Your best employee just quit.

She didn't give two weeks' notice. She didn't schedule an exit interview. She sent an email at 9pm on a Thursday and stopped responding.

When you finally reach her, she says: "I couldn't do it anymore. Every week, different priorities. Every meeting felt like a crisis. I never knew what was actually important."

This is what happens when leaders don't know where urgency belongs.

Not burnout you can see coming. Sudden implosion.

The urgent founder thinks they're creating momentum. The patient COO thinks they're being thoughtful.

The team just knows they can't keep up and, eventually, they stop trying.

Entrepreneurs Skew Urgent. Organizations Eventually Pay for It.

Entrepreneurs who build traction almost always skew urgent. That urgency is often what gets the company off the ground in the first place.

At scale, that same instinct becomes disruptive.

People struggle to understand priorities. Context switches constantly. Everything sounds like a crisis. Leaders start mistaking urgency for accountability and patience for disengagement.

So founders hire someone to "balance" them. Often a COO, Chief of Staff, or operations leader who skews more patient.

In theory, it's a purposeful pairing. In practice, it creates conflict.

The urgent leader thinks, Why aren't they moving faster?
The patient leader thinks, Why are we changing direction again?

What looks like a values clash is usually something simpler: two people processing urgency differently.

Urgency and Patience Aren’t Opposites. They’re a Paradox.

The best leaders hold both at the same time and deploy them intentionally.

Leadership isn't about choosing urgency or patience. It's about knowing when each one is appropriate.

A CEO who treats every product decision as urgent creates chaos. Constant pivots, team whiplash, nothing ships. A COO who needs 'one more data point' before every hire stalls momentum. Roles stay open, competitors move faster.

I see this play out constantly. Leaders who don’t hold both will swing between extremes. All gas or all brakes, never finding the balance that lets their organization actually function.

The Communication Gap No One Talks About

One of the most common breakdowns I see isn't about priorities. It's about how urgency is communicated.

I learned this the hard way early in my career when I was CTO of a startup whose CEO was 3,000 miles away about to demo our product to a room full of investors. Minutes before the presentation, the systems went down.

The CEO was frantic. Calling me repeatedly.

"We're on top of it," I told him. "I don't have an estimate yet. I've got the best people working on it."

He called again five minutes later.
I told him "I promise we'll let you know as soon as we know. Can you switch spots with someone? We need more time."

This interaction repeated a few times over about 20 minutes. Likely what seemed an eternity to the CEO.

I was calm. Matter-of-fact. We fixed it. The demo happened.
But I made a mistake.

My team understood the urgency. They didn't need me to panic. When I communicated with the CEO, my calmness made it seem like I didn't think it was urgent.

I failed to signal it in a way he could feel.

Urgent leaders often need reassurance that something is truly being treated as urgent. Patient leaders often assume calm equals competence.

Neither is wrong. Without communication, both feel misaligned.

Here's what actually works:

Keep a shared document (or task management system) with priorities. Review it regularly. When something new comes up, put it on the list. Talk about where it fits.

I had a CEO once who'd come back from his monthly peer group meetings with new ideas that suddenly needed to be top priority. I started keeping a backlog. Every idea went on it. We reviewed it together regularly.

He felt heard. I didn't have to change my team's priorities every day.

That's the bridge. Make people feel heard without creating chaos.

When Everything Is Urgent, Nothing Is Strategic

Here's the hidden cost of over-urgency: it turns important work into future emergencies.

Stephen Covey's time management framework works well to make this clear. When leaders ignore important but non-urgent work (things like one-on-ones, feedback, planning, alignment), it eventually becomes urgent.

Skipped one-on-ones become morale issues.
Unclear priorities become performance problems.
Deferred communications become cultural problems.

I see this pattern constantly. Leaders stop doing the "boring" routine work because they're in crisis mode. Then the organization develops new crises that didn't need to exist.

This tracks with what leadership researchers have found: patience isn't passivity. It's strategic restraint. It's what allows leaders to make better long-term decisions, avoid short-sighted reactions, and build the kind of trust that sustains performance over time.

And you can't be strategic when everything is on fire.

A Simple Rule of Thumb That Actually Works

Here's high-level guideline I use with some leadership teams:

60% of what you do should be patient, important work. Strategy. One-on-ones. Culture. The things that prevent fires.
30% can be urgent. The actual crises. The real deadlines.
10% is noise, the stuff you just have to deal with.

Call it 2x: Be patient twice as much as you're urgent.

When that ratio flips, organizations feel it immediately. Too much urgency creates thrash, burnout, and context switching. Too much patience creates avoidance, perfectionism, and loss of momentum.

And there's a real cost to constant reprioritization.

Research has found that every time someone switches context, they lose 15 minutes.
Four switches a day equals an hour of lost productivity.

On a macro level, constantly changing priorities has the same effect. The more you're starting, stopping, pausing, restarting, the less effective your team becomes.

When Patience Turns Into Avoidance

Patience becomes dangerous when it's used to avoid discomfort.

Founders are often too patient in dealing with people problems because those conversations are hard. Sales-driven leaders are often too patient with operational issues because they're out of their comfort zone.

I see this constantly: A sales-driven founder avoiding operational problems. Quality is suffering, but "I don't really know operations, so I'll stick to what I know."

That's not patience. That's avoidance.

Patience stops being leadership and starts being negligence when you're using it as an excuse to not do something you should be dealing with.

The Real Skill Is Knowing What Gets to Be Urgent

Most leaders don't need more urgency. They need better boundaries around it.

Urgency should be reserved for the few things that truly demand immediate action. Everything else needs structure, deadlines, and patience.

And sometimes, this is the hardest lesson, leaders have to let some fires burn.

If everything is treated as urgent, nothing improves. You get stuck in a vicious cycle where everything becomes urgent because you're only dealing with urgent things.

The leaders who scale aren't the ones who hustle the hardest. They're the ones who know when to slow down, where to apply pressure, and how to communicate both clearly.

Urgency creates motion.
Patience creates direction.

Leadership is knowing which one your organization needs next.