A Sense of Urgency

The great thing about "A Sense of Urgency" is how valuable and relevant it is for anyone working anywhere in an organization. Whether you're a CEO or a new hire low on the totem pole, this book will open your eyes to how essential it is to be willing to change, and how dangerous it is if you aren't.

The author brings this point home by including compelling stories of how low-level employees took the initiative and, because of their heart and passion, helped lead their company away from the brink and back onto a path of success and innovation. You'll read about mid-level managers who, fed up with the procrastination of a senior team, took matters into their own hands and transformed their corporate culture from foot-dragging torpor to an all-out sprint. The stories are not only informative, but they're truly inspirational.

By the end of the book, you're left with the belief that change is possible on any level, if you have the guts to go after it. So, no matter what level you're currently working at, you can benefit greatly from this book.

The author, John Kotter, is Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. He has an international reputation as an expert on leadership and change, and has written several books, including the bestseller, Leading Change.

Despite the author's impeccable academic credentials, "A Sense of Urgency" is far from theoretical or dry. In fact, it's a clever, fast-paced book that really makes you feel how important having a sense of urgency is. The pages fly by, and Kotter does an excellent job keeping your attention. You might find yourself reading this short, punchy book in one sitting, and when you're done, you'll be filled with hope that change really can happen – and you'll have the strategies you need to get going.

So, keep listening to find out how to tell the difference between false urgency and true urgency; why a long-serving CEO may be less able to help create a sense of urgency than a new hire in the call center; and which of your colleagues you might need to distract if you want your plans to work.

The book starts out by defining complacency, which is basically a sense of contentment and self-satisfaction, especially when coupled with an unawareness of danger. According to the author, complacency is insidious and much too prevalent in most businesses.

Why are so many people complacent? Well, a common reason is past successes. When a company experiences many years of great success, or a fast rise to the top, it can lead to a team believing that they can do no wrong. They stop looking for danger or threats from the competition, and start to work at a much slower pace.

Another danger, which is just as insidious as complacency, is false urgency. False urgency is very energetic, and is often mistaken for true urgency. But, there are some very important differences.

False urgency happens when an organization or team is acting out of fear, anxiety, or stress. People race around writing reports, shooting down ideas, attending meetings that achieve nothing, or putting out metaphorical fires. Sure, it looks productive, but nothing is really getting done. False urgency is an enormous waste of time and energy, and often leads to the death of an organization, bit by bit.

There's a very useful checklist in chapter two that offers up questions you can ask to determine if your own team is rushing around with false urgency. One red flag on the list is when your meetings always get rescheduled due to conflicting commitments.

The author gives us several examples in these first few chapters that clearly illustrate just how dangerous complacency and false urgency are. He avoids pointing a finger at specific companies, but most readers will find it easy to draw parallels between these cases and their own organizations.

True urgency, by contrast, is the opposite of all of this. True urgency is energetic, yes, but unlike false urgency it's also productive and calculated. True urgency knows there are constant hazards in the world, but also recognizes that there are countless opportunities. For a business to take advantage of these opportunities, it must act right now.

Chapter three is where we begin learning about the strategies that can instill a sense of true urgency in our company or team. The author presents us with four strategies in the book, spending a chapter on each one. And for each strategy we're given, he also goes into several different ways in which that strategy can be implemented. All of the author's suggestions are highly practical and can be used by any employee, at any level.

Before he gets into the detailed descriptions of the strategies, though, the author makes the important point that companies need to aim for the heart when rallying their team. And alongside this, he emphasizes that how they go about communicating with their people is vitally important to creating that urgency they're looking for.

Too often, he claims, organizations use darkened meeting rooms, heavy wooden podiums, and PowerPoint presentations to try to rally their teams into frenzied excitement.

But what does this do? Well, according to the author, a darkened meeting room simply makes us think it's time to sleep. Rather than being pumped up and excited, we find our attention wandering, and more than a few audience members might take a nap.

Traditional wooden podiums do nothing but put a barrier between the audience and the speaker, and while PowerPoint presentations can be useful for relaying statistics, they rarely speak to our hearts.

The author suggests going about this task in an entirely different way. Instead of putting your team to sleep or hiding behind a podium, tell them stories that show them what you're trying to say. Keep the lights on, stand on your own, and speak from your heart. Exposing your vulnerabilities, he says, will make your audience identify with you more.

