Creating a sense of urgency in you and your team

If you’ve often wondered how you can get your team working towards goals with the same sense of urgency that you have — you are not alone.

As a leader, meeting deadlines and goals is important, and yet you can’t accomplish this unless you have the whole team on board.

So what do you do when everyone isn’t on board? Or, doesn’t have the same sense of urgency that you do?

I remember a time in my sales career when my leaders would want us to meet a specific target; it usually centred around the time of year - month-end, quarter-end or year-end.

When they wanted us to work to achieve higher numbers, more client appointments, more proposals, more sales, the tone shifted from them. How they spoke to us changed. What they said changed. We could FEEL the importance of the goal.

This is the first shift in creating a sense of urgency:

1.Are you acting the same as you normally do? Are you modeling urgency?

What does modeling urgency look like, you may ask?

Well in my sales career this meant being in the office at 8 am delivering my goals for the day, leaving the office by 9, and not coming back until 5 to deliver what I accomplished back to the group: how many appointments I had, what new clients I spoke with, the new proposals I delivered or were working on, and any closed business that came in that day.

Now, I’m not suggesting you adopt this practice.

The point is, we could feel the urgency from our leaders - they acted differently. They elevated their focus on the results we needed to deliver and they created a process around that which was different from ‘every-day’ practices.

There are four other important points here about creating urgency that I’d like to make. Two are found in the above example and two are added as leadership has evolved:

Next comes a shift in process:

2. The importance of the goal should be discussed: what it means for the business, the team, and clients. What impact would hitting that goal have? Then, have the team provide ideas/plans on HOW they want to accomplish the goal. What steps and actions need to be prioritized? This could be a phased process where the team comes up with actions without the leader and then the leader comes into the discussion and makes any additions/corrections or adjustments.

3. Then, create clear metrics to monitor results that are clear to everyone.

Whether you shift your check-ins to daily, weekly or monthly, elevating your focus on tasks required to hit the goal is important and sends a signal to everyone what’s important and what has to be prioritized. Whether it’s sales goals or progress with a project that has tight timelines, this is important.

4. Each team member should own and be prepared to discuss what they plan to accomplish and how. And, they should be coached to know that if they need support in that achievement, to make it known.

As a leader, your mental check at this stage is: is the activity that my team member is describing going to lead them to their goal today, this week, this month? You may want to provide feedback to raise the number of calls or consider a modified step to get a project moved to the next stage, etc. This where you can guide them if their assumptions are off.

***

I like to think of urgency as applying ‘a heightened focus to encourage faster results’.

Creating a sense of urgency is like accelerating on an on-ramp to the highway. You need to apply more pressure to the gas pedal - not too much, not too little, so you can come up to highway speed and merge with traffic.

You are elevating your speed, attention and priorities so you can ride that highway of consistent and sooner-rather-than-later action-taking.

What doesn’t work is on-again off-again attention.

You won’t go very far if you slow down and take the next exit to subsequently ride on the country road again.

You see, having a consistent elevated focus allows you to generate momentum.

Momentum looks like: clients calling you back, more appointments in your calendar, more proposals or quotes, project milestones being hit.

You become more practiced and consistent with hitting goals, which smooths the hills and valleys of business development and improves the likelihood of that project being completed on time.

So, as you see, I’m in favour of maintaining a certain amount of heightened focus when it comes to meeting deadlines and targets for a certain period of time. That way, it becomes your regular process rather than a faucet that’s turned off and on when you need it.

I find that personally too extreme and unsustainable tends not to deliver the results you’re looking for.

This leads me to the final step:

5. When the project is over or the timeframe has come and gone - recognition of accomplishments is important - even if the goals weren’t hit. It’s important to de-brief and look at what went well, what didn’t go well and what needs to be changed for next time.

In the meantime - for what needs to be changed - this may lead to additional training, practice, coaching, etc. so next time, results will continue to grow.

Also, this is a point where the ‘actions that worked’ can be integrated more fully into ‘regular’ practice so the team can benefit from more consistent results throughout the year.

NOW is YOUR time,

Ariana

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