How, What and Why

How a business prioritizes, what it decides and why determines its culture more than any slogan or mantra could possibly hope to. More than an overarching strategy or slide in a pitch deck — the day to day actions define the business because it’s these priorities tell employees, customers, partners and investors what the company values. 

In one of his most famous quotes (of many famous quotes), Peter Drucker proclaimed “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Drucker had broad definitions of culture but he saw it as a mix of organization values and behaviors consistent with stated strategic objectives that, in the best scenario, has the power to create a socially binding to guide decisions throughout the organization. 

What a company prioritizes becomes what it values. How it deploys its human capital, where the CEO and senior management focus will signal to employees what is valued and therefore where their time should be spent. 

Priorities map to broader strategic goals and act as the tangible actions the business needs to execute to achieve those goals. They also should be broad enough to be used as “guiding hands” for employees faced with day-to-day decisions. Am I spending my time consistent with our priorities? Is my output helping us reach our goals. 

Its leaderships responsibility to set, communicate, enforce and respect the prioritizes explicitly designated. This is a day-to-day process that must be executed frequently. This is not to say that priorities can not be adapted as needed — they’re a means to serve the company’s larger objectives and they flow down from objectives. 

Priorities is an area where leadership takes the biggest role. Employees expect these (as well as strategy objectives) to come from the senior team and will struggle in a vacuum without clear direction. Any work requiring risk-taking, any cross-functional collaborations will either not be undertaken or will struggle to succeed without clear direction derived from priorities. 

If your strategic objective is to get from Point A to Point B, how you traverse the path represents your priorities. These are the concrete actions that make up your strategic plan and will be seen by employees how you’ve broken down the “problem” into actionable steps. It’s a tangible output of the company’s collective thinking and will set a precedent on how to approach future goals. It will also signal to employees how they should break down the smaller pieces in front of them. 

As an extreme example, if a company sets priorities that ignore regulations or skirt compliance, you can be sure that will set the tone for employees to do the same in their day-to-day dealings.