Every company has that leader.

The one who pings at 10 p.m. with “Need this ASAP.”

The one who pulls dates in, stacks “critical” projects, and talks about “moving with urgency” in every meeting.

They look like the engine of the company. Hungry. Committed. All in.

Then you look at the actual work under them.

Projects slip. Decisions get reopened. Teams are always “almost there.” Your best people look fried and oddly passive. They work late, then hedge in every update.

On paper you have an urgent leader. In reality you have the biggest brake on execution in the whole company.

This is the part most CEOs and CPOs do not want to admit.

Urgent leaders do not create fast teams. They create slow systems with busy people.

The Harsh Truth: Urgency Is Not Speed

Walk into any exec meeting and listen for ten minutes.

“We need this faster.”

“Can we pull this in.”

“Let’s treat this as urgent.”

It feels like leadership. You crank the energy, move the date, fire off strong messages. Everyone scrambles. Calendars fill. Slack lights up.

From the outside it looks like momentum.

Under the hood it is the opposite.

Here is what happens in the real world when urgency becomes a leadership habit.

Work gets injected midstream with no tradeoffs. So teams juggle the original roadmap plus “just this one” request that somehow matters to someone important.

Dates move up without adjusting scope. So people cut corners, then spend weeks fixing what broke.

Priorities switch mid quarter. So teams never get the compounding effect of finishing one big thing and building on it.

Psychologists like Gerald Hockey have shown what happens under chronic time pressure. People narrow their focus, lean on shortcuts, and accept more mistakes as the price of surviving the next deadline source. You do not get sharp thinking. You get tunnel vision and rework.

You have already seen this.

Code that races out then gets patched three times.

Deals that win the verbal yes then die in legal.

“Launched” projects that have to be reopened because basic questions never got answered.

People are sprinting. The system is limping.

That gap between visible effort and real progress is not laziness or talent. It is what happens when an urgent leadership style infects the operating model.

How Urgent Leaders Accidentally Jam The System

If you want to fix this as a CPO or CEO, you have to name the pattern for what it is.

Urgent leaders are not villains. Most of them care deeply. They think pressure creates excellence. They think saying “this is urgent” proves they are serious.

Here is what they actually create.

1. They Destroy Goal Focus

Execution looks simple at the top. Three strategic priorities. Clean slide. Everyone nods.

Then the urgent leader goes back to their org.

A customer waves a big renewal. Suddenly there is a special program.

A competitor ships a feature. Suddenly there is a rapid response sprint.

Finance wants a margin initiative. Another effort. Another date.

Nothing comes off the list. Everything becomes “top priority.”

Goal research from folks like Shah, Friedman, and Kruglanski is blunt. People make real progress when they can protect one important goal from interference by others. Start stacking competing goals and performance drops, even if every goal sounds smart on its own source.

Your people do not need more inspiration. They need fewer simultaneous directions.

2. They Multiply Coordination Cost

Every “quick favor” from an urgent leader is not a favor. It is a new set of dependencies.

Someone has to pull data. Someone has to get signoff. Someone has to explain to three other teams why their thing just got bumped.

Multiply that by a month of last minute asks and watch what happens.

Calendar ping pong. Endless status messages that start with “sorry for the confusion.” Work that gets done twice because nobody wants to admit the plan was overloaded from day one.

Your systems are not slow because teams do not care. They are slow because leaders keep throwing work into the stream and calling it hustle.

3. They Teach People Not To Tell The Truth

Most leaders say they want early risk signals. They want people to say “this date does not work” or “this scope is too big.”

Then the urgent leader reacts to every hard truth with more pressure.

“I get it, but this is critical.”

“I know it is a stretch, but we need everyone to dig deep.”

People learn the real rule fast. Speaking up makes life harder.

So your strongest players stop being honest. Their language shifts from “we will ship this” to “we will try” and “should be fine.” You see exactly that pattern in Workplace data when trust in the system starts to crack.

They are not suddenly weak. They just no longer believe leadership will protect focus when pressure hits.