For example, if you're trying to convince your executive team that the company's in serious trouble, dumping twenty slides of facts and statistics on them isn't going to do much. Instead, tell them why the company's in trouble. Tell them the stories you've learned firsthand from your customers. If you make things personal and use a bit of humor, your message will be remembered far longer than any digitized presentation or fist-pounding rhetoric ever could be. The author urges us to keep a heart-centered approach in all that we do, and people will respond.

The first strategy to creating urgency in your organization begins in chapter four. Here, the author teaches us how important it is to bring outsiders into the organization.

Too often, he claims, companies, especially successful ones, are too internally-focused. Kotter calls this the We Know Best culture, where arrogance and complacency take root and grow. Because these companies stop looking outside for new opportunities or hazards, they often develop an extreme disconnect from their customers. After that, the sense of urgency that drove them to the top is slowly lost.

One piece of advice he offers in this chapter is to start listening to your lower-level employees. They're the ones who probably have the most interaction with your customers. Because of this, they're in the best position to collect reams of important information about how your company is really doing.

Once this information finds its way back into the hands of the decision makers, the sense of urgency can begin to grow again. This is especially important if your customers are giving negative feedback.

There are a lot of tips on how to get started communicating with lower-level employees, and many examples of how companies have used this tactic successfully in the past.

There are many other helpful tactics detailed in this chapter, and they all cover different ways you can bring the outside back into your organization. A few examples include things like how to use the power of video to create a sense of urgency in your team; why it's so important not to shield your team from troubling data; and why even redecorating your company's common areas can have a huge influence on your team's attitude toward change.

The author cautions that, if not handled carefully, these approaches might create anxiety and anger in your team. And this could accidentally create a false sense of urgency, which is obviously not the effect you're looking for. Thankfully, however, he also gives us advice on how to avoid this.

All the ideas the author provides us with here are imaginative and highly useful, and it's a chapter you won't want to skip.

The next strategy the author goes into involves setting an example of urgency by living it every single day.

For instance, imagine you're trying to get your team to take action on a task or project. You summon your two closest advisors, to discuss how to get things moving. The meeting starts fifteen minutes late, and then you spend another ten minutes handing out water and coffee and making small talk. You spend less than a half hour discussing the real issue, and then have to break it up for your next appointment. You hastily pencil another meeting into your next opening, which is two weeks from now.

Situations like this happen all the time in the business world. It's easy to see, in this example, that you and your advisors don't really think the problem is that urgent to begin with. If it were, you would have started the meeting on time and gotten right down to business. If nothing had been agreed by the end of the meeting, you'd have canceled your next appointment to get it done.

This is what the author means when he advises us to live with urgency. When our actions demonstrate that things have to get done now, our co-workers will respond in a similar manner. This doesn't mean simply cracking the whip at your team. What it does mean, he says, is that you know, without a doubt, that your past success has nothing to do with the future.

It means getting rid of activities that are not of high value in your schedule. It means laughing with your team, delegating responsibility, encouraging others, and not sending mixed signals. When your actions and your words match, then you're sending a sign that urgency really is important. Urgency begets urgency. It starts with you, and then it's transferred to your team.

Again, however, the author gives us words of caution here. Living with urgency doesn't mean pushing your team to the brink, pressuring them to perform faster and harder. It doesn't mean stressing everyone out, or setting impossible goals. Urgency also requires patience, and a realistic view of the timeframe needed to accomplish goals.

The other two strategies the author covers teach us how to find opportunity buried in a crisis, and how to deal with the naysayers in a group who seem bent on stopping change at all costs. Both are fascinating and have useful instructions for inspiring urgency. The chapter on the naysayers, or NoNos, as the author calls them, is especially practical.

Most people deal with NoNos on a daily basis at work. These are the people who are urgency killers. No matter what the situation, or what evidence there is to the contrary, NoNos can offer up ten reasons why you shouldn't change course. They thrive on shooting down ideas, and would much rather send memos or have meetings than do something productive.

First, the author teaches us what not to do with the NoNos. If they're not handled carefully, NoNos can cause a train wreck in a company, so it's important to manage them with gloves on. Incorporating them into a group is a terrible idea, but so is ignoring them. You'll find out why in this chapter.

So, what do you do about NoNos? Distracting them is the best choice, he says. And your second option is to get rid of them. The author goes into detail here, and you'll learn how to manage NoNos, so they do the least amount of damage.

All in all, "A Sense of Urgency" more than fulfills its promise to teach us about urgency and why it's so important. This punchy little book has wisdom on every page, and the strategies the author presents can be easily implemented by anyone. It's an entertaining read that shouldn't be missed by anyone in the business world.

"A Sense of Urgency", by John P Kotter, is published by Harvard Business Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights.