Hi Nie!

This week's Leadership Dispatch is about priorities. One responsibility of a leader is to help the team focus on what matters, which requires leadership discipline.

​Leadership Dispatch: Choose your battles​

I've gotten some great feedback on the first few Leadership Dispatch principles—thank you to those who've reached out! I would love to know if these are useful to you, and if you've been able to apply any of the principles yet. Let me know what you think!

All the best

Josh

Choose your battles

Fight for things that matter and defer on things that don’t.

If you spend a lot of your time and energy arguing for things that aren’t meaningful, you’ll restrict your own bandwidth to do things that matter and you will frustrate your team and sap their energy on things that don’t matter.

When everything is a top concern, then nothing is a top concern. Your team will eventually figure out that you fight for every single thing regardless of how important it actually is, and they’ll just return to prioritizing on their own.

There are almost certainly things that do matter more than others and you have your own preference stack. Obfuscating your preferences behind a dogged determination to make everything top priority will force your team to create their own preference stack which will be different than yours, leading to misalignment and cascading negative consequences.

This can feel uncomfortable for control-freak types, but you just have to feel that discomfort in exchange for a higher-functioning organization.

Want to share this with someone? Here's a direct link: Leadership Dispatch: Choose your battles​