How to Involve Employees in Setting Team Priorities — Without Losing Control

How to Involve Employees in Setting Team Priorities — Without Losing Control

Faced with pressure to scale and execute faster, our organizational culture assessment research finds that most leaders want employees to take greater ownership of their work. Unfortunately, too many leaders do not involve employees in setting team priorities because they are afraid of losing control.  Telling people exactly what their priorities should be, however, does not instill an ownership mindset.

The pattern of cascading strategic goals is familiar.

• Leaders establish the strategy.
• Executives translate it into goals.
• Managers turn those goals into priorities.
• Employees receive tasks and are expected to feel accountable for delivering them.

Then leaders wonder why people are not more engaged.

If you want employees to truly own priorities, they need meaningful input into setting them.

Employee Input Does Not Mean Employee Rule

Involving employees in setting team priorities does not mean putting strategy up for a vote. High performance cultures are not built on consensus — they are built through alignment and commitment.  It is important that leaders remain accountable for:

• Setting strategic direction and purpose.
• Defining performance expectations.
• Making high stakes tradeoffs.
• Ensuring that resources are focused on what matters most.

The difference is between dictating priorities and creating priorities together within clear strategic and behavioral boundaries.

Research on goal setting by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham has consistently found that specific and challenging goals can improve performance, especially when people are committed to those goals. Our organizational alignment research found that the active involvement of employees in strategic planning strengthens commitment and discretionary effort when employees believe their input matters.

That distinction is critical. Asking for input when the decision has already been made does not create ownership. It creates cynicism and reduces accountability.

Why Employees Often See Priorities More Clearly Than Leaders
Our project postmortem research found that l employees rate the organization’s strategy as 50% less clear than leaders do.  That is a strategy execution risk because frontline employees often have the clearest view of what it actually takes to execute.

• They know where customers are frustrated.
• They see inefficient or misaligned business practices.
• They understand which deadlines collide, which dependencies create bottlenecks, and which supposedly “critical” initiatives consume enormous resources without producing meaningful value.

Ignoring that knowledge is expensive.

5 Ways to Involve Employees in Setting Team Priorities
The goal is not consensus. The goal is to combine strategic clarity from leaders with operational intelligence from employees.

1. Start with Strategic Guardrails
   Be explicit about business goals, customer requirements, nonnegotiable commitments, and constraints before discussing priorities.
2. Ask What Deserves Attention
   Have employees identify the work that will contribute most to the desired outcomes — and explain why.
3. Force Tradeoffs
   Every new strategic priority should trigger a thoughtful and transparent discussion about what should we be stopped, delayed, delegated, or deprioritized?
4. Surface Disagreements
   If everyone agrees, you may not be having a rigorous enough debate. Different perspectives often expose hidden risks, strategic biases, and assumptions.
5. Make The Final Priorities Explicit
   Clarify what matters most, who owns what, and how strategic success will be measured.

There is a Catch — Meaningful and Honest Input Requires Psychological Safety
Inviting employees to openly challenge strategies and priorities is useless if disagreeing with the boss is not worth it.

Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological team safety has shown the importance of creating environments where people can raise concerns, ask questions, acknowledge mistakes, and offer dissenting perspectives without excessive interpersonal risk.

That means leaders must be willing to hear:

“I don’t think this should be one of our top priorities.”

And perhaps the more difficult statement:

“If this is truly a priority, we need to stop doing something else.”

Change management consulting experts know that those are not signs of change resistance. They are signs that employees are thinking seriously about successful strategy execution.

The Bottom Line
If leaders set every priority themselves, they should not be surprised when employees behave like renters rather than owners. High-performing teams create enough strategic clarity to give employees meaningful influence over how their work contributes to strategic success. Do not confuse involvement with consensus or empowerment with abdication. People are far more likely to own priorities they helped shape than priorities handed to them from above.

Want employees to do more than agree with priorities — and actually own them? Discover how the right culture turns strategic priorities into everyday behaviors, decisions, and results. Download The 3 Levels of Culture That Separate High-Performing Teams from Everyone Else to identify what may be helping — or undermining — your team’s performance.

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.