Prioritization is Leadership
We talk about prioritization with every client. It comes up in every engagement, every industry, every team size.
It usually sounds something like this: “We have six strategic initiatives this quarter. All of them are critical.”
Or: “I can’t deprioritize any of these. They all have executive sponsors.”
Or simply: “We need it all.”
The specific words change, but the problem is the same. And it keeps showing up because most organizations don’t feel the cost of it until things are already falling apart.
When You Have Five Top Priorities, You Have None
Here’s what carrying many “top priorities” actually does to a team. Say you have seven people. A leader might think: seven people, seven initiatives, we can make equal progress on all of them. That’s not how it works.
First, you lose the benefit of working as a team. Teams exist because people working together produce better outcomes than people working in parallel on separate things. You get knowledge transfer, you catch each other’s mistakes, and you build on each other’s ideas. When everyone is heads-down on their own initiative, that collaboration disappears.
Second, there’s the Weinberg effect. Every time you add a new item to someone’s plate, you lose roughly 20% of their productivity to context switching. Add two competing demands, you’re down 40%. By the time someone is actively juggling five priorities, they’re spending more time switching gears than working, and the team looks busy while little gets done.
When a leader hands their team a list of equally urgent initiatives, they’re not being responsive to stakeholders. They’re saying: “I can’t make the call here. You sort it out. And I’ll weigh in on whatever you decide.” That’s burden-shifting, not leadership.
You Feel Busy But You’re Not Getting Anything Done
High work in progress, or WIP, creates the illusion of productivity. It’s the half-written report, the feature that’s coded but not tested, the strategic plan that’s been 80% done for three months, the meeting follow-up sitting in your drafts. It’s everywhere, and it’s not just a team problem. It’s an organizational one.
Little’s Law makes this concrete: in a stable system, the more work in progress, the longer everything takes. The counterintuitive truth is that telling someone “I’m going to start your work later so I can finish it sooner” is exactly the right call, even though it feels backwards. The principle is simple: stop starting new work until you finish what you are working on.
The Real Job of a Leader
We had a client bring us in three years ago because their teams weren’t delivering. When we arrived, we found 14 active initiatives running simultaneously across three teams. Every sprint planning, teams would commit to work and then, within days, a senior leader would walk the floor with a “quick ask” that consumed the rest of the sprint. Three different Vice-Presidents each believed that their initiative was the organization’s top priority, and at the end of the quarter, nothing was finished.
When we asked leadership what the single most important thing was, we got a different answer depending on who we asked.
The teams weren’t the problem. They were working hard. The problem was that no one owned the priority decision, so effectively everyone did, and they all disagreed. When there’s no clear decision owner, everyone becomes one, and teams end up receiving conflicting direction from multiple stakeholders at once. They’re forced to multitask, context switching hurts their output individually, and the cumulative effect kills organizational momentum.
A leader’s job is to set the priority, own the trade-off, and defend both. That includes defending WIP limits. When a stakeholder says “can we just squeeze this in?”, it sounds like a small ask, but it compounds quickly. Work piles up, other deadlines slip, and morale follows. A leader’s job is to hold the line, explain the trade-off, and make the call. If organizations didn’t have to make trade-offs, they wouldn’t need leadership, and that’s not a criticism of anyone in the role. It’s just an honest description of what the job requires.
What Good Looks Like
What good looks like in practice is one person owns the priority call, trade-offs get named out loud rather than implied, and decisions are visible to the teams doing the work. When you have those three things, teams stop spinning, work gets done, and stakeholders (even the ones whose requests got deprioritized) get results faster because the whole system speeds up.
When you set a priority clearly, you’re also naming what you’re NOT doing right now. That second part is as important as the first, and teams need to hear it out loud. They need to know what’s on pause and why, or they’ll keep trying to do everything and finish nothing.
Try This at Your Next Leadership Meeting
Take five minutes. Have everyone in the room independently write down every initiative currently in flight. Do it independently, not out loud. You’ll get a more honest list that way, and you’ll avoid people anchoring to whatever the loudest voice says first.
Then ask the group: if we could only finish three of these, which ones deliver the most meaningful business results?
You’re going to find things nobody knew were happening, duplicates, zombie projects, things that were critical eight months ago and quietly stopped mattering. At that company we mentioned above, the leadership team surfaced 22 active initiatives in this exercise. They thought they had 14.
Then name what’s going on pause. Be honest with the stakeholders whose work is moving to the back of the line and own the trade-off out loud. Everything else on that list is actively slowing down your most important work.
The Bottom Line
The real problem in most organizations isn’t delivery. It’s prioritization.
Prioritization is not a planning activity, and it’s not something to hand off to a Product Owner or a PMO. It is leadership. If you’re currently an open gate where all work flows through equally, leadership means choosing. It means saying “this, not that, right now,” and then defending that decision when stakeholders push back.
Your teams are ready to execute. Give them a clear priority. Tell them what you’re choosing not to do. That clarity is worth more than any process, framework, or tool you could put in place. If you’d like some help with prioritization framework options and implementation, just drop us a note at info@agilityirl.com.
This post draws on conversations from the take5IRL podcast, including Episode 5 (The Power of Prioritization in Agile), Episode 54 (Too Much WIP), Episode 87 (Conquer WIP), Episode 96 (Why Agile Fails), and Episode 104 (Too Many Stakeholders, Not Enough Decisions). Listen at agilityirl.com or wherever you get your podcasts.