Prioritisation As Stewardship: Athalie Williams On Cutting Through

Modern leadership operates on a fundamental contradiction. Organisations ask leaders to deliver exponential results, lead with compassion, drive innovation and navigate ambiguity whilst staying energised, clear and composed every day.

Yet prioritisation, the capability that makes any of this achievable, is rarely modelled from the top.

“We talk about prioritisation yet rarely model it,” observes Athalie Williams, who has led transformation initiatives across BHP, BT Group (British Telecommunications), and multiple global organisations over three decades. “Executive teams are expected to do more, faster and with less clarity, and fewer levers. And when the system rewards throughput over value, even the most capable leaders stall.”

The pattern plays out predictably. Strategy evolves, but targets don’t. New initiatives layer on top of existing ones. KPIs remain tied to last year’s priorities whilst the work has fundamentally shifted. Leaders find themselves starting every quarter already behind, measured against expectations that no longer match reality.

The solution is not better time management or more personal resilience. It is having the courage and discipline to prioritise and cut through.

The Prioritisation Problem

When strategy moves but metrics do not, organisations chase outdated goals. New initiatives layer on top of existing ones; KPIs remain tied to last year’s agenda while the work has changed. Leaders start each quarter measured by expectations that no longer fit reality. The result is not only missed delivery but quiet demotivation: teams feel set up to fail.

This dynamic often hides as an execution problem. Leaders work harder and longer; delivery stays patchy. The real issue is portfolio design: too many priorities, too little clarity about what must stop.

What Transformation Teaches About Focus

Williams’ experience shows why focus matters. At BT, a shift from telecommunications to technology required changing the workforce’s skill mix while managing large-scale headcount reductions. At BHP, she led people and culture work across an operating model transformation for more than 80,000 employees while driving an ambitious gender-balance programme.

Both required what Williams calls “ruthless prioritisation” about where to focus limited leadership attention and organisational capacity. “It’s about aligning on a handful of things that matter from the beginning, then checking in regularly to stay aligned and course correct,” she says.

The discipline extends beyond choosing what to do. It requires explicit decisions about what won’t get done. “Without clear trade-offs, everything competes for attention,” Williams argues. “And when everything is important, nothing is.”

This isn’t theoretical. During BHP’s gender balance initiative, Williams made a deliberate choice to appoint only a single chief diversity officer rather than building a large team. The decision forced accountability back to line leaders rather than allowing them to delegate the work to a specialist function. “We wanted this to be a business issue and something that the leaders felt personally and deeply accountable for shifting,” she explains.

The same principle applied to how many initiatives the organisation pursued simultaneously. Rather than launching dozens of diversity initiatives, BHP focused on systemic barriers: redesigning hiring processes, embedding flexible work, addressing pay equity, and changing how roles themselves were structured. “We redesigned everything, how we hired, how we developed leaders, how we structured teams, how we thought about the makeup and design of jobs, even down to the tooling that we used.”

This integrated approach delivered results precisely because it resisted the temptation to launch multiple, and potentially competing, initiatives.

The Board’s Role In Prioritisation

Williams’ perspective from both C-suite and board advisory roles reveals another dimension: boards often contribute to prioritisation problems whilst believing they’re driving performance.

“Boards and executive teams are right to set stretch expectations. That’s part of their remit, to push for ambition, pace, and performance,” Williams acknowledges. “But stretch must be matched by realism, otherwise, executive teams can’t prioritise, they struggle to align, and they can’t deliver.”

The challenge emerges when boards add new priorities without explicitly removing others. Strategy shifts, but the full portfolio of objectives remains. Bonus structures reward last year’s metrics whilst leadership discusses this year’s imperatives. The result is what Williams calls “layering pressure” rather than leading.

“When delivery falters, the reflex is often to interrogate the team: Why didn’t they deliver?” Williams observes. “But the braver question is: did we really create the conditions for success?”

