[act] direction

What matters most is not always the priority. The priority is not always what matters most.

T H E M I S M A T C H O F W H A T E X E C U T I V E S S A Y, T H I N K, & D O

The Matter Most Matrix is a qualitative spectrum measured across two factors:

The amount of budget/resources given to you relative to your peers

AND

The amount of time and attention senior leadership in your reporting chain gives to you, your project, or your teams

W H Y Y O U S H O U L D C A R E

The reality is teams, initiatives, or projects that executives believe are the most important are given the most budget, resources, and attention, regardless of what they may say.

Anything lower in importance receives less budget, less resources, and/or less of their attention.

The Matter Most Matrix visualizes the perception of importance from a managerial point of view. It does not consider quality of work, performance, or efficiency.

  • Anything in this quadrant is mission-critical for driving revenue and acquiring customers. This often includes sales, marketing, product, and engineering divisions. Without this, there is significant loss or risk to the business.

    Naturally, these are the organizations that continuously receive the most investments and have the most eyes from executive leadership.

  • Anything in this quadrant is exploratory, ambiguous, “big bet,” or fun initiatives with unknown returns for the business. These initiatives often require some type of test-and-learn. If anything here fails it’s low consequence because investment was never that high anyway (though anything that becomes wildly successful may eventually move into What Really Matters). This is also a catch-all category for executive pet projects.

    Because Hobbies are not business-critical, initiatives here can suddenly be deprioritized if other business priorities arise. For executive pet projects, once the executive departs their position their Hobby initiative usually disappears soon after.

  • Anything in this quadrant is necessary to keep the business moving but in a supporting function of driving revenue or acquiring customers. These are often the teams that run the business behind-the-scenes, including IT, operations, and customer support.

    Infrastructure often requires significant investments (building a new data center) or large budgets just to maintain itself (a large tech company offering free meals to its employees literally costs tens of millions of dollars per year). But most executives see this the same way governments view roads and bridges — put in the big money when necessary, fund it just enough to prevent it from falling apart, then turn your attention to something else that matters more for your visibility.

  • Anything in this quadrant is necessary solely for legal, compliance, or PR reasons or is a minimal “check-the-box” effort to meet a KPI. Many internal programs (such as career growth initiatives and employee satisfaction programs) may land here, but even teams such as content moderation fall into this quadrant.

    This quadrant has organizations and programs that few, if any, executives actually care about so they take a proof-of-concept approach: Allocate the bare minimum amount of people, resources, money, and time to demonstrate basic functionality then keep that going as long as necessary. When the need disappears, so do the organizations and programs.

W H Y Y O U S H O U L D R E A L L Y C A R E

The most common factor among those who are consistently recognized and rewarded was executive importance and attention:

Their teams and projects were all in What Really Matters

It’s an unfortunate reality that some careers can rise stratospherically while others plateau and stall, despite being in the same company in similar roles, starting at the same levels, sitting in the same organization, and producing similar quality of output.

The most common factor for those who easily reaped recognition and rewards (versus those who didn’t) was whether or not they sat in the What Really Matters quadrant at the company, organizational, or manager level.

For mid-career managers and individual contributors

01

Don’t assume that prioritization means important. Prioritization is the order in which issues need to be addressed whereas importance is the intrinsic value of an issue. We often believe they overlap but it’s not always the case: Managers may give you a task that’s a high priority for you, but is not important for them.

02

Having a project and/or a team in What Really Matters can be a curse. If you are in a high-visibility and high-pressure situation, there is constant pressure to perform because the executives are relying on you for meet their KPI. While success is generously rewarded, failure can stall or even kill your career.

03

Promotional opportunities beyond entry-level must align with What Really Matters to your manager, What Really Matters to your skip-level, and even What Really Matters at the executive level. The most common scenario is when your manager finds your work important but your skip-levels do not.

04

In good times, when moonshots and innovation pet programs go into high gear, the Hobby quadrant is an excellent place to be. Executives are happy when things go well and are unbothered when they don’t. But in bad times, Hobbies are the first to be deemed an unnecessary expense are are quickly cut.

Fred Kim has led high-performance teams for fifteen years and created entire organizations from the ground up. He has designed and implemented new leadership frameworks at Google, Meta, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen Group to recognize and reward success beyond traditional metrics and to mentor the next generation of leaders to be better than the current.

Throughout his career, he has built policies and programs that recognized the interplay of hierarchy, aspiration, and even childhood dreams that impact our decision-making today as adults and as professionals.

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