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Run-Run, Meet-Meet, Talk-Talk, Defend-Defend
Exhausted yet? Replace staff complacency with a sense of urgency.
This is not an emergency, but immediacy. Do it now!

Fast Focus

• Successful firms banish complacency and instill urgency and passion.
• A false sense of urgency is as bad as complacency.
• In a culture of urgency, people quickly recognize great opportunities and hazards.

This year is different.

I always look forward to executive gatherings, and none is more interesting to me than The Council’s annual Insurance Leadership Forum, this year being held at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. It’s a chance to meet with many of our industry’s great company leaders and get their perspective on the state of our business. New ideas abound, and attendees leave the forum with a briefcase full of concepts to apply when they return to their desks.

But this year, that’s not enough. We have a crisis of complacency right now, and it’s something that needs to be tackled head-on if our businesses are to rise healthy and productive out of this economic downturn.

Let’s face it, if you look at the state of the industry today, you’d have to admit that 2009 has not been pretty. While the headwinds have diminished, firms have had a very difficult time growing. Organic growth has been negative, or just slightly positive for those few firms that are in the best positions. Yet I have met with executives of many firms who are complacent about the situation—essentially just waiting for the headwinds to change and turn into tailwinds.

I can hear many of you saying, “Wait a minute, that’s a bit harsh.” And maybe it is. Many of our industry leaders have great ideas ready to implement. I spend much of my time speaking with owners, CEOs, CFOs and other top management discussing strategies to promote long-term growth and profitability. People get excited about change when they see it as an opportunity and a challenge. But even in that positive environment, there’s an element of the conversation that often bothers me: urgency.

I’ve seen it come up over and over again. People head back to their offices from a great confab like the Insurance Leadership Forum ready and willing to implement change, yet change comes slowly, if at all. Why? Because they and their employees do not have a true sense of urgency, the internal feeling of knowing change is necessary and it must happen now. Not next quarter. Not when the winds change and the hard market returns. And that means avoiding things that impede change. It mean acting fast, getting things done, avoiding roadblocks and dodging booby traps. How many people would say that’s how their firm operates?

DEFINING DIRE NECESSITY
My urgency consciousness was raised when I first read John P. Kotter’s book Leading Change (Harvard Business School Press, 1996). Kotter, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership Emeritus at Harvard Business School, recognized how difficult it is to instill a sense of urgency in business people. He followed up that book with the aptly named A Sense of Urgency (Harvard Business School Press, 2008). In this slim, engaging volume, he shows why urgency must become part of a company’s core cultural foundation and how to defeat urgency’s main competitor, complacency.
I want to review some of Kotter’s salient points and explain the difference between true urgency and the frantic wheel-spinning and mayhem that many confuse with urgency.

We all could name many problems that exist in the insurance industry and at our firms. We know that if we do not keep innovating, we will not survive long term. Yet why do things hardly change or does change come so slowly? The issue is complacency. We all have seen it, but few really understand how prevalent or, most importantly, how destructive it can be. Worst of all, many people do not even realize it surrounds them.

You could call it the “same as it ever was” mantra. People find themselves entranced by the idea that the more things change, the more they stay the same, which is another way of saying, “Don’t expect anything to change because it won’t.”

One reason this attitude takes hold is because, by nature, we tell ourselves that we know what to do and how to do it, which leads to a false sense of security and a focus on past successes. We’re comfortable with the status quo and, deep down, we’re afraid of change. What results is a culture of unchanging activity, where we ignore new opportunities or hazards.

Compare this complacency to a false sense of urgency, which is another prevalent norm for many. It can be brought about by current or recent problems or failures that have hit short-term results, or it could be the result of long-term problems that affect a firm over an extended period of time. When such problems arise in meetings or on the financial reports, a false sense of urgency can ensue, and people become anxious, frustrated, nervous and angry.

This type of behavior can cause extreme stress and can be more destructive than complacency because it drains energy from people and diverts it into activities that affect productivity but do not effectively deal with problems.

