Priorities should be your firm's most important goals for success

In business, we tend to overuse certain words. "Priority" is definitely one of them and in doing so we undermine its significance. "Urgent" is another one.

Ever noticed how in the fast-paced business world of the UAE everything seems to be urgent? We then find ourselves having to prioritise the various degrees of urgency.

The dictionary describes priority as "precedence, especially established by order of importance or urgency". Business priorities should be exactly that: an overarching checklist of the most important milestones your company needs to achieve to ensure success.

Three to five priorities

As a business strategy consultant, I recommend a maximum of three to five strategic priorities in a business so that you can harness the collective power of your team. Whether you employ 10 or 1,000 staff, ensuring everyone is working towards common goals is the key.

Many businesses struggle to clearly define what their annual priorities should be. They start with the best intentions, perhaps at a leadership team offsite trying to create a roadmap for what needs to be done over the next 12 months.

Good intentions and enthusiasm during this session often leads to everybody in the team sharing five to eight priorities. That doesn't sound too bad, but consider for a moment that the average senior team comprises seven managers — you now have not less than 35 "priorities" for the year.

The other common mistake is that each department has their own set of priorities, which automatically reinforces a silo mentality and inhibits team alignment.

Align the whole team

While this is easier said than done, it is possible to get a handful of priorities that the whole team is aligned to and agrees on. They need to be high level, specific and achieve significant results once completed.

They also need to be strategic, not operational priorities. This is the biggest challenge I find for most businesses that I work with. Being able to step out of the day-to-day running of the business and see what needs to be achieved strategically for growth.

Typically, strategic objectives will have clearer measures and are linked to delivering your brand promise.

Let's take, for example, the hospitality industry. Hotels in the Middle East region and all over the world are great at measuring performance with lots of industry standard metrics.

This gives them a huge advantage in deciding what to create as their priorities. One of the areas they want to improve is the perception of ‘speed of service'.

Speed of service

They crunch the data and find that their check-in and check-out experience yields the worst results. Sure, they could ask front office to speed up check-in, but this would become an operational priority for the manager's day-to-day work. Looking beyond the front office, consider the various customer touch points that could positively impact the perception of speed of service.

Now we have four departments working together with clear recognition that improving their service will have a positive impact on the customer — it can be a strategic priority.

The writer is the CEO of biz-group, a corporate training and business strategy group.