How to Direct Your Team: Planning, Prioritizing, and Coordinating

Directing work is one of the four major activities that will consume your leadership capital. Directing work involves planning, prioritizing, and coordinating.

There are four major activities that will consume your leadership capital. They’re directing work, doing work, delivering work and developing people. Let’s look at directing activities, and what doing them right or wrong looks like. The three activities, in terms of directing, are planning, where you’re translating your vision into team and individual goals, prioritizing, where you’re turning individual goals into team priorities, and coordinating, using your position to provide a broader perspective to the members of your team.

Planning

In terms of planning, it should be about team goals, and reviewing those goals. You should be approving the team members goals when they bring them to you. It shouldn’t be about driving individual tactics, drafting their goals for them, or renegotiating those goals on a regular basis.

Prioritizing

Prioritizing is done at the team level. You should be deciding what the top priorities are, and what the things are that you’re not going to work on. Prioritization should be done routinely. It’s not a one-off activity. Prioritizing should not be done at the individual level. That’s up to your team members. You shouldn’t be renegotiating priorities on a regular basis, and you shouldn’t have to re-do your priorities all the time.

Coordinating

Coordinating is about connecting your team members with people outside your organization. This should be for first-time connections and you should play the role of the referrer in those situations. Coordinating is not about relationship management. That’s up to your team members. Coordinating shouldn’t be repetitive. You should make the connection once, and be able to step back. And you definitely should not be the referee in these relationships. Leave it up to your team member to work effectively with the people you introduce them to. Focus your directing time on higher level activities versus individual tactics.

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