“If we could only do one thing, what would it be?” I was asked this question by one of our senior leaders (I believe it came from Lencioni’s “5 Dysfunctions of a Team”), and it triggered a lot of thought and discussion. It’s a great question for every CEO. It makes you think about what is most important right now, and what we are currently trading off against it. What is our top priority and what are we working on that may be detracting from that priority.
About the same time, an interviewer asked me for a lesson I learned over the years that has helped me as a CEO. My answer was the need to figure out the vision and the ultimate goal, and never lose sight of it or get distracted by the ‘tyranny of the urgent.’ Something is always going to demand immediate action, and while it is important to deal with the urgency, the key is to stay on course for the ultimate goal.
Each area of the business has a different ‘urgency horizon.‘ In sales, urgency is driven by the next deal or the quarterly target. Competitive challenges immediately escalate to urgent. For marketing, the horizon is a little longer, and for product and engineering it is even a little longer. The cycle-time for each group to effect change is different, so their urgency horizon is different. In responding to the interviewer, I went on to say that I learned that a CEO has to have a measured response to what is presented as urgent. We need to figure out when to act as a shock absorber to buffer the urgency, or an amplifier to spur immediate action.
The tyranny of the urgent and the ‘one thing’ question led me to thinking about how they shape our progress and direction toward our goals. Most companies are about to complete their first fiscal quarter. Some things are probably going well, and some not so much. CEOs and boards of directors are thinking about where they are on their plan for the year, and what they need to course correct. For many leaders, the focus will be on bookings and revenue, or profits and cash, and leaders will be looking for pivots and actions to ensure the business is on track for the remainder of the year.
Businesses are complex organisms, and course corrections are never easy. We may have to weigh bookings against customer satisfaction, or investing in innovation against profitability, or a host of other tradeoffs. We also have to balance near-term urgency against staying true to our longer-term vision and goals.
The hardest tradeoff for me was balancing customer satisfaction against anything else — bookings, profits, employees, innovation, investors, etc. A business will not survive very long (or at all), if the customers are unhappy. Customer goodwill affords us a tiny bit of room to address other urgent needs, but that only goes so far. If there is a choice of what to do next, and we can only do one thing, then how do we prioritize which urgency to address?
Here is a thought exercise: imagine you promised your customers you would deliver a high-demand feature in September, but your innovative team has come up with an idea to alternatively apply resources to complete a new premium feature that you can sell and grow your bookings. You are off of your bookings plan, and the new premium feature could save the year. Your choices are: fulfill the customer promise in September and raise customer satisfaction but miss bookings targets, or put the resources on the premium feature to sell in September and miss the customer promise but maybe make your bookings target. You could try to do both, but will likely slip both beyond the end of the year. In the land of ‘one thing,’ do you opt to finish the premium feature and drive bookings, or do you stay true to your customer commitment? The question comes down to a choice between bookings and customer satisfaction.
The ‘one thing’ question forces a priorities decision. It brings clarity, and avoids the muddled decision of trying to do both options and likely failing on both. Making hard decisions well is a key strength leaders need to develop, and the ‘one thing’ test helps to build that muscle.
So, how does that relate to the second conversation about being calm and staying the course and having a measured approach to urgency? The key is in the word ‘measured.’ A measured approach to urgency says we don’t drop everything and just run around chasing the latest emergency. A measured response may mean finding a way to act on customer commitments that might create a new premium offering to sell to others (two birds, one stone). A measured response is recognizing when a short-term focus will create a long-term disaster, and not making a foolish decision intentionally. We should never lose sight of what great looks like as we acknowledge the present urgencies. We need to balance the mix of urgency horizons across the various functions of our business. Our role is to find the path between acting as a shock absorber to dampen the perceived urgency, or acting as an amplifier to spur the company into action. Keeping the long-term north star in focus, and asking the ‘one-thing’ question will often illuminate the right choice.