Lead Better - Setting Multiple Priorities Lets Leaders Off the Hook

Setting multiple priorities lets leaders off the hook.

And we'll get right to the fun stuff, which is that the word priority first enters the English language in the 1400s.

kind of was at the late 1300s, but really kind of right around 1400 got kind of codified in one of the earliest senses that we would understand.

There was an old French version, but it comes out of the Latin word for prioritus, and that means the thing that comes prior, that comes first.

And so the point of the field note is that over the next five centuries and this is has been a dig to a degree widely discussed because of greg mckeown's book essentialism about the one thing right that's well there's another book called the one thing but you know what i'm saying so for five centuries we think about priority as a singular form and then sometime in the 20th century we start to use it in the plural form and the field note is saying that when that occurred It was not the purpose of why it occurred when we started making plurality, but the impact was that leaders are like, hmm, I have a linguistic escape hatch because now I don't have to decide what is the one most important thing, which is one of the hardest decisions in leadership.

So there we go.

Was that effective setup? I do.

It makes me

wonder if we should go back to it.

And so

the interesting thing to me is like in Latin, the word itself, the prioritas, right? It sounds and looks to an American speaker.

way of looking at language because there's an S at the end of there.

It looks like it's

plural.

But it's

not.

And so this notion that you destroy the meaning of the word by making it plural is something that uh maybe we should allow the grammar nazis to have their day here on this thing because of the implications of what it makes right like you are creating a an escape hatch for yourself to not actually do the hard work of leadership by allowing yourself to think that priority could be priorities and that that i'm going to list five of them and maybe one of the most important things that you do on a yearly basis on a five-year basis is to say, this is the most important thing.

I don't, not only is it leaders don't do it as much because linguistically they don't have to anymore, but I don't think we hear it that way anymore.

So it's, you know, being able to be forced into this, it'd be a healthy exercise.

So if you are a grammar Nazi out there, let me put my appeal into you that you, uh, You create, you know, a bee in your bonnet specifically around this idea and let it be something that resonates and everyone gets tired of you hearing, you know, you talking about it.

That'd be a great thing to have come out from this.

So, you know, and even in, you know, it's so much so that we're willing to hear multiple things about it that when it did happen, like even in 1987, you know, when the CEO of Alcoa stood up in a famous profit meeting with investors, Paul O'Neill said, I'm just gonna say that we're gonna talk about worker safety.

And that's going to be the one thing that he

intended to make

Alcoa the safest company in America and go for zero industry.