Impatience vs. Urgency: The Leadership Tension That Drives or Destroys Execution

What happens when everything feels urgent, but nothing actually is?

In this episode of Leadership Traits Decoded, Cynthia Kyriazis and Drea Martin unpack two closely connected leadership traits: impatience and urgency—and why confusing the two can create more friction than progress.

Impatience is external—it reflects your tolerance for how quickly others move. 

Urgency is internal—it’s the drive that pushes you to take action. 

When aligned, they accelerate execution. When misaligned, they create tension, burnout, and confusion across teams.

The conversation also surfaces a critical leadership challenge: false urgency. When everything is treated as high priority, teams lose clarity on what actually matters—and performance suffers.

The solution isn’t slowing down, it’s creating clarity—through better questions, better communication, and better prioritization.

You’ll learn:

•  The difference between impatience (external expectations) and urgency (internal drive)
•  Why misalignment between the two creates friction across teams
•  How “false urgency” undermines focus, performance, and culture
•  The role of coaching and questioning in uncovering what’s truly important
•  How leaders can reset expectations to improve execution and alignment. 

When everything is urgent, nothing is clear—leaders create impact by defining what actually matters.

Ready to explore your leadership traits? Connect with us on LinkedIn or visit www.plllab.com to see how we transform leadership intelligence into return-driven action.

Transcript

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Welcome And Episode Focus

Cynthia Kyriazis 0:01

Welcome to Leadership Traits Decoded. I'm Cynthia Kyriazis, Chief Experience Officer at the Culture Think Tank.

Andrea Martin 0:08

And I'm Drea Martin, Chief Operating Officer of the Crucible. We are collaborative partners at Performance Leadership Learning Lab, where we transform leadership intelligence into return-driven action.

Defining Impatience In Leadership

Cynthia Kyriazis 0:20

Today we're unpacking the leadership traits essential for building, investing in, and scaling successful companies. Our insights come directly from data-driven metrics within our platforms solution. So let's dive in. Hello, Drea. How are you? We haven't spoken in a while. Yeah, it's been a bit. Nice to be back, Cynthia. Doing well. How are you? I'm good. I'm hanging in there. I went back and I looked at some of our topics. And today I want to see how much we can learn about two topics that kind of bump into each other back to back, so to speak. Right. And the reason is that I experienced these two today, right? So the two topics are impatience and urgency. Fantastic. Okay. Yeah. I had a little problem with tech, and I was extremely impatient because that is my natural state of life. And then I got all urgently about it. I don't know how else to put it. So I'm going to let you take it from here. What what how how about we start with impatience?

Andrea Martin 1:26

Yeah, happily. So we can start by defining impatience. And as you kind of explain your example there, so it's really that lack of tolerance for a slow decision making or slow action. Impatience is an interesting one because it's very much your expectation for others and kind of your tolerance of how other things are moving forward. So that's where that trait itself really manifests itself.

Cynthia Kyriazis 1:48

Okay. What's the upside and the downside of something like that?

Upsides And Downsides Of Impatience

Andrea Martin 1:53

Yeah, well, the upside that we can start with, especially with a lot of clients we work with who are in environments where things are high pressure, pace is expected, and that's just a necessary requirement of the job. Having high impatience means that their expectations are set at a certain level, which usually means they're expressed, which then means things probably move a little bit more quickly because somebody has the expectation that that will be what takes place. So that's kind of that upside there is if somebody has more impatience, especially in a role in an environment where that's necessary, that will influence how they set standards, what they set as the expectations of how things flow, how they determine the way things move.

Cynthia Kyriazis 2:36

Okay. So there is an upside to it. It's not always the negative to say that person is very impatient. There is an upside to probably every skill set we talk about. What about the downside though?

Andrea Martin 2:48

Yeah, the downside is an interesting one because this is where I'd say alignment comes in a little bit more than just kind of the a person themselves having high impatience or having too low impatience is not a problem unless it is misaligned with the people around them. So if you're expecting other people to move at a certain pace or not to make decisions too slowly, or to proceed with action too slowly, whatever the expectation is and the clarity around it, and then the understanding within the group of what kind of that set norm is helps determine if the trait is a positive or a negative, whether it's high or low. So it's that set group pace and then that understanding between people of if you're all highly impatient, things flow very well. If certain people are less patient than others, then it's important to understand that. And that's where that urgency trait comes in as well.

Introducing Urgency And Alignment

Andrea Martin 3:41

That self-drive, that determination that you have yourself to push things forward, the more aligned we see traits like urgency and impatience. So you not only expect other people to move quickly, but you also move yourself quickly to help the entire group experience less tension and just overall experience of, yeah, just have a better experience pushing things forward and kind of initiating.

Cynthia Kyriazis 4:03

So, of course, leaders are always in a position of expecting things to happen and sometimes not taking a step back, perhaps and recognizing their own skill set around that or their own levels of patience or impatience or urgency or non-urgency, because everything could seem urgent every day. Right. And that's a little bit like somebody who cries wolf a lot. Uh, after a while we don't listen, we don't hear. It's just, oh, it's just them doing that. So uh awareness of not only yourself, but how the speed or lack of speed or whatever the style is for the group that the leader is looking at needs to be taken into consideration because it's two players, an individual and a group, right? Right. So we go kind of back and forth on that. So assuming, assuming that the leaders understand that and step back and speak to that, where does the sense of urgency come in in that? As you said before, it's like impatience. It can be a good thing or a bad thing, or a workable thing and a non-workable thing, less effective. Urgency is defined as what, or how do how do we speak to that?

