Patience and Urgency - Part 1

I received an interesting email from a leader last week asking me if I take requests for blog topics. I wrote back to her and let her know, YES I love it when folks engage and are looking for tips or tricks to enhance their leadership life. The question was so well-formed that I asked her for permission to quote it. 

I love leaders who care about their organizations! I really get the sense that this leader both wants to personally be brought into what senior leadership is seeing and cares enough to wrestle with such difficult questions.  

As a leader, if someone in your organization wants to go to lunch or grab a virtual coffee and ask a question like this, I think you should find a way to give them a raise. I have worked alongside too many folks who would just throw their hands up in the air and cast blame on the organization for the lack of productivity. What I love about this question is that there is no blame here, just a leader seeking to contribute. 

The Question

Her question was:

“If you're taking requests, how about something on patience with organizational readiness during times of change?

Lately, we have received several calls to action from senior leadership that incremental changes are not enough...we must make big changes (and in a relatively short time frame).

Oh, and all of this is supposed to occur in a matrix organization devoid of hierarchy.   I find that I struggle to find patience when we identify high-impact opportunities (to do things better, faster, more cost-effectively) that, in reality, will still take 6-18 months to persuade all the affected stakeholders to even START.  No tears or anger, just a lack of productivity.”

I am going to dissect the question as a series, a multi-week post. I am particularly intrigued by this question because at its core, the organization seems to be asking for two different things. Not only are there multiple requests, but they also seem like they are polar opposites.

Patience…………………………….and…………………………………….Urgency

How can we have patience and urgency at the same time? 

On the surface, these attributes seem to be time responses to the same trigger. And in some sense they are. 

When faced with dilemmas like this, I like to separate out the attributes and see if they really are on the same linear plane. Are they really polar opposites?  If we separate the attributes and put each on its own line, can we find any new or interesting ways to look at the problem?

My good friend and organizational change expert Dr. Drew Boyd, writer of Inside the Box Thinking would probably call this “division”. You see, Drew maintains that innovation does not come from what we do not know, but from what we do. So if we give our problem a new definition, we might learn from it. So I did the following:

Patience…………….

And 

Urgency……………

As soon as I wrote the problem on two different lines, the thought came to me that we are likely talking about two different things entirely.  I went back and read the email that my leader friend wrote to me and saw the problem anew. Here is what I am now seeing:

Individual Patience

And

Organizational Urgency

If we put each of these on some sort of linear graphic it could look something like this:

Individual Patience……….and…….Individual Impulsiveness

Organizational Urgency…and……Organizational Stagnation

What this graphic representation does for me is it helps me see how I need strategies for both myself and the organization. The problem with leaving the attributes on the same line is that my brain sees them as the same thing and if I have emotion about them, one will spill over into the other.

By separating out the issues, I can gain clarity and formulate a plan. So now that the question is clearer I can search for better answers to both of these problems.

How can I be more patient?

How can I help the organization gain a sense of urgency?

Next week, in part two, I am going to answer both of these questions and give some tips and strategies that leaders can use in their everyday practice. 

Until next week, I have an assignment for you:

Sit for 15 minutes each day with your journal and reflect on how you can be more patient. 

I really want you to try this. Don’t do anything else while you do this exercise (well maybe have a cup of coffee or hot tea). Just sit quietly with no radio or distractions on and write what it feels like for you to be patient.

If you do this exercise for a day or two, I would love it if you would write a comment below and let me know what the experience was like for you.