Some leaders focus a lot on important tasks to make sure they’re not neglected for urgent ones. Meanwhile, other leaders treat every request as important without considering if it really deserves that level of attention. Forcing urgency on every request makes it hard for teams to do meaningful work. Dealing with a constant false sense of urgency turns the team into a chaotic powerhouse, where everyone runs in different directions without making any real progress.
Switching between tasks all the time and feeling constantly overwhelmed can tire out the team, make them more stressed, and even lead to burnout. When employees don’t have time to really focus on their work or enjoy what they’re doing, they end up feeling unhappy, stuck, and dissatisfied. Being overly busy without a real urgency doesn’t help us move forward; it just makes things more stressful.
It’s reasonable to expect your team to handle urgent requests promptly. However, it becomes counterproductive when every request is treated as a top priority, making the team react hastily. As a leader, your responsibility is to cultivate a culture in your organization that values impact, creative thinking, and long-term value creation over unnecessary chaos, constant firefighting, and reactive thinking.
These are the five practices that can transform your leadership style from a constant state of panic, anxiety, or fear to intentional thinking and calm body language.
Acknowledge the Indicators
Leaders caught up in a perpetual state of frenzy often overlook the signs. Their relentless busyness blinds them to the adverse effects on their team’s productivity and performance. The initial step in addressing this issue is recognizing the signs of a false sense of urgency. This awareness empowers you to proactively foster genuine urgency and eliminate detrimental practices.
Here are five signs of an urgency-driven work culture:
1. Employees are expected to be available at all times.
2. Your team operates in a perpetual panic, consistently tackling urgent issues.
3. Ad hoc requests consistently consume your team’s capacity, with every demand treated as a top priority.
4. Your team lacks clarity on distinguishing valid requests, leading to confusion about where to invest time and energy.
5. Busyness is associated with high performance, overlooking the importance of value creation and productivity.
Real leadership starts by acknowledging how your actions may be fueling a misguided sense of urgency at work and taking steps to prevent it.
Look for the Underlying Cause
Identifying and acknowledging the signs of a problem is just the starting point; you must take decisive action. This involves delving into the root causes of your behavior, addressing any underlying fears, weaknesses, or other factors that drive unproductive actions. Failure to tackle the genuine cause means any attempted change yields only temporary results. Old habits of acting with a false sense of urgency persist, resurfacing intermittently.
Your erratic behavior not only puzzles your team but also erodes trust and respect, as your actions swing between rational and irrational.
Find out what triggers your reactive and hyperactive behavior:
• What fears might be influencing your conduct?
• What planning gaps contribute to your reactivity?
• What beliefs or expectations obstruct clear thinking?
• What challenges hinder your ability to prioritize work and offer clarity to your team?
Make a lasting change in your organization’s culture by getting to the core of your behavior issues, not just dealing with surface problems. This helps in better planning, setting priorities, and leading with a clear direction.
Be Mindful of Your Language
Leaders possess a significant influence; every word they say holds more weight, and are taken seriously. Expressing urgency is effective when leaders need tasks done promptly. But sometimes, leaders misuse this by giving everything a high priority, expecting the team to tackle it with enthusiasm. While leaders might use words like urgent, immediate, or top priority without harmful intent, it can be a thoughtless act. This behavior prompts the team to set aside current priorities and invest energy in tasks that may not warrant their time and attention.
Good leadership involves being mindful of your words. Your role isn’t just about setting the organization’s strategy; bringing that strategy to life is equally crucial. Your language- how you engage with your team, what you express, how you offer clarity, establish priorities, and communicate urgency- significantly influences the outcomes your team achieves.
Leadership is expressed through language. Be mindful of the words you choose when communicating the importance of a task, initiative, or idea. Make sure your team doesn’t feel overwhelmed by a false sense of urgency or react excessively to tasks that may not be genuine priorities due to a lack of clear communication.
Encouraging Decision-Making in Your Team
Empower your team to distinguish between crucial deadlines and other work priorities. Decision-making in an organization can go awry when leaders attempt to micromanage every aspect. Within significant decisions, numerous small choices arise. It’s these daily decisions that shape whether your employees engage in impactful work or unproductive busyness.
When leaders don’t involve their teams in the decision-making process or fail to empower them to differentiate true urgency from a misguided reaction, they create excessive dependence. Instead of leveraging the collective intelligence of the group for better decisions, it becomes a one-person show.
Leaders should not bear the entire responsibility of eliminating false urgency from their organization alone; they must share this responsibility with their teams.
In order to achieve this, leaders need to:
1. Clearly define what qualifies as an urgent task and what doesn’t.
2. Collaborate with the team to create a playbook for managing urgent tasks, particularly useful during high-stress periods.
3. Establish expectations for response times on various requests, specifying delivery timelines for projects, task completions, email responses, and protocols for handling customer complaints or issues.
4. Empower the team to decline unnecessary ad hoc meetings and discussions that might seem urgent but are, in reality, time-wasting activities.
Recognize Impact, Not Time Spent
What gets rewarded shapes how employees see what’s important in leadership.
- Do people get praised for fixing mistakes, or for stopping them in the first place?
- Is it for staying late to solve problems or for the positive impact they create?
- Are decisions encouraged for the long term, or are short-term fixes the focus?
Rewarding the right things sets the right expectations. It shows employees what actions matter and which ones don’t. Praising the right actions tells everyone in the organization what’s valued and appreciated, and what doesn’t hold much importance.
Encourage a culture where working late or on weekends is seen as unusual, not typical. Acknowledge and value creative thinking, risk-taking ability, determination, and courage in your team, rather than focusing on the hours spent solving problems.
Summary
In conclusion, a false sense of urgency in an organization leads to busy, stressed, and anxious employees without achieving impactful work or creating value. While others may notice this tendency, as a leader, you might overlook it. Engaging in constant firefighting prevents you from recognizing the detrimental effects on your team and the organization’s growth. To combat false urgency, take a moment to pause, recognize the signs, and understand the impact of your behavior.
Acknowledging that there’s room for improvement in your prioritization allows you to make corrections. However, sustainable change requires understanding the root cause, looking into your fears, weaknesses, or contributing factors. Instead of addressing symptoms, focus on the underlying issues.
The weight of a leader’s words is significant—when you label something as urgent, your team will prioritize it accordingly. Be cautious in your communication; reserve urgency for situations that truly demand immediate attention.
Rooting out false urgency is a shared responsibility. Leaders alone cannot make all decisions or be omnipresent. Empowering your team to make informed decisions and speak up when priorities are amiss contributes to achieving desired outcomes collectively.
Harness the power of rewards and recognition to drive positive behavior change. Use them to promote healthy work practices while discouraging unhealthy behaviors in your organization.
