When everything is urgent, nothing is
Urgency is part of leadership. Crises happen. Deadlines compress. A client escalates. A system goes down. Someone makes a mistake that cannot be ignored.
But there is a difference between real urgency and unmanaged urgency. One is a moment. The other becomes a culture.
If you have ever worked in an organization where leaders make everything a priority, you know what it does to people. It does not just create a busy week. It creates chronic stress, confusion, and quiet disengagement. People stop trusting priorities. They stop believing timelines. They stop taking the word urgent seriously. And eventually, they stop offering their best.
This week’s podcast episode is about organizational resilience in times of urgency and what leaders can do when pressure shows up without warning.
Why unplanned urgency hits people so hard
When urgency is unplanned, the body often reads it as threat. Not logical threat, but physiological threat.
Heart rate climbs. Breathing gets shallow. Muscles tense. Attention narrows. That tunnel vision feeling is real. It can help you move fast, but it also makes it harder to think clearly, collaborate well, and make wise decisions. If the environment stays urgent for too long, recovery never fully happens. That is when you start seeing burnout symptoms, rising conflict, sleep disruption, and a team that becomes reactive instead of strategic.
The problem is not that leaders need urgency. The problem is that employees cannot live in it nonstop.
Resilience is revealed in the moment
A resilient organization is not one that avoids surprises. It is one that responds to surprise with clarity, steadiness, and alignment.
Dwight D. Eisenhower said, Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
You cannot plan every crisis. But you can build the kind of organization that does not fall apart when a plan breaks.
That starts with leaders who do three things well when urgency hits.
Teaching point one: Define urgency before it defines your team
When leaders label everything urgent, employees end up prioritizing by fear, not value. They guess what matters based on who is loudest, who is closest to them, or who might be disappointed.
Resilient leadership sounds like this.
Here are the top three priorities for the next seventy two hours
Here is what is not a priority right now
If what you are working on does not connect to these priorities, pause and check in
That kind of clarity is not micromanagement. It is care.
Teaching point two: Calm is a leadership skill
Calm does not mean slow. Calm means controlled.
Employees do not just watch what leaders do in urgent seasons. They absorb how leaders do it. If leadership is frantic, the organization becomes frantic. If leadership is steady, people can move fast without breaking trust and making avoidable mistakes.
One simple practice is a predictable update rhythm. Tell people what you know, what you do not know, what happens next, and when they will hear from you again. Predictability lowers stress because it reduces the mental load of constant uncertainty.
Teaching point three: Values must function as decision rules
If the crisis is a surprise, your values cannot be.
John F. Kennedy said, The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
Values matter most when trade offs are required. They only help employees if they are practiced ahead of time, not introduced during a crisis.
The question is not whether you have values. The question is whether your team knows how those values guide decisions under pressure.
A quick self check for leaders
If I asked your employees for the top three priorities this week, would they all say the same three
Is urgent a meaningful word in your organization, or has it become background noise
Do your values help people decide, or do they mostly decorate
Leader takeaway you can use today
In urgent moments, your job is to reduce uncertainty.
Use this quick reset in your next team message.
Here are the top three priorities for the next twenty four to seventy two hours
Here is what is not a priority right now
Here is what urgent means today, deadline and consequence
You will hear from me again at this time
When people know what matters, what does not, and when the next update is coming, their nervous system settles. They execute better. They make fewer errors. They trust leadership more.
Resilience does not come from pretending everything is fine. It comes from leading with clarity when everything feels loud.