If urgency and focus matter, recognise your team. Thank them for starting quickly and staying locked in long enough to do quality work. Photo: vecteezy.com.
John Eades explains why urgent tasks often fall behind schedule, resulting in mad scrambles and burnouts — and describes what the best leaders do to avoid this.
Most leadership problems don’t show up at the finish line. They reveal themselves right at the start.
Work gets delayed, momentum stalls, and quality suffers, not because teams don’t care, but because urgency was never clearly established and focus was discarded.
The leaders with the highest-performing teams understand this important truth — urgency is for starting; focus is for finishing; leadership is inspiring both.
There is a good chance you address projects with a strong sense of urgency but have struggled with one or more of your team members who don’t share your work speed.
Unquestionably, the best leaders prioritise urgency in a sustainable way that fuels performance without causing burnout.
Most leaders misunderstand speed, and if we’re honest, there’s a good chance you’ve misunderstood it too. You think speed means rushing; you think urgency means pressure; you assume moving fast automatically leads to burnout.
So, you hesitate, you soften expectations, you wait for the perfect moment — andwithout realising it, you teach your team that starting later is acceptable.
The truth is, speed is not about how quickly work gets completed, it’s about how quickly meaningful work gets started. Focus, not haste, is what protects quality.
The best leaders don’t rush the work. They focus on setting high standards for the urgency with which a group starts.
Speed, when used well, actually protects people. It eliminates wasted time, unclear priorities, and last-minute scrambling. It replaces chaos with tempo, and that tempo is set by you.
Here are three steps used by great leaders to create urgency on their teams.
Demonstrate urgency first: If you delay decisions, respond slowly, or let priorities linger, your team learns that urgency doesn’t really matter — even if you say it does.
Said differently, your example will always be more powerful than your words because people watch what you do far more closely than what you say.
Your response time, follow-up, and decisiveness all teach your team how urgent to be. This doesn’t mean reacting to everything. It means acting decisively when a moment matters.
Urgency that lives only in the leader’s head never scales. Urgency that shows up consistently in a leader’s actions does.
Be explicit about when urgency is required: Most leaders expect urgency without ever defining it. Great leaders mark the moment. They make it clear when something needs to move now and when it does not. They remove ambiguity.
Urgency is not meant to be constant. Constant urgency creates pressure without clarity, and pressure without clarity leads to burnout.
Healthy urgency has boundaries. Leaders turn urgency on when people are on and remove it when they are off. That balance creates momentum without exhaustion.
Sending emails late at night and saying, “No rush” doesn’t help. It confuses. Over time, that confusion erodes trust and engagement.
Celebrate urgency and focused execution: You get more of what you reward.
So, if urgency and focus matter to your team, recognise and thank them. Thank people for starting quickly and staying locked in long enough to do quality work.
In coaching my middle school football team last year, I learned that coaches once believed speed was built through punishment — more running, more conditioning and more pressure.
Eventually, many learned a better way. A method named ‘’feed the cats’’ teaches you to train for speed and keep legs fresh for when players need to perform.
The same principle applies to work teams. When people move quickly and execute with focus, reinforce it. When they hesitate, coach it. When they rush and cut corners, correct it.
One quick caveat: Every business or team has periods or moments that require more or less urgency.
If there are times when less speed is required, by all means provide that space for the team’s benefit. Encourage them to take some time off to recharge. It will allow them to come back ready to go.
Speed is still a competitive differentiator, but not in the way most leaders think.
It’s not about finishing everything faster. It’s about recognising when a moment deserves action and inspiring your team to begin with urgency and execute with focus.
Every leader defines the tempo of their team, whether intentionally or not.
John Eades is the chief executive of LearnLoft, a leadership development company. He is also the host of the Follow My Lead podcast. He can be contacted at johneades.com. This article first appeared on John’s LearnLoft blog.
