“Urgency and Drama are Not a Good Combination When Driving Culture”

I had to crack up when I said that line during a conversation with a leader about her business's culture.

We are living in very challenging times, and leaders who understand how critical culture is to success are constantly looking for ways to address what gets in the way of a healthy culture.

What makes a good culture in this environment? I can share a list of things that I hear every day in the work we do around designing, developing, and delivering our award-winning business simulations:

• Honest and Unbiased Management: Leaders must act with integrity, tell the truth even during difficult business cycles, and hold everyone, especially management, accountable to the same ethical standards.
• Civil Behavior: Workplaces must actively prevent toxic behavior, disrespect, microaggressions, and a lack of recognition to ensure a safe, supportive environment for all employees.
• Meaningful Work and Opportunities: Employees need to feel that their daily tasks create a tangible impact and that the company provides a clear path for personal career growth.
• Open Communication: Organizations must cultivate transparent feedback channels where team members feel safe expressing their authentic selves and raising concerns without fear of punishment.
• Urgency: Cultivating a proactive, agile mindset where employees prioritize speed to action and decisive execution over hesitation or perfectionism.

During our conversation, we talked a lot about this element of urgency, and in today's fast-paced global business environment, this is how it defines a positive workplace culture:

• Urgency and Agility: Teams treat time as a critical resource, moving quickly to seize market opportunities, respond to competitor moves, and solve customer problems before they escalate.
• Overcoming Perfection Paralysis: It encourages a "bias for action," meaning employees are empowered to make fast, calculated decisions and learn from mistakes rather than letting bureaucratic red tape or fear of failure stall progress.
• Focus on Impact: True urgency is not about artificial panic, burnout, or endless multitasking. Instead, it is the focused, purposeful energy directed toward the organization’s most critical, high-value strategic goals.

Then came the moment that made me say that quote: I asked her what is the one thing in your culture that is preventing people from having this focused sense of urgency, and she said, “There is just way too much drama.”

“Urgency and Drama are Not a Good Combination When Driving Culture.”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized drama may be one of urgency's greatest enemies.

Because drama can look an awful lot like urgency.

Lots of emails. Lots of meetings. Lots of people copied on those emails. Lots of escalations. Lots of exclamation points. Lots of “We need to get everyone together immediately.” Lots of executives getting pulled into problems they probably shouldn't be involved with in the first place.

Everyone is moving. Everyone is talking. Everyone is busy. But is anything actually getting done?

Drama Is Counterfeit Urgency!

Urgency focuses organizational energy. Drama consumes it.

Urgency says, “We have a problem. What do we know, what don't we know, who owns it, and what are we going to do?” Drama says, “We have a problem. Who screwed this up, who knows about it, who should know about it, and why wasn't I told sooner?”

Urgency brings the right five people into a room. Drama invites 27 people to the Teams call.

Urgency makes a decision with 80% of the information because waiting for 100% will cost more than making a reasonable decision now. Drama spends three days debating whether everyone is “aligned” before making a decision that probably should have taken 30 minutes.

And perhaps most importantly, urgency creates accountability. Drama creates spectators.

Drama Has an Economic Cost

This is where my business acumen brain kicks in. We tend to think about culture as something soft. Engagement. Feelings. Trust. Morale. Those things absolutely matter.

But bad culture has a P&L.

Think about the economics of organizational drama.

A relatively small problem occurs. Instead of being solved by two people in an hour, it escalates to involve eight people. Then there is a meeting. Then another meeting to discuss what happened in the first. Someone prepares a PowerPoint. A senior leader gets involved. Other work gets delayed. Decisions get pushed out. Customers wait. Employees become frustrated.

Multiply that by dozens—or hundreds—of incidents across a large organization every year.

That is real money. It is also real opportunity cost.

Every hour spent participating in unnecessary drama is an hour not spent innovating, selling, serving customers, coaching employees, improving operations, or making better decisions.

The Irony of Drama

Here is the great irony.

Organizations with lots of drama often believe they have a strong sense of urgency because everybody is constantly running around putting out fires.

But putting out fires all day isn't necessarily urgency. Sometimes it means you have an arson problem. True urgency is actually much quieter.

People understand the priorities. Decision rights are clear.

Employees know what they own. Problems are escalated when they need to be escalated, not because someone wants political air cover.

Leaders ask questions before assigning blame. Teams disagree without turning disagreement into conflict. People make decisions, learn, adjust, and move forward.

There is energy, but there isn't panic. There is speed, but there isn't chaos.

There is accountability, but there isn't fear.

So How Do You Create Urgency Without Creating Drama?

I think leaders can start with five relatively simple behaviors.

1. Separate important from emotional.
Something feeling dramatic does not automatically make it strategically important. Ask: What is the actual business impact?

2. Push ownership to the lowest reasonable level.
If every issue needs an executive sponsor to resolve it, you don't have an urgency culture. You have an escalation culture.

3. Reward problem solving, not problem broadcasting.
There are people in every organization who become very good at announcing problems. The real cultural heroes should be the people who calmly solve them.

4. Make it safe to deliver bad news early.
Nothing creates drama faster than a problem that has been hidden for three weeks because someone was afraid to raise it. Early escalation is healthy. Late escalation creates theater.

5. Model calm urgency from the top.
This may be the most important one. If every unexpected problem causes senior leaders to panic, blame, send angry emails, and call emergency meetings, the organization will learn to do exactly the same thing.

Culture is ultimately learned behavior. And that brings me back to the conversation that started all of this.

We absolutely need more urgency in business today. Markets are changing too quickly. AI is changing how work gets done. Customers have more choices. Competitors appear faster. Employees and leaders simply don't have the luxury of endless analysis and bureaucratic decision-making.

But urgency without discipline becomes chaos. Urgency without accountability becomes activity. And urgency mixed with drama becomes exhausting.

The best cultures I see aren't necessarily the loudest, fastest-moving, or most frantic.

They are the ones where people know what matters, understand the economics of their decisions, have the confidence to act, and don't need to create a three-act play every time something goes wrong.

That's not a lack of urgency. That's what real urgency looks like.