Sense of Urgency in Organizational Change

Introduction

Harvard Business School Professor Dr. John Kotter has outlined a practical eight-step model for Leading Change. Steps 1-3 help unfreeze the status quo and create a climate for change; Steps 4-6 introduce new practices, engage, and enable the organisation; and Step 7-8 ground the changes in a new culture to ensure sustainability. Because we know that implementing and sustaining change is difficult, it requires a comprehensive strategy.

Amongst many thought-provoking and practical steps of Kotter model, is step one that focuses on Creating a Sense of Urgency; which in essence moves the entire change process from Control to Collaboration. However, Sense of Urgency has been mixed up with Hurry, Rush, Speed and Velocity to the extent that urgency has caused unanticipated resistance to change from the outset.

“People often think that because they are running just as fast as they can, they are urgent, when in fact they are simply anxious. Anxiety is not urgency”. John Kotter

Given the importance of setting the stage, we shed light on why ensuring a sense of urgency among people is crucial to getting cooperation for change. Unless individuals understand the urgency of a situation, complacency sets in and change becomes very difficult, if not impossible.

Hurry and Rush IS NOT “Sense of Urgency”

"Great proposition, but we urgently need to finish yesterday! “We cannot wait, we are really under pressure”. “We are really behind schedules; we need your help ASAP”.

Statements made by many business leaders, transformation and change initiatives leaders and clients who are often connected with double-booked meetings, conflicting or back-to-back conference calls, hectic work schedules, pressing phone calls, emails marked "urgent”, “burning”, “pressing”, calendar reminders, and endless instant WhatsApp messages, and the list goes on. There is no let-up even after one arrives home. Proposal review, quality check preparing for a presentation that you're giving in the morning, etc. Tomorrow is a replica of the above.

So, you rush off; half-walking, half-running, half-eating, and perhaps half-performing.

I guess this frantic sense of being "in hurry" seems familiar to all of us to extent I dare to say that we are suffering from “hurry sickness”; a mixture of anxiety and restlessness and that is often accompanied by a continual feeling of stress. Its symptoms include high tension, declining quality of work, tiredness, and, eventually, serious health problems.

There is no denying the fact that we need to nurture our abilities for a continuous effort and unremitting attempt to accomplish and achieve more and more in less time. But we also need to make sure that our fully work loaded people are not pressured to the maximum, with no acknowledgement of the limits of what they can take on and consequently, they may commit to more than they can handle and get flustered by any sign of a problem that face them.

Often hurriedness is mistaken with multitasking, urgency, and time. It should be noted that hurry-sick people can run a greater risk of high anxiety and stress at an organizational level. Hurry-sick leaders and excessive time-urgency clients may tend to engage in self-defeating behaviors and thoughts such as being excessively worried about schedules, keeping overly tight deadlines, rushing when rushing is not needed, let alone that rush begets mistakes.

“Sense of Urgency” is your ability to proactively address situations. It is about being more assertive, giving clear feedback, empowering others, stopping to juggle multiple tasks that spread your best teams too thinly, steadily focusing on few things at a time, prioritizing, prioritizing, prioritizing, and lastly switching focus from activities to outcomes.

What is a sense of urgency? What is it not?

With the fact that organizations are flooded with change, and many are finding it?hard to keep up with such pace, that the rapid rate of change will not subside. It will only increase, but that bad news reality brings good new within its fold that such sheer pace of change can be managed through a viable approach. John Kotter’s Eight Step Model for Leading Change sets out the first step of what, how to create and approach a sense of urgency in the originations.

In essence, sense of urgency means that leaders take actions that capture the attention of critical organizational stakeholders and explain the importance of making speedy changes to the existing condition. In doing so leaders alert the organization that change must occur and the leaders also begin articulating a business case for change to prepare the organization for the transformation journey.

Creating a business case for change is critical to leading a change effort. Leaders who neglect this step of Kotter's change process may run the risk of generating organizational resistance to the change effort.

organizational stakeholders will be more receptive to the change effort when change leaders are able to explain the two elements of business case for change: (1) Why keeping things as they are now is not in their best interests, (2) Why a best possible future is better than the status quo.

When the business case for change is able to effectively communicate that narrative, the ability of change leaders to gain organizational support for change effort will be exponential.

So, while Urgency is the ability to recognize pressing problems as opportunities, It is not;

• Addressing the problem in a negative way
• Reacting to a single event
• An Administration of communication at the bedside people.
• Showing the staff their poor outcomes due to poor performance.
• Running just as fast with change as you can, how much you could do more.

The business case for change reflects a culture of awareness that addresses market trends, competitor undertakings, technological innovations, people challenges and aspiration, and other external and internal factors to avoid the success syndrome and encourage proactive change.

Why sense of urgency is important?

When leaders create a sense of urgency, they create a compelling narrative and a business case that describes, clarifies, and justifies why change is necessary in the organization and why it is not in stakeholders best interest to stay in the current state. Often leaders are fixated with establishing tight deadlines for making changes in the organization. tight deadlines trigger intense competition for the allocation of resources; a perfect recipe for functional conflict in the organization.

The business case for change emanating from the sense of urgency is a compelling narrative selling the value of “best possible future” and making the status quo a dangerous place for the stakeholders to remain in.?

How should we develop a sense of urgency?

1. Establish Leadership Commitment: Without seriousness and commitment from the leadership, the vision and changes cannot cascade downwards. Such commitment is manifested in absolute resolve to change the status quo, to push employees to no longer be complacent and to help employees see that it is critical to move forward sooner rather than later and that the coming change will eliminate obvious waste.

With Leadership Commitment to transform into a "best possible future", the organization understands why change is no longer optional.

2. Challenge The Team: Everyone in the organization need to understand that we all work for creating value either for our clients, our people, or our organization. Creating value needs creating solutions which are beneficial and fulfilling the needs of our clients, our people, and our organization.?We need to empower the teams to challenge the status quo and question assumptions on why we are doing this. This requires managers and employees?to talk directly and?regularly with unhappy stakeholders to understand their concerns.

3. Create A Culture Of Transparency: When the organization grows then it becomes difficult to understand what the things organization is doing to sustain the business. Make the business goals transparent to everyone and explain it in a way which is understandable to everyone. This includes transparent communication channels and sharing good and bad news and sharing data throughout the organization that supports the claim that change is necessary.

You cannot create a culture of transparency without effectively communicating to your team why change is necessary.

4. Promote Courageous Leaders Not Complacent Managers: Organization is built with people and when forming the team it is essential to keep a check on what people are being hired. Have people who can inspire people, give feedback, can take feedback, is action oriented, protects the company’s values and finally keep creating a sense of urgency. Courageous Leaders can take your company to the next level.

5. Measure The Outcome: It is important for leadership and the team to constantly measure performance and ask back if they are improving and are aligned with the change which is happening in the market. This can be done by Looking at:

• What slows down our progress?
• What skill set are we lacking and what can we do about it?
• What are our stakeholders saying about our product/services?

Ultimately, ensuring organizational decisions and management actions?are in agreement?with change communications (walk the talk).

In simple words: continuous feedback and continuous improvement is the way towards building a sense of urgency.

Enablers to accelerate a sense of urgency

3 enablers that accelerate the creation of a strong sense of urgency around change:

1. Build and evolve a guiding coalition: you need to rally People from across the organisation – they should feel the strong urgency; from all silos and levels. Finding people for this is not as easy as it may sound but using the ONA may prove to be a great workable strategy. The challenge of making them work well together is the real sticky wicket.
2. Form a change vision with the guiding coalition
3. Populate your guiding coalition with a wider network.

With such 3 Enablers, we can create a climate for change.