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.

I spoke yesterday at the 2010 ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement in St. Louis

from May 25, 2010

CSI's Shane Yount speaks today at the 2010 ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement in St. Louis

Shane Yount, Principal for Competitive Solutions, Inc. (CSI), speaks today at the 2010 ASQ World Conference in St. Louis. The topic of Shane's session is "Leaving Your Leadership Legacy."

Shane is a popular and energetic public speaker. He offers several public accountability workshops, leadership workshops, a scorecard workshops each year. Visit the CSI website at www.competitive-solutions.net for more information on upcoming workshops, events and webinars.

Shane works with several nationally-known, highly successful organizations, such as the US Army, Michelin Tire, Harley-Davidson, Revlon, Genentech, Boar's Head, and several others.

CSI's consultants have been chosen to speak at many conferences around North America in 2010. You can see the calendar of upcoming speaking engagements and download selected slides shows at www.competitive-solutions.net.

CSI's Debra Boggan speaks today at the Muskegon Area Labor Management Conference in Michigan

Debra Boggan, Principal for Competitive Solutions, Inc. (CSI), speaks today at the Muskegon Area Labor Management Conference in Michigan. Debra's session begins at 8:00 AM with the topic of "Teaming with Unions: Partnering for Success."

Debra is a popular and energetic public speaker. She offers several public accountability workshops, leadership workshops, a scorecard workshops each year. Visit the CSI website at www.competitive-solutions.net for more information on upcoming workshops, events and webinars.

Debra works with several nationally-known, highly successful organizations, such as the US Army, Michelin Tire, Harley-Davidson, Revlon, Genentech, Boar's Head, and several others.

CSI's consultants have been chosen to speak at many conferences around North America in 2010. You can see the calendar of upcoming speaking engagements and download selected slides shows at www.competitive-solutions.net.

New Starter Bundle Prices for PBL ScoreCard

Traditionally scorecards are meant to serve one main goal; they show the current state of the business. Unfortunately, many organizations today are satisfied to only meet that goal. In reality, this is a flawed objective. To illustrate the point, think of a thermometer which tells the current temperature. Now think of a thermostat, which tells current temperature as well as giving one the ability to control the temperature. Many companies have scorecards which only work as a thermometer. They tell employees the temperature but do not give them a way to change it! Business Scorecards should be viewed as a thermostat and used as such.

Competitive Solutions, Inc.^® is offering some excellent Starter Bundle prices to help you make that change from using a thermometer-style scorecard to a more powerful, more meaningful thermostat-style solution. By eliminating any up-front investment customers can get started for less than $1 a day per user! To make it easy, Competitive Solutions, Inc. is now offering three Starter Bundles for customers needing up to 10, 25, or 50 users.

Knowing the "temperature" of your business is good, but simply not good enough. Take control of your own success with PBL ScoreCard^® today!

Get Started Today:
Sign up for a live, online demo
Request a free trial on www.pblscorecard.com
Come to a scorecard workshop

I'll be speaking TWICE at Southwest SHRM in October

News from my company website...

Shane Yount, Principal for Competitive Solutions, Inc. (CSI), has been selected to speak at the 69th Annual HR Southwest Conference, October 10 - 13, 2010, in Fort Worth, TX. Shane will speak on Monday, October 11th and Tuesday October 12th. The topic of Shane's presentation on Monday is "Leadership GPS – Growth, Performance, Sustainment." The topic of Shane's presentation on Tuesday is "Man vs. Wild: Taming the Scorecard Beast."

Shane works with several nationally-known, highly successful organizations, such as the US Army, Michelin Tire, Harley-Davidson, Revlon, Genentech, Boar's Head, and several others.

Shane is a popular and energetic public speaker. He offers several public accountability workshops, leadership workshops, a scorecard workshops each year. Visit the CSI website at www.competitive-solutions.net for more information on upcoming workshops, events and webinars.

CSI's consultants have been chosen to speak at numerous conferences around North America in 2010. You can see the calendar of upcoming speaking engagements and download selected slides shows at www.competitive-solutions.net.

CSI's Seth Davies selected to speak at the 2010 Wisconsin State SHRM Conference

Seth Davies, Managing Partner of Client Services for Competitive Solutions, Inc. (CSI), has been selected to speak at the upcoming 2010 Wisconsin State SHRM Conference to be held in Appleton, Wisconsin. Seth will speak on Thursday, October 7th from 1:00 p.m. until 2:15 p.m. The topic of Seth's presentation is "Extreme Leadership Makeovers: Training to Drive Sustainable Business Processes."

Seth is a popular and energetic public speaker. He offers several public accountability workshops, leadership workshops, a scorecard workshops each year. Visit the CSI website at www.competitive-solutions.net for more information on upcoming workshops, events and webinars.

CSI's consultants have been chosen to speak at many conferences around North America in 2010. You can see the calendar of upcoming speaking engagements and download selected slides shows at www.competitive-solutions.net.

I speak today at the 95th Annual ISM Conference in San Diego

CSI's Shane Yount speaks today at the 95th Annual ISM Conference in San Diego

Shane Yount, Principal for Competitive Solutions, Inc. (CSI), speaks today at the 95th Annual International Supply Management Conference in San Diego. Shane's session begins at 9:00 AM with the topic of "Scorecards: The Key to Accountability."