“Work is getting in the way of thinking.” said a CEO I admire and fret about. And a bright, focused financial advisor wanting to grow her practice recently told me, “I keep putting off making my growth plan while I check off today’s to-do’s, thinking I’ll make time but….”
My last blog post was on the noble work of vision and the hard work of execution. This post is related. It’s about the challenge of clearing the path to attend to the critical few and genuinely urgent aspects of leading and building a company.
The Dual Power of Urgency
“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Samuel Johnson.
It is a common challenge that the urgent trumps the strategic. When the Board is about to meet, when quarterly results are to be reported, when a key customer is upset enough to cancel an order, or an FDA quality auditor is about to arrive, the focus is clear and urgent regardless of your readiness for or role in those events. But factually, not every day’s agenda contains those important and urgent events, regardless of how it feels!
Dealing with the urgent allows us to feel a sense of control — when fires must be put out or a near-term opportunity presents itself. Urgency creates energy (until it exhausts us), clarity – we know what must be done by when; and it gives us a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, “Got that done!” But sometimes it’s only an illusion of productivity and an investment in our ego not our company.
This false urgency sounds like Henny Penny looking at the sky and shouting, “So do something!” It’s ready, fire, aim. It’s pet projects and the latest bright shiny object. False urgency can be addictive and become a company culture attribute which does not foster long-term sustainability.
On the other hand, urgency also is what John Kotter describes as “a gut level determination one feels when they wake each morning – alert, ready for action and focused on accomplishing what’s important.”
He calls it genuine urgency, and metaphorically, it looks like a formation of geese headed south or an orchestra artfully playing a difficult piece of music. It’s a leader and their team leveraging their talent with focus, accountability and time on e.g. ideation (what ifs), personal development, growth planning, culture-minding. They are purposeful and committed on the near-term tasks relevant to strategic objectives. Genuine urgency requires us to wear bifocals to see both near and far. Too many leaders only wear readers.
Where Does the Time Go?
- In a recent survey of executives, managers, and professionals, 60% of those who carry smartphones for work are connected to their jobs 13.5 or more hours a day on weekdays and about five hours on weekends, for a total of about 72 hours.
- The daily number of business emails sent and received each day globally is 124.5 billion; if you include all emails, the number is 293.6 billion.
- It’s reported that there are 25 million meetings a day in the US with executives spending about 50% of their time in meetings; 67% are deemed unproductive.
If you want to better balance doing with thinking and urgency with purpose, here are three simple first steps. I dare you to take the Calendar Test and then complete the Eisenhower Matrix (made popular by Stephen Covey.) Then sit down to a Reality Test — honestly reflect on what must change.
- Calendar Test: simply record how you spend each 15- or 30-minute interval of time in your day (not just at the office!) across 2 or even 3 weeks. Categorize the events/activities and analyze — a simple pie chart perhaps? Where does the time go?
- Eisenhower Matrix: allocate your categories into the four boxes in the matrix of Urgent/Less Urgent and Important/Less Important.
- Face Reality: Where are you so busy with the urgent that there is too little time to think about and work on the important? Where are you reinforcing false urgency vs. coaching others on what’s genuinely urgent? (I hope you will visit my book, Exit Signs, for more on this and other tools for eliminating the unimportant.)
Take these three steps that support wearing bifocals to see your leadership effectiveness, and frankly, your health, well-being and career satisfaction.