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Key Takeaways
- The false urgency has increased due to the ‘always on’ culture, which causes serious stress and health risks for employees.
- Generation Z especially resists the non-stop urgency and seeks respect for their time and mental well-being in the workplace.
- Leaders are advised to distinguish between urgent and important tasks to avoid unnecessary stress and prioritize critical work.
During a recent stay at a hotel, the fire alarm went off in the middle of the night. Blue-eyed, I put on my shoes, grabbed my phone, and stumbled to the lobby to join the rest of the hotel guests, who had all just performed the same half-asleep, completely panicked dance as me.
After about twenty minutes, peace returned (it was a false alarm), but even after I returned to the silence of my room, my heart continued to pound. It felt like forever before I could finally relax enough to fall asleep again, and the next day I was tired and cranky as a result of the interruption.
These things happen. But the alarm incident reminded me that emergencies – real or not – take an incredible toll on our nervous systems. I was also struck by how similar this felt to a workplace where everything is treated like a fire drill. Urgency is in order. But when every request becomes a moment of panic, nothing truly urgent stands out – and your teams pay the price.
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The urgency trap
Nowadays, ‘urgent’ has become a default setting. Routine requests have somehow become ‘time sensitive’. Slack messages are marked as ‘high priority’ without any evidence that this is actually the case. Leaders do not intentionally create chaos, but this ongoing crisis situation is becoming increasingly common.
False urgency has always existed, but in recent years it has been amplified by the combined forces of increased connectivity and the “always on” culture that gained momentum during the pandemic, dramatically narrowing the gap between work and the office. Emails and DMs fly around all day, leaving employees confused about what to respond to now and what can wait until the next day. “No leader deliberately invents false urgency, but he can covertly entrench himself and become a team norm.” say executive coach Dina Denham Smith in Harvard Business Review.
Panic may be the new normal, but it is also wreaking havoc on employee well-being. Existing in a chronic state of increased stress can have powerful physiological effects, contributing to high blood pressure and even brain changes that can lead to anxiety, depression and addiction. Weight gain, headaches and problems with memory and focus are widespread cited as risks for people who are constantly overworked, in addition to serious conditions such as stroke or heart disease.
Of course, some matters are really urgent. System failure? Data breach? In any case, sound the alarm. Every business is likely to experience emergencies, especially when there is a risk of losing customers or damaging their trust. But just because something feels like it should be done STAT doesn’t mean it actually has to be done.
Urgent vs. Important (or neither)
Employees are becoming increasingly aware of the urgency trap, and are increasingly less likely to jump on every flagged memo — especially Gen Z. In previous generations, there was an expectation that going above and beyond would yield tangible career advancement, or at least that their loyalty would be reciprocated.
Now that that reality has eroded, Phoebe Gavin, a career and leadership coach, tells the Washingtonpost that people under 40 are no longer willing to burn themselves out in jobs that don’t respect their time and mental well-being – a sort of corrective to the one-sided nature of current workplace expectations. “The way it manifests at work does a lot of subverting of expectations that are not mutually beneficial,” she said.
Instead of losing valuable employees, leaders need to get better at parsing the difference between what is urgent, what is merely important, and what is neither.
One way I’ve noticed leaders fall into the urgency trap is that they simply fail to think critically about the implications of treating everything as an emergency. When you run a business, faster is always better, right? This is especially true for founders-turned-leaders, who sometimes struggle to remember that not everyone on their team eats, sleeps, and breathes the business the way they do. A mentee of mine once told me that her manager casually suggested canceling a highly anticipated weekend trip because there was a chance a project could “explode” while she was away. There was no deadline or client waiting for something to be done; in fact, there was no real risk at all. It was just his reflexive belief that something might require her attention, and that she should therefore remain on standby. That’s a terrible approach to leadership.
I’ve long been a fan of the Eisenhower Matrix to ensure I prioritize critical work. Categorizing tasks into one of four quadrants – urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but unimportant, and neither important nor urgent – requires ruthlessly categorizing what really matters. Taking the time to prioritize not only means you avoid the trap of urgency, it also stops you from chasing short, non-essential deadlines that may provide a quick dopamine hit but ultimately won’t help you achieve your core goals.
A few jokes that are common among Gen Z these days: We save PDFs, not lives. It’s PR (or HR), not the ER. For leaders who are used to constantly putting out fires, it’s easy to lose perspective on what really matters. But no one – not you or your team – can live in a constant state of panic without suffering the consequences.
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