"Hair fires combust spontaneously when Quadrant 2 is neglected."
(See Eisenhower Matrix below)
When Everything Is Urgent, Nothing Really Is
Having
a sense of urgency is critical for organizational success. Speed is a
competitive advantage. Teams who make fast decisions, experiment often,
and move to market swiftly tend to be more successful. However, there’s a
big difference between having a sense of urgency and a workplace
culture in which everything is always urgent.
Are you constantly
running from one meeting to another? Or letting your inbox, text alerts,
or calendar dictate how you work? When everything is urgent, we end up
focusing on doing small, day-to-day tasks rather than on achieving more
significant, impactful things.
Constant urgency – the desperate
pressure to be doing more, faster – harms productivity and motivation.
However, not all urgency is bad. The problem is unnecessary urgencies
that distract our energy and attention from the work that really
matters.
Moving From a Reactive to a Proactive Culture
Dealing
with conflicting priorities is not something new. Already in 2011, most
executives (64%) complained that they had too many conflicting
priorities.
Rushing and running in many directions doesn’t mean
your team is making progress. There’s a difference between speed and
hysteria or anxiety. Operating under constant pressure – constantly
reacting to external events – turns urgency into a toxic force. We end
up spending our days (and nights) dealing with self-inflicted fires.
Moving fast is not an indicator of team success – focusing on (and achieving) the right things fast should be the goal.
Urgent
is lazy. It’s easier to label everything as urgent than to take the
time to prioritize. Urgent removes accountability from managers who pass
all the pressure to the team. People have to work on more "initiatives”
just because their bosses doesn’t want to make tough decisions or push
back on their respective managers.
Urgent is power because
managers often define priorities without involving team members. They
confuse what’s important to them with what’s vital for achieving team
goals.
Urgent is stressful because managers equate a state of
constant alert with high performance. They make people jump from one
fire to another instead of doing meaningful work. Thus, they create a
culture of grind, burnout, and resentment.
An always-urgent
culture focuses on busyness, not outcome. It rewards people who are
constantly busy doing something instead of encouraging them to pause,
reflect, and think.
As Basecamp CEO Jason Fried wrote in It doesn’t have to be crazy at work,
“It’s no wonder people are working longer, earlier, later, on weekends,
and whenever they have a spare moment. People can’t get work done at
work anymore.”
Not all urgency is bad, however – the problem is when everything feels urgent.
There
are always going to be moving pieces. Life is messy. No matter how much
you plan, things usually get more complicated. And then there’s people:
someone’s priorities, delays, emotions, or agendas always get in the
way.
Urgency, when used in moderation, creates traction. It helps
break inertia and moves team members into action. However, when urgent
is the normal, teams lose focus. They chase shiny objects rather than
tackle strategic projects.
As Dermot Crowley wrote in his
incredible book, Urgent!, “Urgency is also a useful tool, and without
it, we would struggle to gain traction with important initiatives,
deliver client work on time, or meet business obligations. Most senior
managers use urgency as a lever to drive work forward.” The challenge is
that they associate a calm environment with a lack of productivity.
The
solution to this dilemma, as Crowley explains, is not to take an
opposite extreme position and try to slow everything. The answer lies in
dialing down the urgency to a more sustainable level – where the
urgency is neither acute (very strong) nor chronic (very long).
The
author believes that we cannot eradicate urgency, but we can minimize
unproductive urgency and avoid those last-minute things that waste our
time. We will never control unexpected events. However, we can control
how we react and avoid letting them dictate what is or isn't important.
Avoid falling into the urgency trap – take steps to move from a reactive to a more productive workplace culture.
As
Crowley explains, “The urgency trap is where we end up working with too
much or not enough urgency.” The reactive zone is where urgency is
acute and constant. On the other hand, the inactive zone is where
there’s an absence of urgency. The Active Zone is the sweet spot:
urgency increases productivity instead of harming it.
In reactive
cultures, everything is urgent and important. Conversely, a proactive
culture is one in which the organization undertakes to anticipate and
act before problems arise. By focusing on the right priorities, they
prevent every issue from becoming a fire.
How to Prioritize Your Team's Work
Redefine urgent
When
everything is urgent, nothing really is. When leaders label everything
urgent, they add unnecessary stress and anxiety, distracting teams from
doing meaningful work.
Start by redefining the notion of urgency
with your colleagues. Here are some of the questions I use too help my
clients reflect upon and define what urgency really means to them and
their team.
Does urgent mean immediate or important? How should
the team distinguish between an urgent crisis and an important request?
Who defines what's urgent: the manager or the team? Where do we need
more urgency and when do we need less?