This requires boards to exercise what she calls stewardship, not just oversight. “That means asking: Are we clear on what’s been deprioritised, or just adding more? Do our metrics reflect what matters now, or what mattered last year? Are we rewarding the teams who focus, or the ones who chase everything?”

The Courage To Stop

Perhaps the most undervalued leadership capability is knowing when to stop work already underway. Williams’ experience suggests this requires specific courage because stopping feels like failure, even when it’s strategically sound.

“I think there’s a handful of things you need to protect, and the rest you can be far bolder in the changes that you’re going to make and back yourself,” Williams notes from her transformation work. This means identifying the critical functions or initiatives that cannot be disrupted, then being willing to pause, stop, or fundamentally rethink everything else.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when Williams served on BHP’s Global Crisis Management Team, this principle proved essential. “It was an opportunity to sharpen our focus. It stripped all the clutter away,” she recalls. The crisis forced prioritisation by necessity, revealing which work truly mattered and which had persisted through organisational inertia.

But Williams argues organisations shouldn’t wait for a crisis to achieve this clarity. “Being really disciplined about what gets done and in what order and why” should be standard leadership practice, not emergency response.

Making Prioritisation Operational

Strategic clarity requires more than good intentions. Williams identifies several practices that make prioritisation tangible rather than aspirational.

The first is updating measurement systems to reflect current priorities. “When KPIs remain tied to last year’s agenda whilst the work has fundamentally shifted, leaders find themselves starting every quarter already behind,” she notes. This creates the demotivating dynamic where teams feel set up to fail before they begin.

The second is building a regular rhythm for recalibration. “Prioritisation isn’t a one-off exercise, it’s a leadership discipline,” Williams argues. “The most effective executive teams revisit and realign frequently, not just when things go wrong, but as part of how they lead.”

At BHP, this took the form of regular check-ins on transformation priorities with both the executive team and the board. “You need to regularly check in to make sure that you are continuing to be aligned as a leadership team, as an organisation, on those things, and course correcting where you are not.”

The third is making prioritisation visible in resource allocation. “If prioritisation doesn’t show up in meetings, planning cycles, and investment decisions, it’s not real,” Williams observes. “Leaders may say ‘focus,’ but the organisation hears ‘do more.'”

This means examining where leadership time actually goes, which initiatives receive investment, and what gets discussed in key forums. When these allocations don’t match stated priorities, the organisation receives mixed signals that undermine strategic clarity.

The Sustainability Question

Underlying Williams’ focus on prioritisation is a broader concern about leadership sustainability. “Leadership sustainability isn’t a soft issue. It’s a strategic imperative,” she argues.

Treating executive burnout as an individual resilience issue misreads a systemic design failure. Expecting leaders to manage energy, sustain perspective, and avoid overwhelm through personal practices alone ignores how strategy, workload, and resourcing are structured. Williams argues the problem is organisational: capacity must be designed to match expectations, not left to individual endurance.

“If your strategy demands heroic effort, it’s not a strategy, it’s a gamble,” she observes. “Boards and CEOs must stop applauding endurance and start designing for clarity.”

Her experience suggests this becomes particularly acute during transformation. “I don’t think any organisation ever gets it all right,” Williams acknowledges. “I really believe there are some elements that organisations do well and then they’ll take three steps forward and a step back.”

But the organisations that sustain momentum are those that build in capacity for recalibration rather than expecting linear progress through sheer determination.

The Governance Imperative

The central question isn’t whether organisations should be ambitious. It’s whether ambition is matched by the clarity and focus that makes delivery possible.

“How sure are you that you are creating the conditions for success for your leaders?” Williams asks. The answer requires examining not just what’s being asked of executive teams, but what’s been explicitly removed from their plates to make new priorities achievable.

The strategic power of no isn’t about lowering ambitions. It’s about creating the conditions where high performance becomes sustainable rather than heroic. For boards and executive teams willing to exercise that discipline, prioritisation becomes stewardship, and a source of advantage rather than constraint.  “When everything is important, nothing truly is,” Williams says. Saying no, with intent and clarity, is how organisations make room to deliver what truly matters.