How to effectively manage & prioritize as a department of one
Create a structure for managing work to ensure your priorities align across teams.
As a startup, you likely have several teams made up of a single person, leaving folks feeling like they are on a deserted island. One person is managing your sales, another overseeing your marketing, someone taking care of all of those CX emails, and probably a few folks juggling several areas like operations and finance. While the goal will be to grow each team, in the early days, it’s important to make sure that each of these individuals has the guidance, support, and structure that they need to handle their roles while managing across the organization to work collaboratively with other teams.
how DO you give your “departments of one” the tools, resources, and guidance they need to effectively manage and prioritize their work?
Create an environment of clear prioritization and feedback that allows you to audit work and adjust focus.
Why This Works
Your team is busy! Whether you are a founder operating solo, with several other folks covering a few functions or with part-time support, agencies, and contractors - you may have a variety of contributors and team members operating independently. Each member of your team is likely doing work that keeps the company functioning without anyone even realizing it - or grasping how much time and effort it takes. You want to ensure that every team member is spending their time in the best way possible and that it’s highly visible throughout the organization. As a team of one, this visibility can get lost and it can be unclear what each individual is doing and team members might not feel like they’re getting the recognition or credit that they deserve. By creating a structure where all team members have the opportunity to share all ongoing work and new projects you can make sure that everyone is focused on the right tasks and create efficiencies within your company.
Why Do This Now
Your organization cannot effectively move forward without fully understanding the scope of each team member's work, how they’re prioritizing that work, and ensuring those priorities align across the organization. If you don’t know that someone in marketing is spending hours each week working through a tedious Excel report that isn’t helping to drive results, but it’s something that you as the CEO requested, you might be slowing down progress on other fronts unintentionally. If you’re spending hours each week in 1:1 meetings, but not creating visibility through public channels, you might be creating confusion within your organization with team members lacking visibility into how their work contributes towards the common goal. By not establishing a clear structure of prioritization across your teams of one, you’re losing out on the opportunity to ensure that the most important and effective work is being prioritized. Failing to account for tasks taking longer than anticipated, you might overlook opportunities to create efficiencies and align your team's focus on high-impact work.
how We Do: Build an internal structure to clearly prioritize ongoing tasks and new projects across your teams of one
A well-designed process for integrating prioritization into your individual teams should provide a straightforward solution. While it may require some additional work, the benefits of enhanced efficiency and visibility will make it a worthwhile endeavor.
Make sure that the overall company goals and priorities are clearly defined and communicated with the team.
Audit and categorize all work being done across team members - this should include all ongoing processes they manage (large and small), new projects they're taking on, and any meetings associated with their work.
Review the work as a team to provide visibility throughout the organization.
Allow time for feedback and modifications from team members.
Create space to do this regularly and as new team members are added.
Tools 🛠️
A tool that your team is most familiar with might be the best option here, you could use Excel, Google Sheets, Asana, Notion, or any other project management tool that your team is comfortable with. The key is that this shouldn’t be a time to onboard a new tool – leverage something your team already uses and is comfortable with.
Whatever tool you decide to use, make sure to give your team a template that works for your organization where they can easily fill in their projects, time allocated, priority level, and category.
Make sure to outline the process for how to use the template, add work and projects, and share it regularly - this will make it easy for future team members to jump in.
If your team members need assistance in tracking their time, they can turn to tools like Clockify, Harvest, Toggl, and others.
Rules (Process) 📝
Ask each team of one to do a quick audit of their work. This should include all of the ongoing processes they manage (large and small), new projects they're taking on, and any meetings associated with their work.
After auditing all work, each team member should add an estimated amount of time that they are currently spending or expect to spend on each of the activities that they listed.
With the work and time allocated, team members should then label everything in their audit as either high, medium, or low priority.
Lastly, the team member should categorize work into one of the three buckets:
Critical function: something that if left unfinished the company wouldn’t continue to function properly (ex. Payroll)
Growth/impact: something that is directly helping the company to grow, boost revenue, etc.
Foundational: processes and improvements that will help your work over the long term, but might not have an immediate impact.
Hold a meeting where each team member has the opportunity to share their audit and work with other team members to review priority levels and categorization associated with each item.
Do this on a monthly or quarterly basis depending on how often work is changing throughout your organization.
People 🫶
This is something that should be particularly focused on teams of one who report to the founder or CEO, but if your team is larger it can be something that individual contributors do with their managers.
As you go through this exercise, it’s important to understand the different personalities and work styles on your team. Some team members might relish this exercise and dive right in while others may feel overwhelmed and procrastinate. You may need to find different ways to communicate and help your team hold each other accountable. You can host a working hours session to have people come together and dedicate the time to do this work and ask questions if they’re having trouble.
Once you have the template complete and the first meeting of review is accomplished, it’s a good time to delegate this to another team member, ideally in operations or HR.
As new team members are onboarded, make sure that they are exposed to and included in this process.
Actually Actionable
Nice article. Now what?
We’ve taken the ideas above and created an action plan for you and your team.
Objective 1: Create a template for team members to audit their work
Task: Develop a template for team members to complete with all of their work, priority level, categorization, and time spent. You can do this in Notion, Excel/Google Sheets, Asana, or another project management platform (1 Hour).
Meeting: Once you have the template developed, hold a quick meeting with all of your teams to share the template, explain how it can be used, and ask if any additional changes should be made to it (30 Minutes).
Objective 2: Collectively review all work as a team
Meeting 1: Organize a meeting where each team of one has the opportunity to review and share their audit. Keep this meeting strictly to review with no comments from additional team members (30 Minutes).
Meeting 2: After everyone has had an opportunity to share their audit, hold a meeting where team members have the opportunity to discuss and adjust prioritization, categorization, and potential efficiencies for tasks that are taking significant time and resources (2 Hours).
Objective 3: Create a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for how to manage this process and include new team members as they are added
Task: As you go through this process the first few times, work with the head of operations or a similar team member to document the process and outline a plan for adding new team members to the process (1 Hour).
Before you go
When you’re busy tackling work each day, it can be very easy to lose sight of your team members and the cross-functional work that they’re accomplishing. Things get done and you don’t need to worry about it, which is great, but it’s also an opportunity for further examination. Is each department of one prioritizing the work that you want them to do? Are they getting the outcomes that you think they can? Is there work that you aren’t aware of that’s getting in the way? By taking the time to examine this strategically you’ll make sure that everyone knows that they’re working on what they should, creating efficiencies, and adding more visibility to all team members on what one another is working on. And ultimately, by doing this with consistency, you’ll maintain prioritization and ensure a strong culture of alignment.
Writer: Emily
Interested in working with Emily through of All Trades to transform your internal operations? Email founder@weofalltrades.com for more on how to bring herin as an embedded operator in your startup.