Guide
How to set leadership team priorities
By James Carter · Updated July 2026
The short answer
Setting leadership team priorities means choosing the two or three things everything else serves this quarter — and, harder, naming what you’ll stop doing to protect them. Priorities aren’t a list of everything important; they’re the few things you’ll sacrifice other good things for. You set them by forcing a ranked choice (not a bucket of “important” items), cutting to two or three, naming the trade-offs out loud, writing each one so any decision can be tested against it, and getting the team to disagree and commit on the final set.
First, why “everything is a priority” is the whole problem
Ask most leadership teams for their priorities and you’ll get a list of nine. Each one is genuinely important, each has a champion, and none can be cut without someone feeling their area got deprioritized. So the list stays long — and a list of nine priorities is functionally a list of zero. When two of them collide (and they always do), the team has no rule for which wins, so it defaults to whatever is loudest, most urgent, or closest to the CEO’s last conversation. That’s not prioritizing; that’s reacting with a nicer vocabulary.
This is the quiet source of a lot of dysfunction. When priorities are fuzzy, everyone optimizes for a slightly different thing and calls it disagreement; initiatives sprawl and never finish; and the team stays busy without moving. A clear, short set of priorities is the single highest-leverage thing a leadership team can produce — it’s the Flag at the center of the Flag Model, the thing every other discipline exists to serve.
What a priority actually is
Here is the definition that makes setting them possible: a priority is something you’ll give up other good things for. Not something important — everything on the list is important. A priority is what wins when it competes with something else that also matters. Which means the real test of a priority isn’t “is this valuable?” It’s “what am I willing to not do to protect this?”
If a stated priority never causes you to say no to something you’d otherwise do, it isn’t a priority — it’s a preference. The word comes from “prior”: the thing that comes before. Only a few things can come first. That’s not a limitation to work around; it’s the entire function of the exercise.
This is also why priority-setting is emotionally hard, not intellectually hard. Everyone can identify what matters. The work is agreeing to let good things lose — a product line that won’t get the investment, a market you won’t enter this year, a fire you’ll deliberately let smolder. The fight over what falls below the line is the prioritization. Skip that fight and you haven’t set priorities; you’ve made a list.
How to set leadership team priorities, in six steps
- Ask the one-thing question. Before ranking anything, ask: if we could only move one thing this year, what would make everything else easier or unnecessary? It breaks the “everything matters” reflex and surfaces the priority that actually drives the others. You won’t always land on one, but the question reorders the conversation.
- Force a ranked stack, not a bucket. Have the team rank the candidates 1‑to‑N — a strict order, no ties — instead of sorting them into “important” and “later” piles. Buckets hide trade-offs; ranking exposes them. You learn what people actually believe the moment they’re forced to put one good thing above another.
- Cut to two or three. Draw the line. Everything above it is a priority; everything below it is explicitly not, this quarter. The argument about where the line falls is not a distraction from the work — it is the work. Don’t resolve the tension by widening the list to keep everyone whole.
- Name the trade-offs out loud. For each priority, say the good thing you’re choosing not to do to protect it. “We’re prioritizing X, which means Y waits and Z gets no new headcount.” A priority with no named sacrifice is a wish. Saying the “no” in the room is what makes the “yes” real — and what stops the cut work from quietly creeping back.
- Write each one testably — with an owner and a measure. Phrase each priority precisely enough that any future decision can be checked against it: does this serve priority X, or not? Attach one owner and one measure of progress. “Improve customer experience” can’t arbitrate a decision; “cut time-to-first-value below 7 days, owned by [name]” can.
- Disagree and commit on the final set. Go around the room and get commitment out loud — including from the people who argued for something that didn’t make the cut. Priorities that weren’t genuinely committed to fall apart the first hard week, when the deprioritized work comes back wearing a costume of urgency. How disagree and commit works →
Keeping them alive
Priorities decay the moment they stop being used. New initiatives accrete, urgent things crowd out important ones, and within a month the carefully chosen three are back to nine — not by decision, but by drift. Three habits keep them real:
Make them visible. The priorities live somewhere the whole team sees them weekly — not in a planning deck no one reopens. If a leader can’t recite them from memory, they aren’t directing anyone’s decisions.
Test decisions against them. The point of writing them testably is to use them as an arbiter: when a new request or opportunity shows up, ask out loud whether it serves a priority or competes with one. A priority that never kills or reshapes a proposal is decoration. Build the check into your weekly meeting agenda.
Reset them on a cadence. Review the priorities every quarter and reset deliberately — keep, drop, or re-rank — so they stay current without whipsawing month to month. Setting them once is what leaves a team executing last year’s priorities against this year’s reality. Keeping them, and the alignment they require, is a discipline — the same one behind keeping a leadership team aligned.
Common mistakes
Too many
Five to nine “priorities” so no one has to lose. The team feels aligned and behaves exactly as before, because nothing was actually chosen.
Too vague to arbitrate
“Grow the business,” “delight customers.” True, unarguable, and useless as a tie-breaker — which is the only job a priority has.
Set once, then forgotten
Chosen at the annual offsite, filed, and never used to make a real decision. Priorities that aren’t tested weekly quietly revert to the old nine.
Priorities vs. the to-do list
Confusing the few things that direct everything (priorities) with the many things the team is doing (the operating list). The list can be long; the priorities can’t.
Top-down, no buy-in
The CEO names them alone. They’re technically clear and privately ignored, because the team never fought for them and so never owned them.
No named sacrifice
Priorities chosen without saying what they cost. When nothing is explicitly dropped, everything continues — and the “priorities” are just the old list with a headline.
See whether your team is actually on the same 2–3.
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Book a Calibration Call →Straight answers
How many priorities should a leadership team have?
Two or three. Beyond that they stop functioning — when everything is important, the team has no rule for what to do when two collide, so it defaults to whatever is loudest or most urgent. Two or three is few enough to hold in mind and test decisions against without a document.
How do you choose them?
Start from the one-thing question, force a ranked stack rather than buckets, cut to two or three, and name the good things you’ll stop doing to protect them. Write each testably with an owner and a measure, then disagree and commit. The hard part isn’t naming what matters — it’s cutting what also matters but can’t make the cut.
What’s the difference between a goal and a priority?
A goal is an outcome you want; a priority is what you’ll sacrifice other good things for to get it. You can have many goals and only a few priorities — a priority’s whole job is to win when things compete. If a stated priority never makes you say no to something, it isn’t one.
How often should you reset them?
Review and reset every quarter, and check weekly that decisions still serve them. Priorities decay quietly as new work accretes, so they need a standing place in the operating rhythm — the weekly check keeps them honest, the quarterly reset keeps them current.
Keep reading
“This truly resonated and will have a lasting influence on us as we work to create a technology organization where the best and brightest choose to be.”
Larry Quinlan · Global CIO, Deloitte
About the author
James Carter
Founder of Be Legendary and creator of the Flag Model™. Twenty-five years inside executive teams; co-author alongside Stephen Covey, Ken Blanchard, Deepak Chopra & Brian Tracy, and featured on CNN and in Business Insider. More about James →
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