Behave With Urgency Every Day

In this week’s lesson, we learn the second tactic to raising the level of true urgency: behave with urgency every day. While that might evoke a mental image of a chicken running around with his head cut off, its exactly the opposite. When true urgency drives us, it is evident in everything that we do. We don’t wait for the next scheduled meeting with our manager to raise a concern. We don’t wait for the annual meeting to share what we’ve learned about our competition or the threats to the organization. Instead, our normal behaviors and rhetoric reflect a constant focus on the opportunities and threats that exist around us.

And I’m really good at this.

As I read through the chapter, though, I had to admit that I’m also failing.

Let me explain.

So, I work for a fast growing company. As we’ve learned, the need for change arises in the face of opportunities or threats. Urgency has to be aimed to take advantage of the opportunities and mitigate the threats. Focusing only on the former, the opportunities that have presented themselves as a result of our growth include:

• identifying and realizing new ways to meet customer needs with our core capabilities - extending our work and entrenching ourselves as a high quality service provider.
• the ability to support our team members’ growth by identifying new projects or missions for them to support - meaning they can grow in their careers without having to leave the company.

While these are just a few of the opportunities, they are enough to help you understand the next part of this. We have a Director aligned to each of our core competency skill areas. Their responsibilities include understanding enough about all of our projects to identify those new ways to meet customer needs using their skill area. They are also responsible for ensuring the care and feeding of the team members which include their professional development. It’s incredibly important that they meet those expectations and it is partially my job to empower them to do so by ensuring they have the broader awareness of what’s going on across all projects and skill areas.

We have a monthly meeting that has two main objectives:

1. Build trust and comradery among the Directors and Deputy Directors.
2. Share information about projects, customer trends, updates etc. across all skill areas.

On one hand, this is a mechanism in which we are bringing the outside in. Good on us right?

Well, it only works if everyone shows up most of the time.

And that’s not been happening.

And I’ve been letting it go.

And this is where I’m failing.

Now, we’re talking about Director-level folks and they are all really busy. Not a single one of them is a slacker so when they miss the meeting, I know it is because they are doing something useful.

However, by continuing to allow this meeting to seem optional or allowing it to be deprioritized among other meetings or activities, I’m actually communicating the opposite of the urgency that I know to be needed. What’s worse is that the initiatives that we’ve said are most important end up delayed and potentially forgotten as a result. In effect, my accommodations have not been congruent with what I think, feel or say needs to be our sense of urgency.

Certainly, there are other ways that I am reinforcing the need for urgent action but what we learn from this chapter is that in order to bring about true urgency, we must be hyper focused on the various messages we are communicating about urgency. It’s too easy and natural for folks to become, remain or sink back into complacency. We must be relentless in order to prevent that from happening!

I love studying leadership and one of the main reasons is that I continue to learn new things. I continue to be humbled as I realize how much better of a leader I can become in the future!

Being aware that some of my actions are undermining what I perceive to be a necessary sense of urgency means that I am even better equipped to ensure the needed action is initiated and doesn’t get bogged down!

Leading change is such a daunting undertaking but it is empowering to learn small, daily habits that are impactful and effective in helping to bring about that change.

To behave with urgency every day, Kotter offers 5 tangible actions to keep us on track:

1. purge and delegate - this requires us to identify the most important items that need our attention and eliminate or delegate anything else!
2. move with speed - after doing the first thing, you have more time. Use it to respond more immediately or address more high priority issues.
3. speak with passion - use every opportunity to reiterate the need for change; bonus points for finding natural and varied ways to do this with enthusiasm.
4. match words and deeds - this is self explanatory.
5. let them all see it - find appropriate ways to share these urgent actions and your progress towards them with as many in your organization as possible.

What I am most starting to value about the tactics in this book is that they can be applied to whole companies or small teams. They work with large change efforts or smaller ones. This means we can start to practice these tactics often. On our journey to lead large, impactful change efforts, the ability to ingrain these tools into our leadership is invaluable.

Next week, we’ll focus on tactic three: find opportunity in crises. Thanks for reading!