’s consulting experience, not a controlled study, but anyone who’s worked in a squadron with a 15-item priority list knows it’s true.

They also have a name for the day job: the whirlwind. In contracting, the whirlwind is the mission. Requirements keep coming, mods keep coming, the fiscal year keeps ending. Your priorities don’t replace that. They sit on top of it. Every priority you add is competing with the work your people already can’t put down.

When priorities shift

Sometimes priorities have to change. Maybe the squadron gets hit with a major inspection and all of a sudden everything is about the inspection. That sucks. It’s also okay. Your people will understand, because they can see the reason.

But if you’ve shifted 20 priorities over the prior six months and all of a sudden a new one comes in, you’ve just screwed everyone. Because now your other priorities are less of a priority, and that doesn’t make any sense, because maybe they shouldn’t have been that important in the first place. Every reshuffle teaches your people something: whatever the boss said this week will change next week, so why commit to it?

It costs more than it looks like, too. Sophie Leroy studied what happens when people switch from one task to another before finishing the first. Part of their attention stays stuck on the old task, and their performance on the new one suffers.³ She calls it attention residue. Now picture that at squadron scale. Every time you reprioritize, your whole unit is half thinking about the thing you just told them to drop.

Hand them out to the right people

Let’s say you’re a commander. It’s okay to have a lot of priorities. You just need to make sure they’re dished out to the right people.

Your priority for your First Sergeant may be discipline. Your priority for your Senior Enlisted Leader is taking care of the enlisted. Your priority for your construction flight should probably simply be “do construction contracts.” Those are fine.

What I don’t support is getting everyone into a room and telling everyone everybody’s priorities. It’s not necessary, and it backfires. People listen to the things you say that were meant for someone else, and they take ownership of them without you realizing it. Now your contracting officer is worried about the First Sergeant’s discipline problem, and nobody told them it wasn’t theirs.

There’s research on why that matters. Unclear roles, where people aren’t sure what’s theirs and what’s somebody else’s, are among the work stressors most strongly tied to worse performance. A meta-analysis of 169 samples and more than 35,000 employees found role ambiguity was one of the two stressors most strongly linked to lower job performance.⁴ Telling everyone everything feels transparent. What it actually creates is ambiguity.

Your people have priorities too

You’re not the only one in the building with priorities.

Your flight chief probably has a few key projects they’ve been eyeballing for issues. Those will quickly become your priority once they start failing. And they’ll start failing if you re-prioritize your flight chief’s priorities out from under them.

Your construction flight chief’s priorities are important to you, trust me. So are your services flight chief’s. And your commodities flight chief’s. Hell, your lowest airman has priorities. So do their supervisors. See what I’m getting at? Every level of your organization is already juggling its own list. When you drop a new priority from the top, it lands on every one of those lists at once.

The higher you go, the broader they get

I’d argue the higher you are on the food chain, the fewer and broader your priorities should be. Get more specific than that and you’re micromanaging.

The military already knows this. It’s the whole idea behind commander’s intent: the boss says what needs to happen and why, and the people closest to the work figure out how. David Marquet took it further on the USS Santa Fe, a submarine that was ranked last in the fleet when he took command.⁵ He stopped giving orders and started giving control. His crew told him what they intended to do, and he told them his intent. He built enough clarity and competence underneath that his people could set their own priorities in line with his. The Santa Fe went from worst to first.

You can’t do that if your priorities are a list of specific tasks. You can if your priorities are broad enough for your people to see themselves in them.

How to actually do it

It’s a tough thing to advise on. But it’s an easier line to walk if you treat your co-leaders as contributors to the organization, not executors of your list.

1. Establish your priorities. You are the leader. Don’t outsource this.
2. Know your boss’s priorities. Yours should line up with theirs, not compete with them.
3. Ask your team what their priorities are. Then actually incorporate them. A flight chief who sees their own priority inside yours will carry it without being asked.
4. Keep them few and broad. The higher you are, the fewer and broader.
5. Give them to the right people. The First Sergeant gets the First Sergeant’s. Nobody needs everyone’s.
6. Only get specific when something’s broken. A direct priority on a specific problem is fine. That’s fixing an issue, not micromanaging.
7. When something new comes in, say what it replaces. If the answer is “nothing,” you didn’t add a priority. You just added work. More on that in The New Rule After One Mistake.

Pick it, and say it the same way every time

The most useful thing you can give your people is a short list that doesn’t move. Say it in week one. Say it the same way in month six. When something truly has to change, tell them why, and tell them what comes off the list to make room.

Your people can handle hard priorities. What wears them down is priorities that keep changing.