Make your priorities clear and consistent.
A focused session on what it means to communicate priorities clearly as a leader, why the gap between what leaders think they have communicated and what people actually understand is so common, and what to do about it.
Most leaders believe they communicate their priorities clearly. Most of the people working around them are not entirely sure what those priorities are. The gap is common and has real consequences: when priorities are unclear, people default to what is urgent, what is visible to their manager, or what they already feel confident doing. Work that matters gets crowded out by work that feels safe.
This session looks at why priority communication is harder than it appears, what the most common failure modes are, and what actually works. It covers three things: how to name priorities in a way that is specific and genuinely actionable; how to communicate them consistently across different contexts and conversations; and how to recognise when mixed messages are muddying the picture.
The session is deliberately short and practical. The aim is to produce one honest insight and one clear commitment.
You will identify at least one place where your communication of priorities could be clearer and leave with a specific commitment about how to address it.
Open with a quick confidence check on whether people's teams could name their top three priorities, then work through why priority communication breaks down, what good looks like, and a personal commitment to close.
Ask the room, on a scale of 1 to 5, how confident they are that their team could name their top three priorities right now. Take a show of hands for each number. The distribution tends to be instructive, with most people rating themselves at 3 or below, which frames the session: this is a common problem and worth taking seriously.
Give a brief input on why priority communication breaks down. Leaders often communicate priorities once, clearly, and assume the message has been received and retained. Competing demands mean people re-prioritise constantly, often without realising it. Vague language disguises unclear thinking; words like "quality", "efficiency", and "customer focus" are values, and a priority needs to be sharper than that. And leaders sometimes signal different priorities through what they ask about, what they reward, and what they escalate, even when their stated priorities say something else. The point to land is that communicating priorities is a consistent, repeated practice, and a single clear conversation is rarely enough.
Run a facilitated discussion around three questions. What makes a priority genuinely clear, and what does it look like in practice? How do you currently communicate your priorities, and when and through what channels? Where might your actions be sending a different message from your words? Draw out specific examples and push people to name concrete behaviour.
Ask people to write down one specific thing they will do to make their priorities clearer and more consistently communicated, then share it with a partner.
Use Communication and Priorities when a leader is sure their priorities are clear and the team is quietly guessing. The session examines why the message keeps getting lost, and each leader leaves with one honest insight and one specific commitment to fix it.
Using this tool with a skilled facilitator means that discussions are focused, time is used efficiently, and the group moves toward consensus, making the session productive and impactful.
