The Top 5

By Michael Tessler, Managing Partner

At any time, it’s critical to align your team, but during these challenging times it is even more important.

One method that I have used for years is something I call the Top 5. The idea is to pick from all the possible strategic priorities and choose your Top 5. The focus is on what you want to accomplish and not focus on how. These priorities can be fairly broad in scope. For example, a new product, a product expansion, new geography, or even a plan for disruptive pricing,

Why is this exercise important?

• It allows the whole organization to make thousands of micro-decisions against the company’s top priorities.
• It empowers your team to make these decisions without consistently checking with the leadership team.

Why pick 5? Well, after lots of trial and error, five is the perfect number of strategic priorities. Choosing five forces the team to stick to the highest priority items and to be realistic about what they can accomplish. Beware! Guard against those that want to create sub priorities like 1A, 1B, etc. You know who you are!

The following steps we used for 10+ years at BroadSoft proved to be successful. To give some context, we first gathered the extended leadership team for 2–3 days offsite annually. This was no relaxing getaway, but this was important group work.

Team members needed to come prepared and to complete any pre-work. We also built time for members to take care of day to day business, but when we were in session — all phones and laptops were turned off.

Let’s look take a look at the major steps:

Step 1: Understand The Environment

This step takes the most time and is an opportunity for the team to understand the business dynamics by exploring our financial results, the competition, customer trends and capital markets. We accomplished this by allowing participants to present their ideas, followed by discussion and debates. The goal of step one is to have a solid foundation of understanding among the team.

Step 2: Brainstorm The Priorities

The last day of the offsite was the most crucial session for setting and aligning the team for the next year. Each participant is given a stack of sticky notes and tasked with writing down all their ideas for priorities. It encourages everyone to generate as many ideas that they feel are important.

Step 3: The Team Shares Their Priorities

Each participant stands at the front of the room and presents their priorities by explaining it in a few words and maybe also sharing why they think it’s essential. They stick their notes on the wall as they present. Once everyone has shared, you will have a wall full of notes with priorities.

Step 4: The Silent Sorting

This step is the fun part. Everyone stands in front of the wall of stickers and begins to group them into common themes. The key is that this is done without talking. Some pushing and shoving are encouraged! Luckily in all the years doing this, we never had any fights break out.

You should end up with the magic number of 7 themes plus or minus 1.

Step 5: Ranking The Categories

Once you have your groupings completed, you give each participant a set of stickers based on the size of the group and the number of groupings (this formula can be found on the internet). Use the stickers to vote on the importance of each concept. You can distribute your votes any way you want. In the end, your groupings are ranked.

Step 6: The Top 5 Emerges

The facilitator then reads and summarizes the Top 5. Allow your participants to comment on the top 5 but do not try and wordsmith the top 5 statements. Assign this to a small working group of 3, usually from different groups in the organization. To not lose momentum, this small group should come back in 24–48 hours with the final Top 5 strategic priorities for the organization.

How should you use the Top 5? Share them with the board. We would expect leaders to cascade them within their organizations and build their annual operating plans with these priorities in mind. We would share the Top 5 at our quarterly all-hands meetings and communicate our progress against these priorities.

Don’t be surprised if some of your Top 5 priorities recur year after year. That just means that these are long term priorities and hard to achieve. As the organization grows, the priorities will shift to include internal initiatives. That’s expected.

At BroadSoft, this was an effective method to align the team year after year. Clearly, in this virtual world, leaders will have to adapt our approach. Share with us how you align your teams in the age of virtual teams.