If you’ve followed this blog for a while (and if you don’t, you should — my mother likes when I’m validated by followers), you know that I often warn people against following the Tyranny of the Urgent in allocating their time. Best practice practice is to let clear priorities and goals be your north star, with no urgently waving flag distracting you from the big picture.
Today, though, I want to talk about urgency in a new way. The Tyranny of the Urgent centers around small things that don’t matter or problems that burn hot but leave very little lasting impact. Now, retain that thought, but put it aside for now.
Years ago, when updating my résumé, there was an early draft that I did myself. In place of the two to four sentences where you write about who you are and why you’re God’s gift to Creation, I just put four words: I Get Things Done. (Since having learned about the value of professional résumé writers, I have burned this version and listen to their wise counsel.)
Why did this statement feel right? I work with a lot of people in coaching and management positions who understand what needs to happen to make their business better or move on to the next level. But that’s just it — they can identify what they need to do, but getting it done is another thing entirely.
The biggest hurdle to accomplishing these tasks is that they’re difficult or require too much of a time investment. They require a lot of thought and planning, but the truth is that the big things don’t come easily. And if you don’t have the sense of urgency to get these things done, then they just won’t happen.
People often feel great when they walk out of a planning session with three clearly identified goals in hand. There is a feeling of clarity of purpose, like you’re finally on the right track. But I can tell you from experience, knowing what you need to do and doing it are two entirely different things.
I had a peer who was running a division, and he was excellent at his job. But he had a soft touch, and unfortunately there was someone on his team, let’s call him Joe, who just couldn’t perform. Joe was in a critical sales role and had undergone extensive coaching, but he just wasn’t able to put the pieces together. Ultimately, he’d been given a very fair shot, but it just didn’t make sense to keep him around.
My peer had already taken great pains to try and make Joe work, but even when it was clear what needed to be done, he couldn’t bring himself to fire him. Without a sense of urgency, all he saw was that he had a difficult task in front of him that he didn’t want to do. And so he didn’t.
That situation dragged on, even though my peer knew what the right thing to do was. Because it wasn’t urgent. Until one day, our mutual boss, the company president, had had enough with underperformance in the division. He called my peer and told him that he needed to fire Joe. To which my peer continued to prevaricate and say that, well, he’d been working on things with Joe, but he just needed the right time with all these things going on right now.
So our boss decided to make things urgent. He said, “You need to fire Joe. Now. Put down the phone — don’t hang up. Go fire Joe, and then come back to the phone and tell me that you did it.” My peer returned and confirmed that he had, finally, blessedly, let Joe go. To which our boss responded, “Good. Because if you couldn’t pull that off, I would have had to fire you for damaging the business by not doing what you knew needed done.”
The lesson here is to embrace urgency for the things that really matter. Don’t get sidetracked by fleeting impulses, but it’s just as big a mistake to fail to address the fire burning in your organization. Address the thing that will transform your business, not just the loudest noise in the room. Identifying the difference between urgent issues that matter and background problems is the central responsibility of any true business leader.