#10 – Quality of a Leader – A Leader Should Know How and What to Prioritize

Leadership comes with a great deal of responsibilities. Everything is different from the others in terms of time, the immediate solution to a need, the people involved, decision-making, and a lot more factors. If you are not a good leader, all these thoughts will simply jumble on your mind, making you crazy on what needs to be done first and how it needs to be done.

You do not want to end up in the psycho ward after accomplishing all the tasks given to you, do you? Hey, who said being a leader is a simple job? But why back out? Everything is just a matter of organizing and prioritizing.

Knowing how and what to prioritize will make your life as a leader much simpler and easier. Prioritizing is listing all the things that need to be accomplished in chronological order and doing them one by one from the most to the least important.

Each and every task your team needs to do can be strictly classified in 4 categories:

- important and urgent

- important and not urgent

- not important and urgent

- not important and not urgent

With proper prioritizing, it will be so much easier to identify what needs to be given more focus than others that are not crucial to the team's performance. Effective leadership and management is knowing how to say NO to the last 2 categories, while concentrating on the first 2. Restricting yourself from doing unimportant tasks gives you more time in focusing on the important ones.

Another concept every leader should understand is the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 Rule. This simply states that typically 80% of unfocused effort generates only 20% of results. The remaining 80% of results are achieved with only 20% of the effort. Notice how much (or less) effort one can obtain by focusing (or not focusing) on certain tasks?

As a leader, you should be able to identify the things that need to be focused. An organized and systematic leader can make his people follow him without difficulty because they see him as a person with plans and preparations. He knows exactly what needs to be done, and is aware of the direction that they need to walk (or run, in some cases) towards to.

Such quality should not be limited to the leader only. His followers should practice it as well by seeing how their leader does it.