High Performance Leaders Communicate Urgency

When you communicate to your team you have a clear message. Do you also communicate how urgent that message is? Can your team members tell how important your message is?

High performance leaders communicate the urgency of their message. Not that every message is urgent - and when a message is not urgent team members appreciate knowing that, too. When the message is critical and when it is essential that everyone on the team respond in a vital and urgent manner, high performance leaders make that known.

A leader must communicate two things: the message, and the urgency of the message.

We communicate urgency through our tone of voice, our body language, our timing (when we give the message) and the words we use. It is completely possible for a leader to remain calm and still communicate a great sense of urgency.

How will you know when your urgency has been correctly received? Ask. Make it part of your message. Get the feedback that you need. For example, "This move is highly important and critical to our team's success. I need for everyone team member to get it, and to embrace it, and to put it into action. How important does that sound to you?"

Individually, you can ask team members "what exactly am I asking team members to do? How important is that right now? How do you feel about it?"

It's not enough to broadcast our urgency. We can't take for granted that people understand the importance of what we say. We need to confirm, sometimes adjust, and sometimes re-communicate until both the message AND the level of urgency is understand.

How important it this for your team?

-- Doug Smith

Front Range Leadership: Training Supervisors for Success

doug smith training: how to achieve your project goals

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