Culture: How to Raise Urgency and Intensity

Is a general sense of “just getting by” permeating your workplace? While everyone is technically getting their tasks done, you may be noticing that the general mood is more passive and uninspired. Your group could be suffering from lack of urgency and intensity. 

As operational traits, urgency and intensity are needed in the right doses to maintain team members’ internal motivation and to maximize efficiencies. When urgency and intensity levels are low, it’s easy for a company to fall behind competitors in throughput, innovation and being first to the market. Here’s a look at how to raise urgency and intensity.

Tips for Raising Urgency and Intensity

Raising urgency and intensity is a task that can easily be mishandled if you don’t have a firm grasp on what these characteristics look like when they are implemented in positive ways. For many managers, there is an instinct to believe that raising urgency and intensity can only be done by raising the pressure. The reality is that this could even be counterproductive.

Urgency and intensity should not be motivated by pressure. The goal is to get a team culture in a place where these positive traits are motivated by opportunity instead of pressure. That’s because properly oriented urgency and intensity spark from optimism instead of fear. While they are partly driven by the reality that you need to outwork, outsmart, and outpace the competitor in order to shine, the internal motivation experienced is inspired by a drive for success instead of a fear of chastisement. Ways to foster urgency and intensity in a team include:

• Offer more autonomy as a way of letting team members feel that they “own” projects. This sense of freedom can help to inspire urgency and intensity because team members feel that the success of their own ideas depends on how hard they work.
• Train managers in knowing the difference between urgency and intensity and aggression. Many managers and team leaders who naturally possess the traits of urgency and intensity are stifling them out of a fear of coming across too strongly. Their desire to avoid being intimidating is causing them to suppress important leadership skills that positively motivate team members and help to achieve goals.
• Identify if there are actually low rates of urgency and intensity in your team. These aren’t traits that are measured by standard personality tests that many organizations use. Teamalystics has developed a proprietary assessment that looks at more than a dozen leadership areas and shows the measures on a continuum. This type of assessment helps companies leverage new insights, adapt leadership styles and optimize team performance. When Teamalytics studied the results of 1,484 team assessments, the firm found that 62% of participants ranked at risk of being too low in the category of urgency and intensity.

By getting a read on where team members rank on urgency and intensity, you can move forward with nurturing the natural skills possessed by specific team members. Getting this information is more important than ever in today’s workplace. An assessment that measures leadership traits allows you to see how the different talents of your team members come together to shape the “silent” company culture you didn’t even realize was leading your performance.

Teamalytcis has also published a free e-book for business leaders looking for ways to rise to the top. “CREATING CUTTING EDGE COMPANY CULTURE IN A WORK FROM HOME WORLD” can be downloaded today! This e-book touches on the two keys to an engaged workforce based on the link between results and relationships.