Chief Concerns: 5 Steps for Managing Priorities

You’ve likely had someone tell you, “Don’t worry about the things you can’t control.” This is a nice thought, but let’s face it, we worry about everything. Our challenge is finding the balance between obsessiveness and productivity, making sure we are getting all of the RIGHT things done.

Weighing what matters

While teaching a class recently, a chief officer told me he was “in the midst of a yearlong failure.” His chief had chosen a course of action that this officer had cautioned against, something that had been tried over and over with the same historic result—failure. Now this chief officer was seemingly experiencing an exercise in insanity. 

At some point in your career, you’ll be at these crossroads, either throwing up your hands and turning left or right, or digging in and forging ahead. Success in navigating these crossroads resides more in the wisdom you will gain over the years than in the knowledge you have attained. Think of wisdom as “important” and knowledge as “urgent,” a concept we’ll circle back to in a minute.

If I had thrown in the towel every time one of these crossroads came along, I’d own stock in the towel company. Every chief runs their organizations as best they know—some more aggressively than others—but all under the watchful eye of the elected officials and/or public whom we serve. To those on the outside, EVERYTHING we do is a priority to them. It is easy to feel or become overwhelmed when everything is a priority.

Prioritizing what matters

With all this in mind, let’s talk about prioritizing tasks and controlling what we can. There are five basic steps to help bring calm to the chaos of priorities. This is essentially a mini-strategic plan for getting things done.

Step 1: Make a list

Create a list of bullet points to ensure that you remember all the pertinent things you’re trying to address. To be successful, think in smaller increments (narrower objectives) for what you can complete today. Leave anything you can’t complete today OFF of the today list; don’t focus on it at all. You can arrange this daily, weekly, monthly, annually or in any increment that makes sense for your work patterns; however, smaller bites are more realistic and achievable. Clearly, the immediately impactful items will distill to a daily list. How many things will you realistically be able to complete during that day? Five, 10, 20? Only time will tell, but I submit that you should begin with no more than five on your daily list, and endeavor to complete all five, every day.

There are many facets pulling at a fire department and at the chief. You will likely need to manage two or three lists. For me, those lists were loosely organized into daily, budget cycle and legislative cycle. The most fluid of those lists is the daily. Unfortunately, there are items that won’t get done “today,” and end up on the “today” list, tomorrow.

Step 2: Assess the value of the priority and determine to whom it will be assigned

Determining “what’s first” can be difficult. We’re not talking about daily service demand here. It should go without saying that emergency service is ALWAYS our number one priority. Recognizing that emergency service requests will impact your ability to address everything on your daily list, what is the next #1 priority on your list? Is this something you personally need to complete or can it be delegated to someone else? Is there a penalty or consequence for not completing a specific task today? Has something occurred in the budget or legislative lists that makes an item on the daily list irrelevant or impossible to achieve?

This is where you really need to be honest and flexible. You can’t do it all alone, and you can’t do it all today. This is also likely where you’ll have the most impact assessing whether you’ll enter “the midst of failure.” I want to reiterate here that emergency service IS our number one priority, and that your performance on emergency responses will have lasting collateral impacts on your legislative and budget lists. Love or hate politics, service delivery and daily task completion is where you’ll make or break the connections between service, politics and budget.

Recognizing there is no cookie-cutter approach to prioritization, it is critical to understand the difference between what’s important versus what’s urgent (remember our discussion of wisdom vs. knowledge). For purposes of this discussion, what’s “important” relates to your work, and what’s “urgent” relates to everything/everyone else. What’s important is important, whether it’s urgent or not. What’s urgent may or may not be important—a distinction you will have to learn to make. Clearly, an urgent personal need (family member in hospital, your house of fire, etc.) will take precedence over everything else at that moment. 

Referring to your lists, what’s important should take your attention first and foremost, while the urgencies get done in due time. Something that is urgent AND important is likely the first thing you’re doing today. Using President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s fashion of sorting tasks (as captured by author Steve Covey in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”) may help you prioritize your list:

Step 3: Keep the list visible and up to date

How many times have you heard me or others talk about the strategic plan on the shelf—the one they had to blow the dust off? Same concept here: It does you no good if you make the list then abandon it in a desk drawer or in some password-protected environment where you never seem to remember the password. When you complete a task, cross it off the list. Not only does crossing items off the list help keep everything in order as you continue to work through the remaining items, but it also provides a psychological boost. 

Step 4: Stay focused, steady and on course

It’s easy to become distracted and overwhelmed by the nature of our daily activities or bamboozled by the latest/greatest thing thrown in front of us. You’re the chief. Keep the big picture in mind and don’t allow those momentary distractions to become your newest reality. Stick to the list.

Step 5: Reevaluate the lists daily

There are things that happen every day that impact all three lists (daily, budget, legislative). In some senses, you DO have to be a professional juggler, prepared to keep all three lists up in the air at certain points of time. I became a proficient list-juggler as chief, which led to many of our successes. It was not unheard of that I was convincing a politician, the public or the budget folks that we were on the right track and that a particular topic/investment was for the greater good. Likewise, that a particular proposal submitted from one direction or the other could be detrimental to the greater good. “Fluidity” is the word of the day in reevaluating your list. Be ready for anything.

There are many things you will tackle as chief. Undoubtedly, some of those things were tried by “the last guy or gal.” Just because they were tried by the last chief should not automatically doom them to being “in the midst of failure.” However, without a political, fiscal or legislative change, it is plausible to understand how those who have been in the trenches for a long time will perceive another attempt at doing XYZ as a mistake of significant magnitude. Chiefs should endeavor to avoid those perceptions, recognizing that NOT all perceptions are reality to the whole, and that some directions and outcomes will be out of their and/or your control. Just because it not within your control, however, does NOT mean you don’t have to worry about it. Similarly, just because it’s the shiniest object doesn’t mean we have to obsess over it!

Focus your attention

Your mission as chief is to serve your communities, your department, your elected officials and, oh yeah, yourself and your family. Take your people where they NEED to be. You’ve heard me say before that where they NEED to be may not be where they WANT to be. Running a fire/EMS department takes a tremendous toll on an individual. You didn’t come here to win friends; you should have come here to serve, to influence people and to make a difference in our fire/EMS communities at large. 

There’s always another shiny object coming around the corner. Focus your attention, know your boundaries, and follow your moral compass. There is no Holy Grail to surviving the work, but using the five steps I outlined here will help focus your attention and energies to complete the tasks at hand.

I suspect that we have all experienced that feeling of being in the midst of a yearlong failure. Hopefully those failures turn into productivity and advancements as we strive to do the right things, at the right times, for the right reasons every day.