Everything Cannot Be an Emergency: How Urgency Culture Disguises Itself as High Performance

For a significant portion of my leadership career, I worked in an organization that moved fast. And for a long time, I thought that was one of our strengths... We accomplished an incredible amount of work. We pursued new ideas. We tackled big initiatives. We found solutions when obstacles appeared. There was an underlying belief that when something needed to happen, we would figure out how to make it happen, and I loved that mentality...

Until I started seeing the other side of it.

Over time, moving fast became moving urgently. Taking on challenges became taking on everything. Finding solutions became an expectation that there was always a way to squeeze in one more initiative, one more project, one more request.

And somewhere along the way, urgency started masquerading as high performance.

That distinction took me years to fully understand and now that I am outside of that environment, I can see it much more clearly:

A team constantly operating with urgency is not necessarily a high-performing team. Sometimes it is simply an overwhelmed team that has become incredibly good at surviving.

Urgency Can Feel Like Success

Urgency culture is tricky because, at first, it can feel really productive. Things get done. People respond quickly. Leaders solve problems. Teams pull together and accomplish things that seemed impossible.

There can even be an adrenaline rush that comes with it. Anyone who has worked in a fast-paced environment knows the feeling of tackling a crisis, rallying the troops, and somehow pulling it off.

The problem begins when the exception becomes the operating model.

One emergency becomes another.

Then another.

Soon, everything is urgent. And when everything is urgent, people stop having enough space to ask a much more important question: Is this actually important?

Urgency asks: How fast can we get this done?

Exceptional leadership asks: Should we be doing this at all?

Those are two very different questions.

I Didn't Always See It While I Was In It

This is something I understand much better in hindsight.

I spent years in an environment with an incredibly fast work tempo. There was always another opportunity, another initiative, another way to improve, another expectation to deliver.

And to be completely honest, I was good at operating that way.

I could move fast.

I could juggle a ridiculous number of things.

I could find a way.

In many ways, I wore that ability as a badge of honor, but as the pace continued to accelerate, I began seeing the cost.

People were tired.

Capacity conversations became increasingly difficult because there was always another reason something needed to happen.

As a leader, I found myself caught in the middle. I wanted to protect my team, but I was also responsible for delivering on expectations coming from elsewhere. I tried to absorb pressure where I could. I worked more. I carried more. My team carried more.

And because we kept delivering, the system kept working.

Or at least it looked like it was working. That is one of the most dangerous things about urgency culture: When capable people continually find a way to make impossible workloads possible, organizations can mistake their sacrifice for sustainable capacity.

Eventually, “Look at everything we accomplished!” can hide a much more important question: What did it cost us to accomplish it?

Urgency Has a Cost

The cost of urgency does not always show up immediately. At first, the work still gets done. But over time, cracks begin appearing.

People move so quickly that important perspectives get missed.

Stakeholders who should have been involved are consulted too late, or not at all.

Quality declines because there simply is not enough time to think deeply.

Teams become reactive instead of strategic. Relationships suffer. People become exhausted.

And perhaps most concerning, everyone becomes so accustomed to operating in crisis mode that urgency begins to feel normal.

That does not mean people stop caring. Often, the opposite is true. Some of the most talented, dedicated people I have ever known have worked inside urgency cultures.

They care tremendously.

They are capable.

They work incredibly hard.

But even exceptional people cannot sustainably produce exceptional work when everything demands immediate attention. Speed, work volume, and excellence are not the same thing.

Sometimes slowing down is what allows excellence to happen.

Revisit the Eisenhower Matrix

Early in the 1% Better Leadership Challenge, we talked about the Eisenhower Matrix, and this is exactly where I think it deserves another look.

The matrix separates work using two questions:

Is it important?

Is it urgent?

That creates four categories:

• Urgent + Important: Do it.

• Important + Not Urgent: Schedule and protect time for it.

• Urgent + Not Important: Delegate it, reduce it, or question whether it needs your attention at all.

• Not Urgent + Not Important: Eliminate it.
  

Simple.

However, here is where urgency culture gets dangerous... It pulls almost everything toward the urgent side of the matrix.

Emails feel urgent.

Requests feel urgent.

Meetings feel urgent.

Someone else's deadline becomes your emergency.

Meanwhile, some of the most important leadership work lives in the Important + Not Urgent quadrant.

Strategic planning.

Employee development.

Relationship building.

Process improvement.

Preventative maintenance.

Succession planning.

