Last night, I left my wife and daughter at a campsite and went to watch a ASBH (Béziers) rugby match.
That probably isn’t the most promising opening to an article about leadership, but stick with me.
We’re away camping as a family, and tonight was the first home match of the new rugby season in Béziers. I wanted to go, my son wanted to come with me, and my friend Justin was able to join us tonight but won’t be able to make the next few matches. Karissa and our daughter were happy to stay behind at the campsite, so the three of us headed off to Béziers.
It wasn’t a particularly momentous decision. Families make choices like this all the time. But it did get me thinking on the way to the match about how we decide where we need to be when there are several places, and several people, that matter to us.
When everything matters
We often talk about prioritisation as though it should be relatively straightforward. Work out what matters, put everything in order and start at the top. It sounds perfectly sensible until real life gets involved.
Most of the difficult decisions I’ve encountered haven’t been choices between something important and something unimportant. Those are generally quite easy. The difficult choices come when both things matter.
Your team needs you, but so does a customer. A colleague wants some time to talk through a problem, but there’s another commitment you’ve already made. An opportunity comes along that genuinely deserves your attention, but accepting it means taking time away from something else that matters. And, of course, work itself constantly competes with family, friendships and all the other parts of our lives that don’t conveniently disappear when we become leaders.
The hardest priorities aren’t important versus unimportant. They’re important versus important.
That changes the question.
If everything competing for our attention has some legitimate claim on us, then trying to be there for everyone isn’t really an option. We simply can’t. Being present in one place inevitably means being absent from another.
Perhaps a more useful question is: Where does my presence matter most right now?
Every yes contains a no
I think this is one of the realities of leadership that becomes more apparent as responsibility grows. There are more people you could help, more conversations you could join, more decisions you could contribute to and more opportunities you could pursue. The temptation is to think that good leadership means somehow finding enough time for all of them.
Rarely does it. Every yes contains a no…somewhere.
Saying yes to one meeting means that time can’t be spent somewhere else. Giving an hour to one person probably means asking someone else to wait. Travelling to meet a client or pursue an opportunity means being away from home. Protecting time with your family may mean saying no to something at work that is genuinely worthwhile.
None of that necessarily tells us which choice is right. That’s what makes prioritisation so very hard.
Last night, choosing to go to the rugby didn’t mean that Karissa and our daughter mattered less than the people I went with. It meant that, taking everything surrounding this particular evening into account, this was the choice we made. On another evening, with different circumstances, I might have stayed camping.
And I think that’s an important distinction.
Priorities aren’t always a ranking of what matters most. Sometimes they’re a judgement about what matters most right now.
Sometimes we get it wrong
Of course, calling something a priority doesn’t automatically make our decision a good one. I’ve certainly made choices about where to spend my time and later realised I got them wrong.
In the past, I’ve attended a meeting and realised afterwards that I really wasn’t needed. Sometimes something has felt urgent in the moment but, with the benefit of hindsight, wasn’t especially important. Sometimes the person making the most noise gets the attention while someone quieter, who perhaps needs it more, waits — the squeaky wheel gets the most grease.
Leadership involves making judgements with incomplete information. We won’t always get them right. What matters, I think, is remaining conscious that a choice is actually being made.
Because there’s a danger in becoming so accustomed to being needed that we stop noticing what our choices are costing.
Who has been paying for your priorities?
There’s always another reason for a leader to be somewhere else. Another customer needs something. Another deadline is approaching. Another problem has appeared. Another opportunity won’t wait. There’s another meeting where it would be useful to have you in the room.
All of those things can be legitimate.
But I’ve started to think there’s another question that needs to sit alongside Where does my presence matter most right now?
It’s this:
Who has been paying for my priorities lately?
That’s a bit more of an uncomfortable question.
Who keeps getting the no? Who keeps waiting because something else came up? Which relationship, project or responsibility repeatedly gets pushed down the list because something louder or more urgent gets in front of it?
And perhaps most importantly: are the people who are most understanding about our absence, becoming the people we’re absent from most often?
That can happen remarkably easily. Someone understands that you’re busy, so you ask them to understand again. A capable member of the team doesn’t demand much attention, so your time goes to the person who does. Your family understands the pressure you’re under, so work wins another evening.
Individually, every decision can be justified. It’s only when we stand back and look at the pattern that we sometimes see something different.
Tonight, the answer was rugby
Tonight, my answer to Where do I need to be? was at the rugby with my son and Justin.
It was the first home match of the season, and there were reasons why this particular evening mattered. So we left the campsite, drove to Béziers and watched the match while Karissa and our daughter stayed behind.
There was nothing particularly heroic or profound about the decision. In fact, it was completely ordinary. But perhaps that’s why it made me think.
Leadership isn’t only expressed through the big decisions we make. A great deal of it is revealed in the accumulation of much smaller choices about where we put our attention, our energy and our presence. We make those choices at work, at home and everywhere in between, often without really noticing we’re making them.
We can’t be everywhere, and trying to be everything to everyone isn’t leadership. Eventually, it just makes us ineffective everywhere.
What we can do is become more intentional about choosing where we need to be, while remembering that every choice has another side to it.
So perhaps every now and then it’s worth asking ourselves two questions.
Where does my presence matter most right now?
And, just as importantly:
Who has been paying for my priorities lately?
The answer to the first will keep changing.
We should probably make sure the answer to the second does too.