Whether in driving change within an organisation or in enhancing product and/or service delivery, it is important for leaders to instil a sense of urgency and be role models of that among their peers and subordinates.
To achieve this, they need to understand what actions demonstrate a sense of urgency, what actions do not, and why having such progressive organisational culture is necessary.
Essentially, having a sense of urgency is crucial to address complacency. Internally, this can refer to satisfaction with the status quo, i.e. justifying for any lack of action to current practices and continuing existing operations or processes that do not take into account new opportunities or threats outside.
Externally, complacency can be seen in the way products and/or services are being delivered to customers, which will only be addressed when problems that could have been avoided through foresight actually arise.
In any case, complacency can be extremely dangerous for organisations because it prevents them from adapting to today’s rapidly changing and competitive environment. This usually stems from past successes, which do not truly reflect future ones.
As such, leaders need to encourage their organisations to have a sense of urgency. However, this does not mean that they should always react to present or incoming problems on a daily basis – this is more to handling emergencies rather than being urgent.
Leaders should also be careful not to create false urgency. This usually involves generating a lot of activities that lead to conflicts or unnecessary meetings instead of productive results.
False urgency is often rooted in anger and anxiety, and does not actually strive to solve the actual problem or come up with real solutions. Subsequently, it can demotivate subordinates to accomplish their job tasks, thus lowering their work productivity.
So what really is a sense of urgency? Instead of frantic activities, this ‘urgency’ is proactive and long term. It requires everyone within an organisation to make a change in order to achieve success, even amidst internal and external challenges.
“This set of thoughts, feelings, and actions is never associated with an endless list of exhausting activities. It has nothing to do with anxious running from meeting to meeting. It’s not supported by an adrenaline rush that cannot be sustained over time,” says John Kotter, a renowned thought leader in business, leadership, and change, and author of A Sense of Urgency.
“True urgency focuses on critical issues, not agendas overstuffed with the important and the trivial. True urgency is driven by a deep determination to win, not anxiety about losing.
“With attitude of true urgency, you try to accomplish something important each day, never leaving yourself with a heart-attack-producing task of running one thousand miles in the last week of the race,” he further elaborates.
