Every leader knows the feeling: cash flow, customer service, employee engagement, production, quality, communication. At any given moment, multiple priorities compete for limited attention — each insisting it’s the most important. Shifting conditions in the market and even your own operating environment can change in ways that make previously established long-range outcomes murky. And no circumstance — anticipated or otherwise — changes the scope of a leader’s accountability.
Smart Business spoke with Terry Davis, President and CEO of Our Lady of the Wayside, about what it takes to regularly create successful outcomes even as priorities continuously shift.
How can leaders produce strong outcomes when priorities always change?
Leaders can’t control every outcome, but they can influence them by improving the quality of the solutions they create. Strategic plans should establish ambitious goals and serve as an organizational compass. But markets shift, regulations evolve and internal realities change. A leader’s responsibility is to continually develop solutions that keep the organization moving toward its priorities. Still, extraneous factors in the marketplace, as well as within your own company, can throw long-range planning out of wack and out of your control. What can be controlled are the solutions created to ensure your business’s priorities are managed and advanced.
Every organization has dozens of priorities, but only one can truly come first. Once leaders identify that priority, they can align people, resources and decision-making around it. Triaging priorities in a way that supports organizational goals and objectives while making solid sense to management and employees is where meaningful solutions begin.
In any industry, regulatory change can create layers of complexity almost overnight. What’s important to understand is that the constraints leaders are given often lead them to the most effective solutions.
How can leaders better manage the rotation of competing challenges?
There are times it’s best to lead from 30,000 feet. That doesn’t mean being distant. It means seeing the entire landscape before reacting to a single problem. This approach requires significant groundwork: extensive knowledge of priorities, investing in employee training, clearly communicating expectations and building a culture that views mistakes as opportunities for course-correction rather than blame.
As those systems become established, the focus becomes staying out of the way of team execution and providing the opportunity for staff to feel great about the win. Key to this is ensuring employees know that if an initiative goes sideways, leadership is there to help work it through. When those calls come in, leaders can redirect staff to re-evaluate and re-focus on the resources available, and the tools and solutions the situation requires.
Once expectations are clarified, a leader’s focus becomes trying not to solve every problem for people. When the job becomes creating confidence rather than dependence, everyone’s professional development grows. Over time, confidence becomes one of the most valuable tools a leader can create. Teams that know how to solve problems don’t wait to be rescued.
How does a solution-oriented mindset build momentum?
More than momentum, a solution-oriented mindset generates experience that fuels the ability to create solutions. Every challenge successfully solved becomes organizational experience — and experience may be the most valuable asset a leader can build.
External issues change and internal resources become strained. But organizations with a solution-oriented mindset gain confidence not because every outcome goes their way, but because leadership understands that outcomes aren’t always etched in stone. What matters is having the ability to create the next solution. This is where the paradigm shifts. Organizations stop reacting to every disruption as a crisis because they have built the confidence and agility to reset, adapt, and move forward.
The best leaders don’t confuse control with success. They know outcomes will change, circumstances will shift and uncertainty is inevitable. Their job isn’t to predict the future, it’s to prepare people to succeed no matter what the future brings. ●
INSIGHTS Thought Leadership is brought to you by Our Lady of the Wayside.
