As a team leader, how can you make sure your team is working on the most important tasks?

To ensure your team focuses on the most important tasks, clearly define and communicate priorities aligned with organizational goals. Utilize prioritization tools and regular progress check-ins. Foster an environment of open communication for adapting to changes efficiently, keeping the team aligned and focused on high-impact activities.

Adhering to processes in a disciplined manner will help drive away the work inefficiency woes. The following points should help: 1. Start the day with a standup call that where you can discuss the day's priorities and delegate the work within team mates. 2. Over the course of the day remain in touch with your team via internal messaging platforms like Teams, Slack etc. to let them know they can contact you in case of any support. 3. For any adhoc work an outlier process can be setup.

Sense of urgency and impact of the tasks on company top line / bottom line play key role in determining the importance. I will leave it to the team member to decide after sharing the above stated information. If he/she still is unable to decide, then you decide for them.

As a CIO adhering to the Theory of Constraints, I would ensure that my team focuses on the most important tasks by identifying and addressing our system’s constraints. We would prioritize tasks that directly contribute to our organizational goals and alleviate these bottlenecks. Regular team meetings would be held for clear communication of priorities and progress tracking. We would also foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, leveraging data analytics to make informed decisions and optimize productivity. This approach ensures that we are always working on tasks that add the most value to our organization.

They are not scrambling at the last moment. Always ready to fail, and learn. Self organized, agile and has a good view of what they want to achieve.

Prioritization frameworks help when the tasks are more preplanned. Teams can be encouraged to use since it will help track their efforts in a data driven manner. Efforts should be made to ensure it doesn't become a case of micro management. For any sort of adhoc efforts action should be the magic formulae and the team should get to work on it right away but planning the bandwidth accordingly.

Delegate comes first and Empower comes next not only in alphabetic order but also when we enforce this process in real-life. Once proper training is done team mates need to be trusted and enforced tasks. Rome was not built in a day so they need to be given enough time to learn, adapt and prove themselves and then entrusted with more complex tasks. Once they go up the maturity ladder they can be started to train for leadership roles as well.

Daily team meetings before starting the day and daily status reports digitally before calling it a day. Also checking during the day about the status of important projects based on project milestones to be met if the member needs more resources etc