When Everything Is a Priority: Leading Strategic Focus in Disrupted Systems

Morning Excellence Webinar: Hosted by the Performance Excellence Network, in collaboration with the Wisconsin Center for Performance Excellence and the Iowa Quality Center and in cooperation with the Greater Rochester NY Quality Council

Program description

In an environment where disruption is constant and competing demands are relentless, organizations often find themselves in a state where everything is a priority. This session focuses on what leaders actually do in that moment: how they decide what to stop, what to sequence, and what to defer - and how they communicate those decisions in a way that maintains trust and alignment.

Attendees will explore how leaders can cut through complexity to establish clarity, focus, and disciplined execution. This session will outline a practical, integrated approach that connects the strategic plan, organizational action plan, and project portfolio management processes into a cohesive system for decision-making. Participants will learn how to define a limited set of organizational priorities, translate them into actionable goals, and use structured portfolio management methods to assess which projects advance strategic outcomes and which should be deferred or stopped.

Participants will:

• Simplify deployment of your strategic priorities to the workforce

• Apply structured methods to evaluate and prioritize initiatives

• Establish governance models that ensure execution discipline and accountability

• Use data-driven approaches to continuously reassess priorities in dynamic environments

This session is for leaders working in environments where:

• priorities regularly compete for limited time, capacity, and resources

• multiple initiatives are active, but focus and alignment are unclear

• decisions about what to stop or defer carry real organizational impact

About the speakers

Karen Kiel Rosser, MHA, LSSGB

Vice President, Chief Quality & Strategy Officer

Mary Greeley Medical Center

Karen is responsible for the overall direction of quality/performance excellence and organizational strategy at the medical center. This includes the development and implementation of a system-wide framework for performance excellence utilizing criteria from the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Program as well as the tools of lean and six sigma. She has led the organization to achieve the state’s highest level of recognition for performance excellence – the Iowa Recognition for Performance Excellence four times.

Whitney Johnson, MBA, LSSGB

Project Portfolio Coordinator

Mary Greeley Medical Center

Whitney supports organization‑wide alignment of projects and initiatives with strategic priorities. With a strong foundation in performance improvement and organizational assessment, Whitney brings expertise in Lean, Six Sigma, PDCA methodology, and data‑driven decision‑making to strengthen project intake, evaluation, and portfolio governance. 

JOIN US FOR THIS PERFORMANCE EXCELLENCE NETWORK (PEN) WEBINAR

Date: Thursday, June 11

Time:  9:00 - 10:00 am (ET)

Location:  On-line, via Zoom

Cost:  Free to GRQC members and non-members

Registration:  Click below to register.  Note:  Registration may not work with Internet Explorer; please use a currently supported browser.

Can’t make it live but interested in the content?  Register anyway: all registered attendees get a link to the recording after the session!

Please direct any questions to events@grqc.org.