Having a shared notion of
what urgent really means will save your team many headaches. Define
principles that are easy to observe. That something feels urgent to one
member doesn't mean it should become urgent for the team.
Prioritize important work, not just urgent
Use the vaunted Eisenhower Matrix popularized
by Stephen Covey to map your team’s workload and define a course of
action. This framework will help you neutralize an “always-urgent”
culture, eliminate time-wasters, and make more space for deep/ strategic
work.
Once you’ve captured all of your work in the respective quadrants, use this as your guide:
• High Urgency & High Importance: These are your highest priorities. They demand that you act quickly.
• Low Urgency & High Importance: These tasks have a much greater impact on helping you achieve your long-term goals. This is the sweet spot – you’re proactive, decreasing the number of pressing problems and making time for meaningful work.
• High Urgency & Low Importance: These are everyday distractions – daily fires that suck your team’s focus, energy, and time. Delegate to others or deprioritize – especially when someone else has imposed the urgency.
• Low Urgency & Not Important: These tasks shouldn’t be on your team’s to-do list right now. Get rid of them!
This activity is a wake-up call for managers. It provides a clear picture of the actual workload, promoting a conversation about what’s rewarded: Being busy and running from one fire to another, or doing impactful work that matters?
Focusing on what’s important minimizes emergencies, allowing them to be treated with the proper importance before they become a fire.
Pro Tip: If most of your projects fall in quadrant 1 (e.g., High Urgency/ High Importance), try using the Action Priority Matrix. Click here to learn about it.
Who Are You Serving?
One of the reasons behind conflicting priorities is that teams are unclear about who they really serve. They try to satisfy too many stakeholders and end up pleasing no one.
Prioritize whom you serve. When facilitating the team purpose exercise, one of the questions I ask people is: Who are you really serving? Most teams provide services to multiple constituents: the whole company, a specific department, one leader, the clients, the community, etc. However, defining the key stakeholder makes it easier to determine what’s urgent or not – every team should have one primary group they serve, not multiple.
This activity will also help you deal with managers who think everything is important and urgent. The key stakeholder’s needs, not powerplays, should determine your team’s priorities.
Integrate priorities across teams
According to Harvard Business Review, almost 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional. They often have conflicting agendas or legacy processes that hinder performance. Most importantly, individual or department-specific goals are rewarded over collective ones.
Start with the end in mind: What matters the most to the organization?
Define criteria to establish cross-functional priorities. Establishing clear trade-offs will help you resolve conflicting priorities. Use even over statements to effectively prioritize one good thing even over another good thing.
For example, shall your team prioritize urgent work even over important work– or the other way around? Should it prioritize cross-departmental goals even over department-specific goals?
This doesn't mean that one thing doesn’t matter but rather that one matters most. When push comes to shove, your team will know what to prioritize even over what else. Establishing criteria for prioritizing work will save your team many headaches, mainly when conflict arises.
Prioritization is a zero-sum game
Time
is a finite resource. No matter how hard you try to squeeze it, there’s
never enough to do everything. We don’t get more time; we make time.
That’s why prioritization is critical to focus energy and resources on
the initiatives that matter.
Unfortunately, leaders often forget
to realize that time – and prioritization – is a zero-sum game. They
keep adding priorities until everything is essential and the workload is
unmanageable. New priorities should replace existing ones, not be added
to an already extensive to-do list.
Use this rule of thumb: Whenever you prioritize one project, which one will you deprioritize?
Urgent
doesn’t always mean faster. Rushing work or focusing on the wrong
priorities can waste your team’s time––especially when they need to fix
the mistakes caused by rushing without clear priorities.
Rethink how you approach communication: shift from reactive to proactive.
Synchronous
communication is super-fast and works well when there’s a big fire.
However, for normal issues, asynchronous communication is more
effective. It allows people to design their day around work rather than
meetings or calls, meaning they can achieve more.
Prepare for real emergencies
Discerning
self-inflicted emergencies from real ones is crucial. It promotes a
calmer working environment and induces a sense of urgency when it’s
really needed. Also, when facing a real emergency, the team can take it
seriously and not like it's just another fire drill.
It’s useful
to know how to reach someone in an emergency. An escalation rule can
help identify who should be contacted and which specific channel or
method to use. This helps people understand that, if the protocol has
been activated, it's a real emergency.
When urgency is acute and
constant, it can harm productivity. However, a balanced approach to
urgency can turn speed into a competitive advantage. Discuss with your
team what urgent really means.
"Move fast in the right direction –not in every direction."
--Dermot Crowley
Check out a related post: Busy is A Four-Letter Word
To your greater success and fulfillment,
Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT
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