Thinking.

None of those things usually scream for attention today.

Which is exactly why they continually get pushed aside... until they become emergencies.

Stop Rewarding the Firefighter. Start Preventing Fires.

Organizations often unintentionally reward urgency. Think about who gets recognized.

It is often the person who swoops in at the last minute, works until midnight, solves the crisis, and saves the project. And yes, sometimes that absolutely deserves recognition.

But I think we should also be asking: Why was there a fire in the first place?

What if we celebrated the employee who redesigned the process so the emergency never happened?

What if high performance meant fewer fires rather than becoming exceptionally skilled at extinguishing them?

Exceptional leaders do not just put out fires. They ask why everything keeps catching on fire.

Maybe expectations are unclear.

Maybe decision-making takes too long.

Maybe priorities constantly shift.

Maybe there are too many approvals.

Maybe the team is understaffed.

Maybe everything has been labeled a priority.

Maybe the organization has simply normalized an unsustainable pace.

Urgency is sometimes unavoidable.

But let me be clear: Urgency culture is 100% avoidable.

If It Is Urgent but Not Important, Why Are You Doing It?

I once attended a High Performing Organization training where the instructor made a comment I still think about... We were discussing the Eisenhower Matrix, specifically the Urgent + Not Important quadrant.

He joked that if an email landed in that category, maybe you should just ignore it. And if it became important, they would email again. If it didn't, apparently it wasn't that important.

Now, am I recommending that everyone start ignoring their emails?

No. 😂

But there is actually a really important point buried inside that joke...

We spend an enormous amount of time completing things simply because they are in front of us.

An email arrives.

We answer it.

Someone asks for something.

We do it.

A meeting invitation appears.

We accept it.

A task is easy to check off.

We complete it.

It feels productive because we are moving, but movement is not the same as progress. If something is urgent but genuinely not important, we should be asking why we are spending valuable time on it at all.

Delegate it.

Automate it.

Reduce it.

Batch it.

Eliminate it.

Or simply let it wait.

Your team's limited energy should not be consumed by work that does not matter simply because it arrived loudly.

Leaders Set the Tempo

An incredible valuable lesson that I learned from working inside a high-urgency environment is that culture flows from leadership.

Leaders may say:

“Don't burn yourself out.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“You don't need to respond after hours.”

...But employees pay much more attention to behavior than words.

If leaders constantly create last-minute requests, everything becomes urgent.

If leaders send messages at all hours and expect rapid responses, everything becomes urgent.

If every new idea immediately becomes an initiative, everything becomes urgent.

If employees who continually take on more receive the most recognition, everything becomes urgent.

You cannot tell people to slow down while leading in a way that constantly speeds them up.

Leaders set the tempo.

Sometimes exceptional leadership means intentionally lowering it... Not because standards are lower, but because slowing down gives people the ability to think, collaborate, listen, plan, and produce better work.

Create Space Before the Next Emergency

Reducing urgency culture does not mean becoming slow and it does not mean ignoring legitimate emergencies. It does not mean lowering expectations or losing ambition. instead, it means becoming much more intentional about what actually deserves urgency.

A real emergency should feel different from normal work.

When everything is urgent, teams lose the ability to distinguish between the two.

So the next time something lands on your desk labeled ASAP, pause before passing that urgency downstream and ask:

Is this truly urgent,

Is it important?

What happens if this waits?

Am I creating urgency simply because I want it done quickly?

What existing priority will be disrupted if we respond immediately?

Sometimes the answer will be, "Yes. This genuinely needs our attention now." In that case, great. Your team can rally.

But rallying should be something teams do occasionally, not how they survive every Tuesday.

High Performance Should Be Sustainable

For a long time, I associated high performance with how much we could accomplish, but now I think about it differently.

High performance is not just about output. It is about producing meaningful, exceptional work in a way that can be sustained.

It is about having enough capacity to think before acting.

Enough time to involve the right people.

Enough clarity to distinguish important work from loud work.

Enough margin to respond when a real emergency actually happens.

...Because if your organization is already operating at 110 percent capacity every day, there is nowhere to go when something truly urgent occurs.

You cannot sprint forever, and you shouldn't have to. Exceptional leaders do not prove their value by creating teams that can survive endless urgency. Instead, they build teams that know what matters, have the space to do it well, and understand that not everything deserves to be treated like an emergency.

Sometimes the most powerful thing a leader can do is look at the chaos swirling around their team and say, "This can wait."