Want to build a great work culture? Then learn to prioritize the right things, says entrepreneur

When setting priorities, there’s more within our control as individual leaders and employees than we often admit. Yet, employees are limited if companies don’t adopt organizational systems, practices, and cultures that value the importance of prioritizing.

Teams and employees that can combine individual habits with organization-wide processes and behaviors will be able to spend more time on the most important work, which can translate into a competitive advantage.

Here are four routes companies can pursue to help them prioritize better, leaving old habits behind.

It can be counterintuitive to consider that for a company to grow and achieve more than it has in the past, it might need to focus on fewer things. Yet, many companies and teams continue to take on more until they burnout, fail, or get into a rut. It’s often easier for employees to say yes to something exciting than to say no in an effort to prioritize important work.

I fell into this trap as the founder and CEO of Uncharted several times when doing our annual strategic planning. My eyes were bigger than my stomach, and I overestimated the number of activities that were truly important. To keep up, our team would have to sprint to do it all, often leading to burnout and confusion about how all these different priorities connected. Over the years, we involved more people from across the company in the strategic planning process, allowing diverse voices to weigh in, challenge leadership’s thinking, and raise the bar for our top commitments.

Teams and individuals can interrupt these tendencies by embracing the power of pushback, or the behavior of teams when they challenge each other, debate approaches, and believe that it is safe and productive to disagree on the best way forward. I like the framing of pushback (as opposed to just feedback) because it sets the expectation and the permission for people to disagree and debate.

Define reality and understand trade-offs: Raise your team’s awareness of their own time and resources. Set aside time in big decision-making meetings to consider trade-offs.

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Create the space for pushback: Your team’s intelligence and wisdom are only as good as the space that’s created to invite them. Yet, most teams don’t schedule time for debate, pushback, and discussion around big, strategic decisions.

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Create psychological safety: When pushback is normalized, disagreement and debate become valuable ingredients in decision-making, as a team and individually.

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Explain how decisions were made: Companies should focus on transparent, frequent communication to develop a culture where debate and pushback are normalized. When teams view pushback as a tool to move important things forward, they’ll feel more comfortable contributing in the future.

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Many employees struggle with being held accountable for multiple metrics while simultaneously being told to get better at prioritizing. Will they be penalized for deprioritizing some of their work? Can they leave work undone without being fired?

Before shifting to a 4-day workweek at Uncharted, I often heard similar concerns from our team. So, we started by getting better at deprioritizing. The pushback techniques above helped move our ideas forward while creating the capacity for new, valuable work. But, we know what gets measured gets managed.

To support a culture of prioritization, a company needs to define, track, and report on performance metrics that matter. While increased accountability may be on our minds when we talk about metrics, let’s not miss the motivating factors. Instead, reward the behavior of prioritizing.

Consider shifting performance indicators to measure the number of projects or activities someone deprioritized, and publicly recognize those employees who demonstrate these skills. In addition, you might consider expanding promotion criteria to reward an individual’s proven ability to focus on the most important work.

The vocabulary in an organization is full of clues about what the organization values. While companies tout a feedback culture, it’s often filled with phrases like “you’re crushing it,” or “they always go the extra mile,” or “they worked nonstop through the weekend to get it done.” These compliments praise long hours, over-committing, and hustle culture as behaviors to be celebrated and rewarded.

Every organization already has a shared vocabulary of common words, phrases, and themes. In that case, we might as well own the vocabulary and intentionally expand it to reinforce the new behaviors we want.

When I moved my company to a 4-day workweek, we all read Essentialism by Greg McKeown, a book that focuses on the disciplined pursuit of less. McKeown challenges his readers to distinguish essential work. As we piloted the 4-day workweek, the words “essential” and “non-essential” became part of our everyday vocabulary, and they often sparked rich conversations around our priorities.

Company values are most powerful when they’re part of everyday conversation. Can you tie principles of prioritizing to one of your company values? For example, one of our values at Uncharted is “take the long view,” which is referenced when we struggle to balance urgent and short-term work. When we leverage this value, it recenters us and puts things in perspective, allowing a more sober-minded consideration of what’s truly important.

Leaders need to model vocabulary, both in using it and celebrating its use across the team. Publicly highlighting those who embody the values through everyday actions is a great option. For example, some companies use large group meetings and town halls, while others leverage technology by using employee recognition software.

The art of prioritizing is an ongoing practice that requires nurturing. The workplace offers many opportunities to practice the art of prioritizing. Still, to see your company’s practice forward, the organization must build in time to reflect on past decisions, identify the lessons, and determine how they’ll do it differently next time.

For reflection to happen at the company level, it must occur at the team level. As the founder and CEO of Uncharted, I often moved too quickly. Before I had a chance to reflect on how that strategic planning process led to 12 different priorities, I lept to the next thing. Or, positively, how a recent decision was informed by honest dialogue and helpful pushback.

Here are three steps to increase company and team reflection:

1. As individuals, then as a team, carve out time to briefly reflect on major decisions. It can feel uncomfortable to revisit mistakes or past decisions you regret (this has happened to me a few times). Still, I’ve found it therapeutic to revisit the factors and the mindsets involved in big decisions. What worked? What didn’t? What will we do differently next time?

2. Find the individuals and teams who lead the way on healthy prioritization. Why are they successful? What behaviors do they exhibit? What support or resources do they leverage? How can we replicate this elsewhere in the company?

3. As an executive team, discuss how and when you have struggled to prioritize in the last quarter. Client demands, a fast pace, unclear metrics? How might we restructure our work, reset our relationships, and redefine our metrics to get around those barriers? Sometimes the best way to get better at something is to identify the barriers that stand in our way.