You come to work with your day already filled with tasks and meetings. What are you accomplishing? Where is the urgency? You have deadlines! Meetings to go to! Reports to write! Where is the urgency?
Being busy is having lots of things to accomplish while there may or may not be a sense of urgency.
What is the difference between urgency and busyness? Urgency is the need to accomplish something and make a difference quickly. While busyness is the activity of being busy, sometime with little sense of accomplishment.
How can you tell if there is a sense of urgency? One way is to look at how decisions are made when something must be done. For example; what happens when you face one of these types of challenges?
- We need to find out why our competitors are crushing us
- We need to get our new product to market before we lose our advantage
- We’ve lost three of our key employees in the last couple of months
- We need to install a new accounting system so that we can invoice faster and improve our cash flow.
You’re in a meeting and you bring up one of the aforementioned issues or any other one. You tell your team this problem needs to be solved immediately and then what happens? Is the response similar to “Yeah sure we need to do something, I think I’m free in couple of weeks” or is it more like “ We need to do this now everyone clear their calendar tomorrow” “who else needs to be sure make sure this is their number one priority”.
If the response is more like the first one then no one has a sense of urgency about solving the problem and moving forward.
Are you waiting for someone else to define your urgency or are you doing that for yourself? Define your own sense of urgency, act from it and be prepared to leap over everyone who’s just acting busy.
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Jane Lovas, CEO of Lovas Consulting, works with overwhelmed business owners who feel that they have lost their vision and their companies are not growing as fast as they want. Jane helps them clarify their vision and share it with all employees; building engaged, energized, innovative companies and creating abundance for all.
Jane is also one of the co-authors of Seen and Sustained: Best Practices in Communication that Increase the Visibility of Small and Diverse Businesses.
Additional information is available at www.lovasconsulting.com. Contact Jane by email jlovas@lovasconsulting.com or by telephone at 703.594.6028.