Not Everything is as Urgent as it Appears

A critical part of being accountable and delivering against your commitments (promises!) is to actually have the bandwidth for them, in other words, to not over-commit.

We already talked about how it is ok — actually expected — to say ‘no’ when needed. What we didn’t talk about yet are timelines (or ‘deadlines’ to make it even scarier sounding).

Not everything that comes from your leadership comes with a “ drop everything else and do this right now “ expectation. In most cases, leaders just want to know when they can expect an answer and have the confidence that they don’t need to spend their energy to track that deliverable for you.

If a request came in without a timeline or clarification on urgency, don’t assume. Just ask: “ Hey, when do you need this by? “

No decent leader will hold it against you if you ask, “ By when do you need this? “ I’m actually pretty sure for most leaders this will register as a plus point (if it doesn’t it’s time to look for a different leader).

What leaders want to know is whether you commit to providing the answer and by when. They want to be confident that you will do it and that they don’t have to worry about it. They will tell you if a timeline is not flexible and why.

As an employee, train your leader to provide that information with her requests in the future. However, also make extra sure that you are managing yourself against that timeline! It is super frustrating as a leader if you need to keep your own reminders on everything you need because you cannot rely on open loops to be closed without your constant follow-up.

Not everything needs to happen right now. In fact, very few things are truly urgent, although many are perceived or presented as urgent or initially appear non-negotiable.

Unfortunately, corporate culture has developed many bad habits in order to try to compensate for low accountability:

Feel empowered to understand and validate urgency and tight deadlines. Ask for when a task is truly due. If it requires you to drop other things, understand what drives the urgency and what breaks if the deadline is missed.

If you think a deadline has a ‘safety buffer’ built-in, ask for the real deadline. However, once you get the real deadline, you must make sure that you will be ready by that time. Otherwise, you just teach your partners to add additional buffers to manage in the future to work around your tardiness and unreliability.

If a deadline is infeasible, check your calendar and priorities and see when you can make it. Offer that alternative plan and check for agreement. If pushed, be clear what you will have to sacrifice in order to make that timeline.

In most cases, you will find that a deadline is actually negotiable.

Did you like this article? Want to read more?

If you want to get this post and much more in one comprehensive, and structured view, check out our new book:

A practical guide to living healthier, happier and more successful in 52 weekly steps

By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk

ISBN 9781077278929

If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors, we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.

Related posts:

Your rental experience may become a real disaster if you do not prepare to enter the market. Having some basic knowledge about the scammers and their techniques is a must for everyone who wants to…

The World Conference on Psychology and Behavioral Sciences in wpbconf.org is an academic conference that brings together researchers, scholars, practitioners, and students from around the world to…