Once that belief is gone, performance is next.

The Data You Are Ignoring In Your Own Tools

Here is the good news.

This problem is not mysterious. It leaves fingerprints everywhere in your existing tools.

You already track revenue, churn, pipeline. You stare at those dashboards until your eyes hurt.

What you probably do not track is the language and load patterns that show exactly where urgent leadership is slowing you down.

That is the thing Workplace was built for. It pulls patterns from tools like Slack and Teams and shows where certain words cluster, how often decisions get reopened, where ownership language drops, and which teams are drowning in after hours volume.

If one org or one leader generates a huge share of “urgent” and “ASAP” threads, that is not personality. That is execution risk with a name on it.

If the same teams show rising hedging language and more corrective phrases like “just to clarify” and “sorry for the confusion,” you are not looking at a communication quirk. You are looking at a system that no longer trusts its own decisions.

Put those signals in front of the CEO with the same seriousness as revenue misses. This is not an HR side topic. It is how you stop burn rate from turning into burn out.

Once leaders see their own fingerprints in the data, the conversation changes from “our people are tired” to “our operating model is broken.”

How To Put A Price On The Word “Urgent”

So what do you actually do with this as a CPO or CEO.

You do not fix urgent leadership with meditation apps or softer emails.

You change the rules of the system so urgency is no longer free.

1. Make Every Urgent Request Name The Trade

Set one non negotiable rule at the top.

Any time a senior leader calls something urgent, they must name three things on the spot.

• What stops.

• Who is affected.

• How long the sprint lasts and when recovery happens.

If they cannot answer, the work does not start.

This sounds simple. It is not. It will surface every place where “urgency” is just wishful thinking and ego.

2. Cap Concurrent Big Bets Per Team

Decide, as an executive team, how many truly major priorities any team is allowed to carry at once. Two. Maybe three for some.

When something new comes in, something old comes off. Not “we will do both.” Not “we will try.” A real choice in writing.

Goal research is clear here. Once you split effort across too many targets, commitment and outcome drop fast source.

Use Workplace data to check which teams are carrying the heaviest load of “top priorities” in language. That is where you start subtracting.

3. Timebox Decisions And Make Ownership Unmissable

Fast companies do not rush everything. They decide cleanly, then stop revisiting the choice.

Borrow from high performing engineering orgs. The DORA research shows that elite teams deploy more often and fail less. Stability and speed rise together, not in opposition source.

Give debates a shelf life. For example, once a decision hits the table, you have 48 hours to decide. After that, the named decision maker chooses. If you cannot decide, you are not ready to meet.

For every initiative, name one directly responsible individual in writing. Not a committee. Not “the team.” A person.

Watch how fast execution changes once there is a single neck to grab, and that neck knows leadership will not destroy them with random late changes.

4. Promote Calm Predictable Delivery As The New Status

Right now, many companies glamorize the firefighter.

The person who pulled three all nighters.

The leader who “made it happen” by pushing everyone past the red line.

Flip that.

Tell stories about the VP who refused an extra urgent request because the team was at capacity and quality would suffer.

Celebrate the team that hit a tough date with zero weekend work because they did boring things like clarify scope, kill low value work, and say no early.

Put those examples in town halls. Put them in promotion packets. The culture will follow the status signals you choose.

The Real Test For Every CEO And CPO

Here is the exam that tells you if you have an urgent leadership problem or a people problem.

Pull the last 30 days of messages and approvals from your own account and your top team.

Count how often you used words like “urgent” and “ASAP.”

Now count how many times you clearly named what would stop or slip because of that ask.

If those numbers are not close, you do not have a high performance culture. You have a leadership style that is manufacturing drag and calling it drive.

The upside is huge if you fix it.

When urgency becomes rare and honest, people stop bracing for impact. They start believing their effort will actually be protected.

Decisions stop bouncing. Work moves in straight lines. Your best people stop surviving and start building.

That is what real speed feels like.

It does not feel frantic. It feels calm, clear, and relentless in the right places.

Your move.