WARNING SIGNS
The interesting thing about complacency is that most complacent people don’t realize they are. They feel that they’re doing the right thing. However, deep down they are afraid of changing the status quo. You might see a false sense of urgency exhibited by your staff if you realize people are meeting just to meet and hash over problems, talking incessantly about what to do, preparing all sorts of reports about “what if” this or that occurs. By recognizing some of the warning signs of complacency and a false urgency, you can tackle them head-on.

A useful trick to identify the complacent is to evaluate what they do instead of what they say. In the end, a complacent person does what has worked in the past, not what is needed for the future. A great example of this is changing the producer compensation model. I have preached for years that the current system of producer compensation is broken, and many of my listeners immediately concur with the shortfalls. However, when I look back over time, very few have really made the significant changes that are needed. So in the end, their actions said, “Why change what has worked for us and everyone else for the past 50 years?”

Clearly, it’s a case of actions speaking louder than words.

A false sense of urgency can be very destructive to an organization, resulting in stress, frustration and declining morale. The trick is to identify this type of culture. Assess whether people’s actions are much more about activity than productivity. As Kotter says, it looks like this: “run-run, meet-meet, talk-talk, defend-defend, and go home exhausted.” I am sure we can all relate to at some point experiencing this type of behavior.

Kotter has identified some useful questions to help leaders ferret out complacency and false urgency.

1. Are critical issues delegated to consultants or task forces with little involvement of key people?
2. Is candor lacking in confronting the bureaucracy and politics that slow down important initiatives?
3. Do meetings on key issues end with no decisions about what must happen immediately (except the scheduling of another meeting)?
4. Are people just presenting an endless stream of PowerPoint presentations?
5. Are failures in the past discussed not to learn but to stop or stall new initiatives?

INSTILLING URGENCY
So, what is a true sense of urgency? It occurs when leaders and employees know and understand the importance of change in a rapidly changing industry or landscape. It’s an atmosphere where people quickly recognize great opportunities and hazards. A culture with a true sense of urgency is driven by leadership, is prevalent throughout an organization and, most importantly, can be recreated as needed.

Kotter defines the behavior as activity and actions which are alert, fast-moving and focused on the important issues. The team has an ability to continuously purge irrelevant activities to provide time for the important ones and does so in a manner to prevent burnout.

How do you build a true sense of urgency among your staff that can replace the cycle of complacency and false urgency? It’s not easy because long-lived cultures in many firms are difficult to change, but if you can create that sort of culture, it will heavily influence your firm’s future success. Kotter suggests a single strategy and four tactics to help you get there.

The strategy part is simple. Create a culture that is exceptionally alert about the industry and change.

People become externally oriented and are driven to win and be the best. Most successful people are focused on making some progress each and every day and constantly purging lower-value activities. The foundation of a culture of a true sense of urgency is a set of internal feelings—a compulsive determination to keep moving and to win now. The end result can be behavior change: People will be focused on important issues, relentlessly launching new initiatives or cooperating with the initiatives of others to achieve ambitious goals despite the obstacles. Winning will be the only acceptable result.

Great producers—rainmakers, as I call them—have these characteristics built into their DNA. The key is to transform the desires and attitudes of rainmakers to others within your agency.

To implement this strategy, combine analytically sound, ambitious and logical goals with methods that help employees experience those goals as exciting, meaningful and uplifting. The entire program must be designed to create a deeply felt determination to move, make it happen and win now. In the end, the key to success is to get beyond people’s minds and into their hearts. What is this really called? Passion! A culture of passion creates a true sense of urgency. History has proven that passion is one of the foundations of success, and passionate individuals are more successful than those who do not have a passion for their work.

Now let’s discuss the tactics.

Tactic 1: Bring the outside in. Employees must reconnect internal reality with external opportunities and hazards. Firms tend to be too internally oriented. There can be a significant disconnect between what the “insiders” see, feel and think, on the one hand, and external opportunities and hazards, on the other. An inside-outside disconnect always reduces an organization’s sense of urgency because it can create the “we know best” attitude that sees no reason to look outside. To me, the best example of this is an insurance agency that thinks it has a great producers and a value proposition that distinguishes itself from its competitors. Yet when you compare your organic growth rates or hit ratios to the industry’s truly best, you find that your agency is just average. I see many firms fall into this trap because whatever it is they do, and how they do it, worked in the past. But it is like a train stuck in the station—ultimately another train will pass it by. Slow and steady does not survive in a quickly changing environment like insurance.

