100 Pennies Exercise: Align Your Team’s Priorities

Is your team’s focus aligned with your mission? The 100 Pennies Exercise is a powerful, quick activity designed to help leaders and teams assess and prioritize their efforts. By allocating 100 pennies to represent time and resources, this exercise provides a snapshot of where your team is focused and helps identify any misalignment. Learn how this method can quickly realign your team around the most important goals to ensure mission success.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, it’s easy for teams to lose sight of what matters most. The 100 Pennies Exercise offers a practical, visual way for leaders to see how their team members rank priorities. By distributing 100 pennies across a list of top priorities, leaders can gauge the importance placed on each task and how time, energy, and resources are spent.

Here’s how the exercise works:

1. List Priorities: Team members create two columns, listing their top 4 to 6 priorities on the left.
2. Allocate Resources: They are then asked to distribute 100 pennies (representing time and resources) among the priorities listed in the right column.
3. Discuss & Realign: The team shares their penny allocations, discusses alignment, and identifies any necessary adjustments.

This exercise helps leaders understand where efforts may be misaligned and provides a clear path for realigning resources toward the most critical goals.

Why Use the 100 Pennies Exercise?

• Clarity: It simplifies complex prioritization challenges into a visual and interactive format.
• Alignment: It reveals whether team members are aligned on the organization’s key priorities.
• Efficiency: It ensures resources are focused on the most important tasks, enhancing overall efficiency and mission success.

Takeaways from the 100 Pennies Exercise:

• Is everyone on the same page about top priorities?
• Do the allocations reflect the most critical areas of the business?
• How can you adjust efforts to ensure the team is aligned?

Leverage this exercise to maintain focus, optimize resources, and achieve mission success.