Developing a sense of urgency in your team

Just last month, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) CEO Sundar Pichai sent a memo to Google employees letting them know that the company would slow down its hiring for the remainder of 2022 and take other cost-cutting measures in response to the current economic slowdown.

The memo itself was a masterclass in Pichai’s leadership, but this sentence stuck with me: “Moving forward, we need to be more entrepreneurial, working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days.” One particular word from this sentence really stood out to me and that was this: URGENCY.

One of the most common complaints I hear from my community of leaders is their team members lack a sense of urgency in completing their tasks: “Why don’t my employees work as fast and decisively as me? I set deadlines but they keep missing them.”

Here are some reasons a lack of urgency in your team could occur and how to remedy them:

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There are no standards

Have you defined your standards clearly as a team lead? And if you have, have you over-communicated it to your team? The terms ’right amount of work’ and ‘fast turnarounds’ are frequently thrown around, but have you determined what those mean?

If you haven’t, is it any wonder your team isn’t on the same page as you?

To close the expectation gap, you need to clearly define what your standards are and communicate that to your team; only then will they know what working with urgency looks like. Your job is to get them from where they are now to where you want them to be through coaching and correction.

You aren’t leading by example

As a leader, you might not have any sense of urgency yourself. It’s okay to be chill and less uptight all the time, but it could also send the wrong signal to your team that it’s okay to take longer than usual to complete a task.

You need to set the example. You have to model what excellence looks like. If you hustle a little more or even quicken your walking pace up a notch, your team will start to pick up that it’s important to work quickly and with purpose. Monkey see, monkey do. ●