In this edition, I'm offering up Lesson 13 in a long article entitled: Why Organizations Go Off Course.  The article details a series of lessons I have learned both as an Executive Director and as a consultant working with dozens of other organizations. 

This series offers a counterpoint to the lessons in another series: Why Organizations Thrive.

Why Organizations Go Off Course Lesson Thirteen is: Avoid getting the wrong things done.

More than a few times, I've encountered Executive Directors who accomplish tasks very effectively. Their writing is cogent. Documents they produce are always well-formatted. They are well-spoken in person, laying out clear ideas. They get a lot of stuff done. Many, many tasks get crossed off the to-do list. They clearly work a lot of hours.
 

Yet, their organizations are floundering.

Almost always, it's because they're getting the wrong tasks done.

By wrong, I don't mean they are doing tasks that are inherently counterproductive and take the organization backwards. It's that they're doing tasks that should be priority 6 through 10 when priorities 1 through 5 are crying out for more attention.

Peter Covey wrote extensively about this 50 years ago in his seminal book: The Effective Executive.

How can an executive stay focused on the top priorities in order to be more effective?