The high cost of fake urgency in the workplace

But much of this activity is “fake” urgency. There’s often no actual high-stakes deadline. The urgency is manufactured by managers or clients who say they want something delivered fast, and may or may not get to it once the work is submitted.

Fake urgency looks like initiative, but creates unnecessary fire drills for individuals and teams operating in a continuous state of overwhelm, stress, and eventual burnout, according to research from Harvard Business School and Harvard Business Review.

Urgency can be a potent leadership lever to pull. Urgency creates activity and can bring people and teams together. The problem, per usual, is nuance and context. When everything starts to feel urgent, the insidious effects of hurrying sprout up: teams stop thinking, stop prioritizing effectively, and eventually will lose trust in whoever or whatever is sending out the urgency signal.

Real vs. false urgency

Real urgency is “specific, scarce, and tied to a meaningful business consequence,” said Sarah Vancini, a marketing executive at Stories with Substance, where she specializes in B2B marketing for Fortune 500 clients.

“Fake urgency is vague, constant, and usually shows up when a leader is trying to compensate for weak planning, unclear priorities, or anxiety at the top,” Vancini said.

Running a business is metaphorically like running a marathon, not a sprint, said Mike Grossman, a six-time Silicon Valley CEO, and author of the book Failure is an Option, launching in June.

“If everything is an emergency, then nothing is an emergency,” Grossman said. “You need to go fast, but your speed and intensity need to be sustainable over a long period of time.

Pulling urgency levers as a business leader is almost never the right call, Grossman said, citing exceptions:

• Risk of missing payroll
• Security breach
• Loss of a major client
• A company-defining strategic deal (like M&A)

“These are the moments when tremendous urgency is required,” he said. “But even then it’s important to stay calm and clear. Having people run around with their hair on fire is never a productive approach.”

The source of false urgency 

False urgency often reflects a genuine desire to succeed but is typically rooted in anxiety, according to Harvard Business Review.

Leaders worry about the perception of their performance, disappointing stakeholders, and missing opportunities. 

“Urgency is a leadership tool, not a leadership style,” said Rick Elmore, founder and CEO of Simply Noted, a direct mail and personalization platform. “When you weaponize it — making every Slack $WORK message a five-alarm fire, every deadline existential — you train your team to stop believing you.”

Elmore draws a distinction between “market urgency” and “manufactured urgency,” he said.

Market urgency is “real external pressure from a competitor move, a customer moment, or a short window,” he said.

Manufactured urgency “is just anxiety dressed up as leadership,” he said.

“Market urgency gets the full alarm. Manufactured urgency gets a quiet hallway conversation,” Elmore said.

It comes down to ego-driven leadership versus mission-driven leadership, said Carlo Johnson, director of strategy at Neuemotion, a creative agency specializing in science-backed marketing.

"Ego-driven leaders are validated by a sense of importance, and when everything is an emergency, things inherently feel more important,” Johnson said. “Mission-driven leaders, however, understand that having teams bought into the vision is the number-one priority, because that will create urgency from the bottom up vs. being forced from the top down."

The hidden cost of constant urgency

Constant urgency degrades thinking.

“A moderate amount of pressure can absolutely improve performance: it can sharpen attention, increase activation, and help people prioritize. But once that pressure crosses someone’s threshold, the brain starts shifting out of higher-order thinking and into fight, flight, or freeze,” said Danielle Holtjer, a therapist and founder of Vancouver Clinical Director. “In that state, people are no longer learning, reflecting, or problem-solving at their best. Their capacity for creativity, judgment, emotional regulation, and nuanced decision-making starts to narrow. 

“For some people that looks like visible anxiety or reactivity; for others it looks like shutdown, indecision, procrastination, reduced output, or what appears to be disengagement. Often, they are not unmotivated — they are overloaded.”

Effective leaders know how to create enough clarity, accountability, and momentum to support team focus without chronically pushing them past the point where performance deteriorates, Holtjer said.

“Urgency can be useful in truly time-sensitive, high-stakes moments, but forcing speed is often counterproductive when the work requires learning, strategic thinking, collaboration, creativity, or emotional intelligence,” she said. “Calm teams are not necessarily complacent teams — often they are the teams operating in the optimal zone for sustainable high performance.”

Constant urgency destroys prioritization.

It results in people responding to short deadlines over important work.

“False urgency, which creates pressure around routine activities, will cause a team to lose its ability to prioritize and ultimately reduce the quality of work as people rush for speed over accuracy,” said Mike Roberts, co-founder and president of City Creek Mortgage. “False urgency will also lead teams to make hasty decisions, particularly on complex issues. In stressful situations, teams are more likely to choose the easiest solution rather than the best one, while calmer conditions allow for catching errors earlier and thinking more strategically. When we slow things down just enough, the decisions are almost always better.”

Constant urgency eliminates deep work.

Fake urgency rewards responsiveness over intelligence.

“The unspoken cost of false urgency is deep thinking,” Elmore said. “When you keep interrupting your team to ‘put out fires,’ you kill the work that actually moves the needle — strategy, creativity, compounding effort. The calmer leaders I've studied and emulated don't create a sense of relaxation. They create clarity. That's what unlocks real speed.”

Calm is a performance advantage

Calm isn’t slow. It’s focused, Elmore said.

Calm teams are operating in the optimal zone for sustained performance, Holtjer said.

“In leadership, the goal is not to keep people activated all the time,” she said. “It is to build an environment where people can stay calm and clear most of the time, and then respond effectively when a genuinely high-stakes moment calls for speed.”