An unbridled urgency can be counterproductive and costly. If you’re too quick to react, you can end up with short-sighted decisions or superficial solutions, neglecting underlying causes and create collateral damage in the process. But if you’re too deliberative and slow to respond, you can get caught flat-footed, potentially missing an opportunity or allowing an emergent challenge to consume you.
To balance these two extremes, you need reflective urgency — the ability to bring conscious, rapid reflection to the priorities of the moment — to align your best thinking with the swiftest course of action. I’ve developed three strategies to practice reflective urgency:
Diagnose your urgency trap — the habitual, unconscious, and often counterproductive ways that you push harder to get ahead when you feel the pressure of too many demands. If you’re able to spot your trap, then you can stop the self-defeating habits that keep you in a constant state of elevated urgency.
Once you diagnose your own urgency trap, you can bring the same thoughtful reflection to your critical moments to disrupt the pattern. If you’re unaware of what your trap is, answer the following prompt to explore it: “When the demands I face increase and my capacity is stretched thin, a counterproductive habit I have is….” Once you pinpoint the initial behavior, the unproductive thinking that holds it in place will be evident.
Bring focus to the right priorities. Another problem is the unconscious tendency to focus on less important work, because we enjoy it or we’re good at it, at the expense of our highest priorities.
Avoid extreme tilts. In a perfect world, you would fluidly pivot from reflection to action, but that’s not the world you inhabit. You cannot reduce the demands you face, nor can you afford to attack them with the reckless abandon of unchecked urgency. But you can recognize that not every issue requires the same approach. Depending on the situation, you can consciously, and subtly, turn down or dial up the required elements of reflection and urgency.
As you evaluate your daily responsibilities, avoid the temptation to treat every initiative the same. Knowing that you need the best of both — and that a perfect 50/50 split is unrealistic — make the subtle tilts toward reflection and action as needed to get the balance right.
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I was understandably a little intimidated back in 2009, on one of my first fundraising trips to the Silicon Valley for Hootsuite. Would investors give me the time of day? Would they share my enthusiasm for building a social media management platform?
But something unexpected happened. Time and time again I heard the same four-word phrase from investors and entrepreneurs.
"How can I help?"
These were powerful and extremely busy people. And yet here they were offering up their time and expertise, their connections and critical thinking power, to a new entrepreneur. I had an “aha” moment and had to stop and ask myself: What was so special about this four-word phrase? And why were so many incredibly successful people using it?
The power of “How can I help?”
If business is all about who you know, then this simple line — How can I help? — might be the ultimate networking tool. By offering to help, you cultivate instant rapport and establish an immediate sense of trust. A foundation is built — with striking speed and efficiency — for future interactions. The key to cementing relationships isn’t just offering help, of course. It’s following through and actually providing it.
So how does it work?
What’s the mysterious mechanism at work here? You could think of the help you offer as an investment. Like any investment, it might pay off in the short-term, you may have to stick around for the long haul or it might be a bust altogether. But I’ve found — more often than not — that you do see a healthy return from the help you extend.
Close to home, for example, I mentor more than a dozen entrepreneurs each year as part of an initiative called The Next Big Thing. I expect nothing from this other than the satisfaction of seeing young entrepreneurs find their path. Over the years, these entrepreneurs have gone on to start companies in my backyard here in Canada. Each year, the critical mass of talent and investment in the region grows. Ultimately, we all benefit.
We tend to think of business as calculating and sometimes ruthlessly Darwinian. But the truth is that self-interest and a cold shoulder will only take you so far, in business or in life. Regardless of how busy things are or how cutthroat the competition is, I’ve found that real success often starts with four simple words: How can I help?
Many leaders want to accelerate learning on their teams. They know that in a knowledge-driven economy, continuously developing new competencies is the key to sustainable advantage. The central challenge, however, is that leaders tend to think of learning too narrowly — equating it with training, mentoring, or “constructive feedback” during performance reviews. But all of these are inputs that may or may not correlate with the results we want to create.
By contrast, we should be mastering how we generate outcomes. And that is a team sport.As Peter Senge wrote in The Fifth Discipline (Doubleday Business, 1990), a learning organization is one in which “people continually expand their capacity to create results they truly desire.”
If you want to accelerate learning on your team, first engage them in a meaningful challenge, then design a feedback system that enables them to learn naturally, every day. Here are six suggestions for how to get started:
• Shorten the loop. According to scholars such as David A. Kolb and Walter Shewhart, real-life learning occurs in a loop. Like scientists, your team needs to be able to form an idea, run an experiment, check whether they moved the needle, and reflect on what to take away. Learning stalls when we don’t close this loop quickly enough.
• Think like an architect. Experts in designing public places think about how space itself can help direct traffic flows. Similarly, the ideal feedback system channels timely, useful information directly to those most able to act on it.
• Look upstream. Do your teams know whether they are delivering on key promises to customers or other stakeholders? Most companies don’t have real-time data on how well they are doing at critical “moments of truth” with their customers.
• Gather feedback on how the system is doing, rather than rating individuals. Organizations miss important insights when they evaluate individuals in isolation, rather than looking at how the system is operating as a whole.
• Create forums for team learning. When you create concrete processes for sharing knowledge, conducting after-action reviews, reflecting on data, or exploring root causes as a team, everyone learns.
• Evolve your system over time. As a favorite professor of mine once said, adding data is like lowering the water level in a river — it surfaces the rocks.
When you approach learning as an integral part of your team’s work and design systems accordingly, you will be simultaneously increasing the speed of your decisions, deepening understanding of your business, and strengthening your competitive advantage.
The single most common concern I’ve heard in my thirty years of working, across all people, is: communication in the organization. There are lots of reasons we feel this way, not the least of which is that communication is hard. This article is about what we all can do about it – regardless of our role in the organizations.
For Leaders
Communicate more. Be more conscious about what you need to communicate, then communicate it, and communicate it again.
Communicate in different ways. Communicate your message in different media and in different ways.
Don’t assume they know. Leaders often have mulled a decision for a long time. Once they have made it, they often assume everyone else knows. And sometimes they share something once and expect everyone to see all of the connections to other strategies and plans the way they do.
Ask clarifying questions. Since communication is about message sent and message received, you need to make sure it gets received. Ask questions to make sure people understand.
For Team Members
Ask questions. If you don’t know about something, ask.
Communicate yourself. Leaders feel the communication gap too. If you want them to communicate more with you, make sure you aren’t perpetuating the problem by being close-lipped yourself.
Give feedback. One of the best ways you can improve the communication in your organization is engage in it, and give feedback on how it is going.
For Everyone
Assume positive intent. If you want better communication with others, assume that everyone is trying to communicate successfully, even when it doesn’t happen.
Remember it is hard. Yes, we can hold ourselves to a high standard, and for something this important we should; and yet when we remember it is hard, we will get past the communication misses more easily.
Remember it is everyone’s job. Communication requires a sent message that is received and understood. Improving organizational communication is everyone’s job, and when everyone realizes that, improvement is possible.
Overcoming the organizational communication gap isn’t something for leaders and supervisors to solve – it is a problem that everyone plays a role in so everyone can help improve.
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