Managers: Urgency Is More Than Just About Deadlines and Speed

Urgency is a significant issue that can make or break an initiative, even a company. When urgency is present most people can feel it and it works as an insistence or pressure, an incentive or a need, a driver that motivates people---that lights a fire in the belly. And even though people can feel it, very few people understand exactly what urgency is.

Urgency is most often described as a force or a power from the outside, like a deadline or a need for speed in functioning. But the problem with this externally understood perspective of urgency is that it leads to intense bursts of action that then fade, or if sustained for a long enough time can lead to burnout.

Nevertheless, urgency is vital to the success of any program or venture as long as it is well understood and effectively used.

So, what is urgency?

Urgency is a felt experience. But this tells us very little.

Because it’s important to replicate urgency from time to time describing it as a felt experience offers very little if nothing to guide you as a manager in replicating this vital condition.  So let’s look at three elements of urgency that are present in every situation in which urgency is needed.

1 --- Urgency is not casual. When it is present and effective there is a need for it. It is necessary, required. The lack of it would lead to negative outcomes.

For example, when a major change is required and a specific plan has been developed, it is then time to communicate to the team(s) who will execute it. The people involved need to ratchet up their active engagement to accomplish their objectives. What does ratchet up imply?

Presumably, prior to the major change, the team or teams have reached a condition of relative stasis. In other words they are pleased with that they have accomplished, with what they’ve needed to do up to this point, and are in their respective comfort zones. They are relatively self-satisfied and are proceeding in an accomplished state of mind.

The new major change insists they leave their comfort zones and re-energize, i.e. they must a) identify the values inherent in and specific to the new change, b) integrate them as benefits into their personal and professional lives, c) marshal and prioritize their emotional and mental resources necessary to participate and contribute fully, d) gather and organize the external resources necessary to move forward, and take action, and e) intensify their focus and engagement in order to meet and exceed expectations. They must adapt a need-to-accomplish state of mind.

A word of caution: there is also the condition known as false urgency. This is a situation replete with activity---frantic, unfocused, the appearance of something happening when what is really happening is the expenditure of tremendous energy with little effective result: calendars booked and double- even triple-booked with meetings, presentation after presentation, deck after deck, discussion after discussion, and what to show for it?  Usually emotional and physical tension, drained hopes and expectations, a feeling of time wasted, frustration, anger that can lead to rancor, and the not unsurprising verbal/emotional fight. False urgency is a flight from danger, being pursued by the monster of loss.

2 --- Internal and external locus of control: These are psychological concepts describing where a person perceives the control in a situation to be.

Urgency is very often understood from an external locus of control---i.e. a deadline is the controlling factor; or a drop in income and profit; or the boss is demanding more speed. Because these controllers are external those responding must comply, even be deferential, submitting to the external demand.

What of the internal locus of control? How is a team member motivated by his or her own sense of urgency?

As I said above, team members must have a sense of the benefits that accrue to them---not just professionally but personally, i.e. more meaningfully with regard to their own ambitions and aspirations: their own sense of self-esteem and the esteem they are granted by their colleagues; the progressive fulfillment of their own dreams; their standing in their professional and personal communities; and their desired compensation for the effort extended. These and other possibilities constitute their own internal locus of control. This is not about compliance but expression, not submission but expansion, not running from danger or disaster but about reaching toward a vision that is significant in their lives and meaningful to them as humans.

3 --- Depth: Another way to understand urgency within the idea of depth resides in the question “Why?”  

For example: Why is this thing being done? and/or Why is this thing being done in this way?

These are not resistance questions but a desire to enter deeply into the project. This is evidence of a seriousness and gravity of intention. Answering these questions, and others like them, can generate an urgency of commitment.

Those needing answers are desiring a professional and personal stake in the project. Rather than just employees they want to become virtual partners and this alone will spark a sense of urgency that can carry them through the long hours and tough times, let alone open the path to innovation, because it’s become personal, and optimized execution which is their professional pride. Interest becomes commitment which then becomes dedication all driven by personal and professional urgency.

To Recap

Managers are sometimes, and maybe even often, responsible for inspiring and/or facilitating urgency among those they lead. Understanding the elements of urgency is critical.

Urgency is not casual. Work to develop a sense of internal locus of control. And foster a move into depth.

Furthermore, keep conscious of the following process:

• Help those you lead identify the new values set by articulating them as best you can;
• Assist in integrating the new values as benefits, professionally AND personally;
• Show those you lead how you prioritize your own mental and emotional resources (internal locus of control);
• Organize external resources into a plan of action;
• Adopt a need-to-accomplish state of mind which activates the process of leaving their comfort zones behind.

Use this template and tweak it to suit your own management style. It can and will yield commitment, dedication, professional connection to the project, respect for you as a leader; a personal sense of responsibility; and the internal urgency which will carry the project forward without being a drain on energy.

Please let me know how you understand urgency not from the outside but from within.

(Photo Credit: Leo Reynolds, Flickr)

Jim Sniechowski has published his first novel, Worship of Hollow Gods, at Amazon.com. In Worship of Hollow Gods Jim bears witness to the world of a sensitive, nine-year-old boy, subjected to the underbelly of his Polish Catholic family in working class Detroit. The year is 1950. The family gathers for a Friday night family poker/pinochle party. The outcome reveals a world no one ever talked about then and are forbidden to talk about now---the unspoken, the impermissible, the reality beneath every family’s practiced facade---and what lies beneath when the front has been ripped away. Worship of Hollow Gods is available now in Kindle and paperback for at https://tinyurl.com/hollowgods 

James Sniechowski, PhD and his wife Judith Sherven, PhD https://JudithandJim.com have developed a penetrating perspective on people’s resistance to success, which they call The Fear of Being Fabulous. Recognizing the power of unconscious programming to always outweigh conscious desires, they assert that no one is ever failing. They are always succeeding. The question is, at what? 

Currently working as consultants on retainer to LinkedIn providing executive coaching, leadership training and consulting as well as working with private clients around the world, they continually prove that when unconscious beliefs are brought to the surface, the barriers to greater success and leadership presence begin to fade away. They call it Overcoming the Fear of Being Fabulous. https://OvercomingtheFearofBeingFabulous.com