Tactic 2: Behave with urgency every day. Your staff must be coached to never act content, anxious or angry. Always demonstrate your own sense of urgency in meetings, conversations and documents, and get that message across to as many people as possible. Key behavior traits of leaders with a true sense of urgency:

• Purge low priority items.
• Cancel distracting projects.
• Delegate effectively.
• Move with speed to free up time for urgent matters.
• Speak with passion.
• Instill in others the need to move, adapt and stay ahead of the competition.

We send messages to our colleagues constantly and in many ways. What we say is important; how we say it can be quite revealing. People watch how quickly or slowly we react on various issues. They notice tone of voice, facial and body movements. They notice the details that ultimately show whether you have a sense of urgency that creates a positive culture versus a negative, stressed-out environment.

Tactic 3: Find opportunity in crises. Always be alert to see if a crisis can be your friend, not just a dreadful enemy. This is one way to destroy complacency. Proceed with caution, and never be naive, since crises can be deadly. Crises can be used to create a sense of urgency if these principles can be followed:

• Always think of crises as potential opportunities and not as dreadful problems that are the fault of someone else.
• Crises do not automatically reduce complacency. If not monitored and handled well, crises can lead to fear, anger and blame, which can lead to behaviors associated with false urgency.
• To use a crisis to reduce complacency, make sure it is visible, unambiguous and specifically related to a real business problem that can have significant impact on the organization if not addressed. Fight the impulse to minimize or hide bad news, yet don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.
• Be exceptionally proactive in assessing how people will react when you develop specific action plans and seek to swiftly implement them.

Tactic 4: Deal with the no-nos. Remove or neutralize all the relentless urgency-killers, those people who are not skeptics but are determined to keep a group complacent or, if needed, to create destructive urgency. These “no-nos” are highly skilled urgency-killers. If they cannot undermine attempts at diminishing contentment with the status quo, they try to create anxiety or anger among others.

In dealing with these individuals, one must be careful to understand the difference between a skeptic and a no-no. Skeptics may need more data to be convinced. They tend to be risk averse. They probably have been in situations where real issues were not dealt with well. In the end, skeptics can slow down a process but also can be very useful by challenging naive people about making huge mistakes.

KEEP IT GOING
Creating a sense of urgency for a specific issue is easy. Creating a culture that includes a sense of urgency is much harder. The following are some tips on how to build a culture of urgency that will stay with your agency into the long term.

• Anticipate a possible downturn in the sense of urgency.
• Plan for a solution.
• As soon as urgency starts to dip, use an appropriate combination of urgency-raising tactics.
• Most of all, remember that culture always needs to be reinforced over and over if it is to catch on with your staff. If you think of a sense of urgency as a cultural foundation of your organization, you will find many ways to constantly reinforce the desired activity.

It is imperative to smash complacency in your firm and instill a true sense of urgency—not just a false one, where concerns are aired in meetings and platitudes are spoken about dealing with the problems, but no solutions ever see action.

It might help to think of it as a “house on fire” situation: If your house were on fire, would you convene a committee, get input on the problem, solicit suggestions on how to battle the fire, and schedule a follow-up once more study had been done? No! You’d call all hands on deck and do whatever was prudent to get that fire put out and save your house. It’s that same sense of necessity and immediacy that you must instill as part of your culture.

But be careful: Don’t train your staff to just go running off with a bucket of water whenever they see a fire. You are aiming for a planned, coordinated solution that is enacted swiftly, even while the next arising situation is being eyed. Urgency doesn’t mean emergency, but it does mean immediacy.

Finally, practice continual mindfulness and improvement. When you see complacency or a false sense of urgency emerge, turn those things into a true sense of urgency by using tactics that will jolt people out of the same-as-it-ever-was attitude. Each time you bring the staff around to a true sense of urgency, try to instill that deeper into your culture until it becomes second nature.

If you can do that, and completely banish complacency from your workplace, you’re going to be one of those industry movers and shakers who inspire people at next year’s Insurance Leadership Forum. And you’ll be one leader I will want to meet.

Robert Lieblein is a contributing writer and managing partner of Hales & Co.