Injecting Your Employees with a Sense of Urgency

Injecting Your Employees with a Sense of Urgency
Urgency. What is it? What comes to mind for most people is an emergency situation often accompanied by a feeling of panic. A sense of urgency – not urgency associated with an emergency situation, but the urgency needed to drive daily business results is essential for sustained success. In other words, urgency means "getting it done and doing it on time."

Unfortunately, urgency is often a key ingredient missing from many organizations. Injecting a sense of urgency into your team is one of your greatest challenges as a leader. If your team is lacking a sense of urgency surrounding day-to-day activities, consider utilizing the following tips:

Communication - Communicate routinely and consistently. Keeping employees informed is critical to keeping them engaged in the business. With timely and relevant information employees will feel a greater sense of urgency to get more done.

Look Ahead - Integrate discussions of business performance into your routine meetings. It is not enough to simply post business results. Leaders should discuss the results and then move forward by shaping the discussion on the next set of milestones. Keeping a forward-looking view of goals makes daily work feel more relevant and fosters that sense of urgency needed to hit those goals.

Make a Connection - Connect employees to the business. When sharing high level information and/or business results, link these results to how the team impacts them. Without this link, the information will likely be meaningless.

Take Action - Drive a sense of collective accountability. Do not assume complete responsibility for performance. Hold team members accountable for team performance and for fulfilling job responsibilities. Require your employees to develop corrective action plans for performance metrics that are not meeting goals. Remember, they know more about what they do than anyone. Hold them accountable for using this knowledge to help the business.

Share Results with Others - Provide opportunities for your team to present business results to other teams. Sharing this responsibility encourages teams to better understand their performance and the steps they are taking to improve.

Provide Support - Promptly respond to questions, concerns, and problems elevated to you. Clearly communicate timeframes for follow-up and consistently request status updates within these timeframes.

Set Expectations - Clearly define and communicate behavioral expectations. These behavioral expectations will guide people towards the behaviors needed for successful operation.

Give a Thumbs Up - Recognize individuals and teams that respond with urgency. Providing recognition encourages the behavior to happen again. You can take it a step further by inviting the employee to a brief meeting with your boss and provide even more recognition. Public pats on the back go a long way toward sustaining the proper behaviors.

What do you think? How else can you inject a healthy sense of urgency into every day work? Please contribute to the discussion with your own thoughts and feedback. I’ll be happy to post your comments and suggestions.