Urgency is not always importance. And visible busyness is not always leadership.

I have seen urgency rewarded from the shop floor to the boardroom.

People moving quickly. Phones ringing. Emails flying. Everyone looking busy. Everyone proving they are “on it.”

For much of my career, urgency was treated less like a response to exceptional situations and more like a default leadership standard. If you were moving fast, chasing hard, reacting quickly and throwing everything at the problem, you looked committed. If you stepped back, asked better questions, or tried to take the helicopter view, you could be judged as not moving quickly enough.

That has always troubled me, because urgency is not always importance. And visible busyness is not always leadership.

In many organisations, urgency becomes a form of performance theatre. Everyone looks committed. Everyone looks active. Everyone looks stretched. But not enough people are asking whether the work actually matters, whether the problem has been properly understood, or whether the same mistake is about to be repeated again.

The pull of false urgency

There is research behind this. In the Journal of Consumer Research, Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher Hsee described what they called the “mere urgency effect.” Their research showed that people can choose urgent tasks over important ones, even when the important task offers a better outcome. The presence of a shorter deadline can distort judgement.

That is the problem in everyday leadership. Something arrives quickly, loudly or emotionally, and it immediately gains status. A client chases. A colleague interrupts. A patient message lands. A board paper is late. A customer complains. A team member wants a decision. A deadline moves. A WhatsApp appears. A meeting request arrives with the word “urgent” attached to it.

The leader reacts, not always because the matter is important, but because it has arrived with pressure. That distinction matters. Pressure is not proof of importance.

Harvard Business Review has also written about the danger of false urgency at work, arguing that leaders need clearer criteria for what genuinely deserves urgent attention. Without those criteria, teams can quickly learn to drop what they are doing whenever something arrives loudly enough. That is not agility. It is a lack of priority discipline.

When everything becomes priority one

High achievers are especially vulnerable to this because they often have more capacity than the people around them. They can hold more in their head. They can work longer, move faster, absorb more complexity and tolerate more pressure. That ability is often part of why they have progressed.

But it can also become a trap. A high achiever may be able to treat twenty things as priority one. That does not mean they should. And it certainly does not mean the people around them can keep up.

This is where urgency becomes contagious. A leader who treats everything as urgent often creates a team that feels permanently behind. People stop distinguishing between what matters and what is merely loud. They rush, react and over-communicate. They become anxious about speed rather than thoughtful about quality.

Eventually, everything becomes urgent. And when everything is urgent, nothing is strategic.

The cost is not only professional

The obvious cost is performance. Decision quality falls. Strategic thinking gets squeezed. Mistakes repeat. Meetings multiply. Delegation weakens. People chase activity rather than progress.

I explored this in an earlier article, Decision Quality Is a Leadership Skill — Not a Personality Trait

When leaders are under pressure, their ability to think clearly matters more, not less. Yet false urgency often removes the very space needed for better judgement.

The cost is not only professional. It is personal. High achievers can complete twenty impressive tasks in a day and still lose the part of the day that mattered most: dinner with family, getting the children ready in the morning, a bike ride with friends, a quiet conversation, exercise, sleep, or a moment that only looks important once it has passed.

That is the cruel part. At the time, urgency feels justified. It feels necessary. It feels like the price of achievement. Only in reflection do we sometimes realise what we missed.

The goal may have been financial freedom, a better lifestyle, the sports car, the holiday, the promotion, the exit, the reputation, or the next milestone. But the better question is still this: at what cost?

Doctors, lawyers, CEOs and founders know this pattern

For doctors, this can appear as packed clinics, overflowing inboxes and constant triage. Every patient matters, but not every message carries the same level of clinical urgency. Yet when the system is overloaded, cognitive space narrows. Listening becomes harder. Decisions become more pressured. Some decisions may be deferred, referred or revisited, not because the doctor lacks care, but because the mental bandwidth has gone. Research published in BMJ Open has linked electronic medical record use with perceived burnout among healthcare providers, which reflects the growing pressure created by digital workload and constant clinical administration.

For lawyers, urgency often arrives through client anxiety. A client may feel that everything is immediate, but the lawyer must still distinguish between emotional urgency and legal significance. Without that discipline, every client pressure becomes a professional emergency.

For CEOs and founders, urgency is often tied to uncertainty. A sales issue, investor concern, product problem, staffing matter or operational wobble can all feel critical in the moment. Some will be. Many will not. The skill is knowing the difference before the entire organisation absorbs the leader’s anxiety.

This links closely to what I wrote in The Clarity Gap: Why Smart Leaders Still Feel Uncertain

Capability does not automatically create clarity. In fact, capable people can sometimes carry so much that they become less clear, not more.

The culture of visible busyness

One of the deeper problems is cultural. I have worked in environments where urgency was treated as one of the highest leadership virtues. Fast-paced. Commercial. Demanding. Results-driven. Those words can sound impressive. They can also hide poor prioritisation.

I have seen people rewarded for being frantic: sleeves rolled up, always in the fire, always moving, always chasing, always involved. That can look admirable from the outside, but activity is not the same as direction. Some leaders are praised for always being in the fire, when the better leadership question is why the fire keeps starting.

This is where reflective leadership can be misunderstood. The person who pauses, questions, delegates, empowers and asks why the same issue keeps returning may look less busy. In reality, they may be doing the deeper leadership work.