False Urgency And Priority Clarity

Andrea Martin 5:06

Yeah, so urgency is more of that internal drive, while impatience is more about that external expectations, tolerance, what you put up with. Urgency is that powerful sense of tenacity and determination that pushes you as an individual forward. So that's more your expectations and maybe your tolerance for your own pace compared to impatience being a lot more of that outward reflection of the group around you. What I wonder, especially with your own work and kind of coaching in this environment, there seems to be a lot of false urgency within the space. Just I run into this all the time within the corporate space. It's tough sometimes to understand because there are deadlines, there's things that have to happen quickly, but we're also typically not working in kind of life or death situations. So this urgency that kind of runs, how do you deal with if there's this false sense of urgency, everything's currently high priority, everything's kind of on that clock? How do you pull someone back from that? How do you make that a maybe healthier work environment so that there's a little bit more of an understanding of what truly is a priority versus what is not?

Cynthia Kyriazis 6:13

Well, that's an interesting question. And it's really very much speaks to the role of a coach in that you need to be able to ask the questions. It's about the questions, not the answers, right? So the question is, what is it making you feel this way? Tell me, is there a deadline? So we try to kind of unfold what the story is about and then ask even more questions about how are you detecting that the team might feel with this? Or have you gotten pushback and what does it sound like? And just keep trying to ask the questions to see if it can unfold. What is this urgency about? Was it in fact the building is on fire, right? Or was it something that somebody's boss said to them? Or was it something because the CFO came in and said we're down 5%? We have to kind of take a step back and ask the leaders, prioritize this issue and see where it is on the scale of how important it is, so that we could start to help

Coaching Through Questions

Cynthia Kyriazis 7:07

them see and feel and by definition, what really is an urgent thing, or is it just your personal urgent thing? And then this the same with impatience, like having a discussion about do you feel that there is a sense of impatience around this? And if so, how and if so, what, to get them to open up and put in words what it is they're seeing and feeling with their team. Lots of times coaches get the rap of, well, if I wanted to be a therapist, I could have done that. Coaches don't go in to give you the response, they want you to unfold it yourself so that we can talk about what options there are, what options outside of that think in this particular type of box, because that's how the world they may feel in. You know, they may feel that they have this constant, constant pressure to produce. And okay, that's fine. We can have a constant pressure to produce, but it's how we do it. That's why we decode traits, right? Because it's being done through human beings, and human beings sometimes need help unfolding things in order to own them. And that's about asking the questions so we get the aha lights, not just saying, Oh, you really need to stop that. You know, that's not that's not what coaches do, right? So thanks for that question, though, because sometimes I have to heal myself with this impatience urgency thing that I have from time to time.

Andrea Martin 8:28

That's helpful to understand that, this notion of like where's the fire? Whether it's an internal urgency that's just constantly driving things and high in patience, constantly driving things, or is it pressure that's coming from a certain perspective or information that's maybe not yet something that they've even come to light with themselves? So that's where asking the right questions comes through and understanding what your own personal levels are and those of the people around you so that you can really navigate that. That's really cool insight.

Cynthia Kyriazis 8:52

You know, when I talk to sometimes when I talk to leaders

Communication Tactics For Meetings

Cynthia Kyriazis 8:55

about improving communication, and in this case, let's say meetings, how do you make your meetings more effective? We'll have that conversation for a while. One of the things that I always say in meetings is don't go into a meeting unless you can clearly identify what it is you need and want from that meeting. So it might be also a lesson in this communication if you sense that people are impatient or you're impatient or you're urgent or they have a sense of urgency right, whatever it is, maybe sit, take a step back and think, what is it that I need from this communication? And what is the best way to help my staff or my leadership team get there? It's always about what's happening with them, too. Cool. Yeah, definitely. Awesome. Well, that was awesome. That helped help me. I hope it helped our listeners.

Andrea Martin 9:38

Yeah, me too.

Cynthia Kyriazis 9:40

Thanks a lot for your insights, Drea, because you always put them in such a uh distinct way that is very, very helpful, I think, at least for me, and I'm assuming for our listeners as well. Appreciate that.

Andrea Martin 9:52

Thanks for sharing your own insight and knowing when to write and how to ask those questions. So that's definitely that's my biggest takeaway, I think, is just that notion of coming and knowing that you're not looking for the response. You're you're looking for how do you point someone towards that clarity. And that's maybe the base of everything we do is helping them find clarity.

Cynthia Kyriazis 10:08

That's right. That's exactly

Key Takeaways And Closing

Cynthia Kyriazis 10:10

right. Well, thanks so much again for all your knowledge and sharing. Thanks for listening to this episode of Leadership Traits Decoded. You'll be able to find all our episodes on the Performance Leadership Learning Lab website at www.plab.com. Or you can listen on your favorite streaming platform.

Andrea Martin 10:31

We'll be back soon to explore the next essential trait. Until then, feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn if you have any questions or ideas.