Can Your Team Talk about Urgency without Freaking Out?
I have been in physical danger twice in my working life. These two situations were as urgent as a work scenario gets, actual gotta-go-now, oh-shit urgent. For context, these happened when I worked in mental health and homeless services in San Francisco. I have had lots of jobs, but I was never an EMT, firefighter, or a police officer.
[Off-topic but important: I think two dangerous-urgent situations over 7 years in and out of locked treatment facilities, lowest-end residential hotels, the local jail, and other places where people are living on the edge are basically nothing. Many people have unfounded fears that people with mental illness and poor people are dangerous. Stigma causes real harm. Here are links to research (one, two, and three) about the low relative risk.]
These experiences give me a relatively unique perspective on urgency at work. When emotions get high about something that’s urgent, and anxiety starts to spread in the team, and I feel myself starting to catch the fever too, sometimes I will say: “Are we in danger right now?” (The answer has always been “No.”) “Then we have time to pause, breathe, and come up with a plan.”
With this full (if dramatic) continuum of risk and urgency in mind, my stressing team member and I can take a breath. We can laugh at our high emotions.
Then we are where we need to be: Together, working on the solution. We can talk about what to do to deal with the time crunch, and whether we can downgrade the urgency itself a bit.
This is Part 2 about urgency. Part 1, “Why am I rushing?” is about the individual pause to determine the source of urgency, when you are feeling busier than you want to be.
Certainly, good planning helps determine and manage urgency. Everybody needs basic training on project management. If you are lucky and the work is big enough, you may have a certified PMP (Project Management Professional) or some other expert in charge.
Here, I’m talking about when those best-laid plans go awry, or don’t get made in the first place.
When things get hectic, a healthy trusting team has a calm and generous way to discuss urgency. They can agree that urgency is required (urgency is often real and necessary!), and negotiate relative urgency, aka prioritize, when necessary.
Discussing urgency and negotiating urgency is hard to do. For one thing, questions about what is urgent and why it’s urgent often come up at the last minute, right before or right after the big deadline. Not the easiest moment for a calm and generous chat. Talking about urgency can trigger unkind thoughts about team members:
Please just do the thing and stop complaining!
Maybe if you stayed off your phone, you would be done by now!
Why didn’t you ask for help two weeks ago?
Okay, that’s enough. Just writing those examples down is stressful.
What can a team do to make it safe and easy to talk about urgency? One way is a classic way: Ask good questions! Here are some to work with.
Questions for a moment of stress over a specific deadline or urgency:
Where does this urgency come from? This is the question from Part 1, the first article about urgency. “Why am I rushing?”.
If this is urgent, do we need to decide what is not urgent? Prioritize to ensure the most urgent things get done first. (Obligatory mention here of the famous Priority Matrix urgency/importance 2 x 2 grid, aka “Eisenhower matrix.” I don’t find it that useful, but it’s meant to help a manager decide what to delegate or skip altogether. Do you use it? Please tell me.)
What does done look like? This is a favorite question for people in my leadership courses. I got it from Brene Brown. When somebody comes to me stressing about a deadline, often they are doing something different than what I had in mind when I assigned it. “I need a page of bullet points” is different from “I need a polished four-page narrative with diagrams.”
Do we need more people to help with this? Sometimes, a deliverable requires more effort or an additional expert than we first realized. Or you just want the thing in the rearview mirror. Adding more people to the effort may be a good trade-off.
Questions to help you step back and think about how the team works:
How do we determine urgency? Is the deadline firm or flexible? If people know why something is set on its timeline, they can manage their time and energy better.
How well are we planning our work? Project management matters. Who is your expert, by agreement or by accident? Who needs training? What software or documentation do we use, and how well is it working for us?
How do we communicate and track our work? The perfect systems and expertise in project management don’t matter if the team doesn’t use them and take the time to talk about how the work is proceeding.
Do we all feel safe raising our hand to alert the team to slow progress and roadblocks? We want people to raise a hand early instead of dropping the ugly surprise at the deadline. We won’t do that if we are embarrassed or don’t want to bother people, or are afraid of judgment or punishment.
When your team is comfortable talking about urgency and negotiating urgency, you have a safer team that is at less risk of conflict and burnout. In general, your people will be more relaxed day to day. We will never get rid of urgency. It will always be part of work. But we can understand it better, and roll with it better.
As our mindfulness expert Rebecca Bromberg said during our guided meditation on this topic at a recent session of our monthly Recharging Station here to join us! “We deserve space from the constant pressure of urgency.”