Maintaining a Sense of Urgency

Through good times and bad, through crises and times of change, businesses that thrive, grow and succeed are those best able to maintain a sense of urgency.

But just what does that mean, to maintain “a sense of urgency?”

Many people equate urgency to lots of tasks being done quickly and frantically. If you check your thesaurus, you won’t find that urgency, quickness and franticness are synonyms. Unfortunately, too many people buy into that myth. And that’s exactly the wrong approach when a business is contending with a crisis or profound change. While complacency is certainly the wrong way to respond to challenging circumstances, a false sense of urgency can often be more dangerous.

In his latest book, A Sense of Urgency, John P. Kotter ably explains the difference between the three responses and provides a very useful guide for businesspeople facing change, crises and challenges. Kotter, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership Emeritus at Harvard Business School, has been lecturing and writing about leadership for years.

He has authored three outstanding books on the subject in the past decade, that have become invaluable for today’s business leaders: Leading Change, The Heart of Change and Our Iceberg is Melting. This latest book carries forward and develops the themes of the previous three while folding in and updating much of what he learned in the intervening years.

The essence of true urgency lies in doing the right things the right way. It is “ridding oneself of unproductive tasks that add little value to the organization but tend to clog managers’ calendars and impede necessary action.” It is not allowing subordinates to “delegate tasks up” to you. It is that and much more.

No doubt you’ve dealt with managers who appear to be operating with urgency. They run from meeting to meeting, always checking their BlackBerry, coming in early and leaving late. Perhaps you’ve even been guilty of false urgency. According to Kotter (and our own observations), managers like this tend not to get a lot accomplished, and rarely contribute to addressing the immediate crises.

Kotter defines complacent behavior as “unchanging activity that ignores the organization’s opportunities or hazards, focusing inward.” He says that a false sense of urgency is aimless, “frenetic behavior leading to exhaustion and stress.”

Complacency is built on a feeling that the status quo is basically fine. On the other hand, false urgency is built on a platform of anxiety and anger. By contrast, the true sense of urgency is action that is alert, fast moving, and focused externally on important issues.

That external focus is so important that Kotter devotes an entire chapter to it. In fact, bringing the outside world in is one of his four tactics to achieve urgency.

As noted, a complacent organization is one that is inwardly focused. He writes, “An inwardly focused organization inevitably misses new opportunities and hazards coming from competitors, customers, or changes in the regulatory environment. When you don’t see opportunities or hazards, your sense of urgency drops.”

Bringing the outside world in can take many forms, and Kotter cites a number of examples. For instance, bringing in the voice of the customers helps the organization become more cognizant of what it is doing right (and wrong), and how it might improve its products, services and customer support in ways that assure and improve customer loyalty.

The outside world, as Kotter notes, is a constantly changing beast, with new challenges always popping up. New technologies arise that could mean the death knell of your business or, conversely, make your business more valuable if those technologies are leveraged correctly.

An important component of urgency, which Kotter only obliquely mentions, is the central role of communications. Unfortunately, he falls into the usual trap of referring to organizational communications repeatedly in the context of a function performing various tasks. In fact, effective communications – both internally and externally – are implicit in truly urgent behavior, though he fails to say so.

Leaders and managers operating with urgency are very clear in their communications and keep their people in the loop. They engage regularly in lively discussion, dialogue and debate inside the company, and assure that the information they impart to the organization is both timely and relevant.

Despite Kotter’s oversight and his omission of that key point, it’s a fine book with some very important counsel for today’s manager.