That has been a recurring pattern in my own career. I have often felt like an Englishman in New York in those environments. Not because people did not listen. Most did. In fact, the majority often welcomed it. They were relieved that someone was willing to challenge the chaos, reduce unnecessary pressure, empower capable people and stop treating exhaustion as a badge of honour.

The resistance usually came from a much smaller group. Often they were senior. Often they were powerful. Often they had built their own authority around the old model: control everything, react to everything, stay close to every decision and prove value through visible effort.

That is where progressive leadership can become threatening. When you walk into a chaotic business and can quickly see what is causing friction, plateau, loss or repeated failure, you are not just offering a new way of working. You are exposing the cost of the old way. If you can simplify the noise, empower the team, improve performance and reduce the dependency on outdated command-and-control behaviour, some people will see that as progress. Others will see it as a threat.

I have been in those situations more than once. The broader workforce usually understood the value quickly. They could see that not everything needed to be urgent. They could see that not every decision needed to be pulled upwards. They could see that working eighty-hour weeks, answering two phones at once and carrying work that could be delegated was not a sign of sustainable leadership.

But a few senior people did not like it. Because when results improve without the old chaos, the old chaos starts to look unnecessary.

That is why the questions matter:

• Why are we running around like headless chickens?
• Does this really need to be urgent?
• What can be delegated?
• Who should own this?
• What friction is slowing us down?
• What are we repeating?
• Where has visible busyness replaced effective leadership?

These are not soft questions. They are performance questions, culture questions and leadership questions. They expose whether urgency is being used wisely, or whether it has simply become the default operating rhythm of the organisation.

A better question than “is this urgent?”

Most leaders ask the wrong question. They ask, “Is this urgent?” The problem is that most things arrive sounding urgent, especially in high-pressure environments where speed is often mistaken for value.

The better question is: “How urgent is this, really?”

I often think about urgency on a scale. A ten is genuinely urgent. It needs attention now because there is consequence, risk or time sensitivity that cannot be ignored. A five matters, but it can be planned. It deserves attention, but not panic. A one is noise, preference, habit, poor planning or pressure dressed up as urgency.

The discipline is not to remove urgency from leadership. That would be naive. Some things are urgent. Some things do require immediate action. The discipline is to stop treating everything as a ten, because when everything is a ten, the leader becomes reactive, the team becomes exhausted, and the work that actually matters gets pushed to the margins.

Harvard Business Review’s work on how CEOs manage time reinforces this point. Senior leaders cannot treat their calendar as a neutral container. Their time signals what matters. If a leader’s attention is constantly captured by noise, the organisation learns from that.

Where executive coaching helps

This is where executive coaching becomes valuable for high achievers. Not because a coach gives them a better to-do list, but because coaching creates the space to examine the pattern behind the pressure.

Why does everything feel urgent? Who is defining importance? Where has pace replaced judgement? What are you carrying that should not be yours? What are you achieving, and what is it costing you?

In What Executive Coaching Actually Does — And Why High Achievers Use It, I wrote about coaching as a space for clarity, challenge and better decision-making.

That is exactly the point here. Through The Elevation Model™, this work starts with Vision and Alignment. What actually matters? What are you trying to build, lead, protect or become? Then Awareness reveals where your attention is really going. Breakthrough challenges the inherited belief that pace equals performance. Pathways creates better choices. Commitment locks in the change. Embodiment turns it into a new leadership standard.

The outcome is not a slower leader. It is a clearer one.

Final thought

Urgency will always exist in leadership. There will always be pressure, deadlines, interruptions, difficult conversations, client demands, patient needs, commercial risks and moments that genuinely require fast action.

But everything cannot be priority one.

High achievers need to be especially careful here. Their capacity can become both their strength and their trap. They can carry more, so they do. They can move faster, so they expect others to. They can absorb pressure, so they mistake pressure for importance.

Better leadership is not always about moving faster. Sometimes it is about stepping back long enough to ask the question no one else is asking: is this genuinely urgent, or have we just learned to treat everything that way?

Because urgency is not always importance. And visible busyness is not always leadership.

References

Denham Smith, D. (2023). “5 Tactics to Combat a Culture of False Urgency at Work.” Harvard Business Review.

Porter, M. E. and Nohria, N. (2018). “How CEOs Manage Time.” Harvard Business Review.

Schwartz, T. and McCarthy, C. (2007). “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time.” Harvard Business Review.

Zhu, M., Yang, Y. and Hsee, C. K. (2018). “The Mere Urgency Effect.” Journal of Consumer Research, 45(3), pp. 673–690.

Mark, G., Gudith, D. and Klocke, U. (2008). “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Leroy, S. (2009). “Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work? The Challenge of Attention Residue When Switching Between Work Tasks.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Li, C. et al. (2022). “Electronic medical record-related burnout in healthcare providers: a scoping review of outcomes and interventions.” BMJ Open.

Baxter, S. L. et al. (2022). “Association of Electronic Health Record Inbasket Message Characteristics With Physician Burnout.” JAMA Network Open.

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I’m Laurence Loxam and I’ve pushed limits in business, on mountains, and at the finish line.

Now I help elite professionals do the same, pushing past the point most people stop.

I coach doctors, lawyers, CEOs and founders who’ve hit success, but still feel there’s more.

Together, we unlock clarity, sharpen confidence, and lead with conviction.

Ready for your next leadership breakthrough? Let’s connect.