Is Urgency Culture Killing Your Team?
As an executive coach, I’ve seen my share of leaders who (unknowingly) wreak havoc on their teams by creating an artificial urgency culture. Louis, a government agency director, is a great example. He works email late at night and on weekends. It helps him keep his sanity, with his busy schedule. Cool.
However, because Louis’ direct reports were receiving emails from him during “off work” hours, they assumed they needed to be working those hours too. They also thought Louis was expecting responses from them at all hours day and night...
What is Urgency Culture?
Maybe you’ve heard the term ‘urgency culture’ buzzing around. But what is it and why should you care? Is it just another reason for people to complain, or could it be negatively affecting you and your team?
In the workplace, urgency culture refers to a relentless push for immediate action and constant availability. It’s when the team believes every email needs an instant reply, every project is priority #1, and every meeting is critical. You know the feeling?
Don’t get me wrong, a proper sense of urgency is important. But, as leaders we need that urgency to be moving towards the organizational vision, not a frenzied attempt to assuage our every thought, fear, or whimsy.
A healthy urgency leads to carrying out goals. Urgency culture just leads to perpetual overwhelm and burnout.
The Negative Impact of Urgency Culture
As I mentioned, Louis’ team was working day and night trying to be immediately responsive to him. They were also taking their eyes off true priorities and creating unwarranted “fire drills” for their teams. With every thought, idea, or question he posed, they leapt into action – which meant their team members did too. Not cool.
Check out what Gallup learned: On average, it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after an interruption. When urgency culture rears its head, it means tens (or even hundreds) of interruptions every single day. At a minimum, these mental disruptions are causing major productivity delays.
Teams that enable urgency culture end up compromising quality, increasing turnover, and making rushed decisions. They also suffer reduced innovation, ineffective communication, deflated engagement, and more.
Put simply, urgency culture decreases quality, productivity, and the well-being of the team.
Decreased Quality of Work
Strategic planning, complex problem solving, and creative thinking require time and diligence. When speed and multi-focus are prioritized over careful planning and execution, the quality of everything suffers.
When we’re sucked into a tornado of tasks, interruptions, and more tasks, focus on the bigger picture is lost. We end up wasting time being incredibly busy but missing the mark on true priorities.
Decreased Well-Being of Workers
As leaders, we have a lot on our plates, including the well-being of our teams. Urgency culture and the pressure of being “always on” creates unnecessary stress and performance anxiety. Prolonged intense stress is accompanied by burnout, sick days, and turnover.
Got your attention yet?
Let me tell you a little more about Louis and his team… When I met them, the team felt overburdened, frustrated, and stressed. Louis seemed unreasonable and, due to their artificial ‘urgency culture’, they were missing important targets and tripping over each other in pursuit of constantly moving targets. Morale was low and he’d already lost one key team member.
So, how do you know if you’re unintentionally creating an urgency culture? Glad you asked!
Four Urgency Culture Creators: 🔨
- 24/7 Outreach: Sending emails, texts or IMs at all hours creates an expectation for immediate responses and around-the-clock availability from your team. This disrespects the need for work-life balance and causes teams to always stay on high-alert for a “ping” from you.
- Micromanaging: Excessive oversight and needs for (unscheduled) detailed updates create a constant level of anxiety among employees, as they worry more about updating you than focusing on the project at hand.
- Lack of Clear Prioritization: Failing to clearly communicate priorities, or often changing them, leads to chaos, confusion, redundancy, and a lot of busyness with limited results.
- Reacting to Every Issue as a Crisis: Leaders must discern, and mentor their teams to discern, the difference between “true crisis mode,” “important mode,” and “may be good to do, but I’m just thinking out loud mode.”
Symptoms To Beware Of: 😱
Recognizing you might be contributing to an urgency culture is the first step, but if you’re still not sure, here are some red flags to look for amongst your team.
- Dropping balls: When teams are caught up in an urgency culture, a little gets done on a lot of things, but important timelines and strategies get missed.
- Meeting overload: Team members are grumbling about too many meetings, and/or are not engaged during meetings. Urgency cultures are notorious for holding too many ineffective scheduled and impromptu meetings. This only adds to the overwhelm and feeling of running fast on the wheel but getting nowhere.
- Mistakes: When everything is urgent, things get sloppy. This means rework and costly errors.
- Lost trust: Teams engulfed in an urgency culture lose trust in their leadership. Eventually, they take on a “let’s wait it out” approach, as they’ve learned something new will come as soon as they get started with “this”. They also stop believing you have a sense of what their day-to-day operations are like or worse, you don’t care.
Three Tips for Ending an Artificial Urgency Culture 😅
Getting back to Louis…None of this chaos was Louis’ intent. HE knew what was and was not a priority. And, he didn’t expect responses from his team during off-work hours. Unfortunately, Louis hadn’t told his team “I don’t need an answer to this today” or “This is not priority, but something for us to talk about in our next meeting.”
Louis also hadn’t made it clear that, although he often squeezed in work late at night and on weekends, he did not expect the same from them. And, unless he specifically said, “this is urgent”, he wasn’t looking for a response until team members were back at work.
Fortunately, Louis is a quick learner and hopped right into action once we figured out why his people were so disgruntled. We crafted a plan, and within weeks he incorporated a few simple principles into his communication that shifted the culture from frantic to focused.
If you suspect you might have inadvertently created an urgency culture for your team, here are a few simple things you can do to remedy it:
- Share Your Expectations: Maybe it works for you to read and send emails at night and on weekends. But it’s important to TELL your team immediate response is not your expectation.
- Set Clear Priorities: Clearly communicate what tasks and projects are truly urgent versus important, but not immediate needs.
- Acknowledge and Reward Accomplishments: Celebrate well-executed projects and important deadlines being met. This shows you value your people and the importance of their work, as well as the quality of their work.
Healthy Urgency
Urgency culture is more than a buzzword. It’s a problem that costs your team productivity, trust, and peace.
But when leaders turn the story around and create healthy urgency instead, they develop a team with less stress and better results. When there’s a healthy sense of urgency, there’s magically more time for strategic work and trust grows. When priorities and expectations are clear, deadlines are met with ease and teams feel good about their work quality and their roles on the team.
Perhaps most importantly, leaders who set the tone for healthy urgency enjoy teams that move toward their goals, without feeling drained or flustered, but focused and engaged.
Reach out today to learn how our coaches can help you create a culture of clarity, accountability, and remarkable results.
