Most Things Can Wait

PSA: Most things can wait.

I know how that sounds. A little flippant, maybe even irresponsible. But I've been sitting with it long enough now that I'm ready to stand behind it.

Every business has problems. Something urgent is happening at any given moment. A client is unhappy. The design is wrong. There's a disconnected team. Something wasn't communicated. One unit of the business is underperforming. A lawsuit is brewing. And to the people closest to those fires, the urgency is very real because it's their truth, and I have enormous respect for that. They're not being dramatic, they're being human.

Here’s what I’ve been quietly observing for the last decade about what happens when urgency travels up. Someone brings a real problem, not a nothing burger, a problem with real heat behind it to a truly excellent leader. And the leader... receives it. They listen, they ask a question or two, they might clear their afternoon or cancel something on the calendar. They stay close, but importantly, they don't catch it. The urgency itself doesn't transfer. It’s one of the most senior skills I've ever watched up close.

There are two reasons I think this happens.

The first is altitude. From the top of the mountain, the view is different. Leaders who have been running something long enough have seen enough versions of the same fire to know which ones burn the building down and which ones go out on their own. Importantly, that context doesn't make them cold, it makes them legible. The team inside the problem can't see what the leader sees, which is that this has happened before, it will resolve and that three other things happening simultaneously make this less catastrophic than it feels right now.

The second reason is more nuanced and in my opinion, more interesting. When a leader catches someone's urgency then absorbs it, matches it and mobilizes around it, they've quietly done something that looks like care but isn't. They've taken the problem from the person who was supposed to carry it. Urgency transfer is ownership transfer. And leaders who understand this know that staying steady isn't just about their own clarity. It's about keeping responsibility exactly where it belongs.

Which brings me to what it actually looks like when something IS urgent for a leader.

They don't disappear, in fact they get closer. They check in more. They cancel things. They make themselves available so that if the moment comes where they need to step in fast, they can. But they still don't run the thing to the ground themselves. That proximity without intervention is its own skill and it looks a lot like doing nothing from the outside.

I used to do the opposite of everything I just described.

When I ran my company, urgency was my love language. If something mattered to me, I matched its energy immediately. If someone brought me a problem with heat, I caught that heat and raised it. I ran things to fix them myself because that's what I thought caring looked like. I thought that if I showed up fully, took it on and solved it, I was showing leadership.

What I didn't see, until recently, was what I was actually doing—signaling to my team that I didn't trust them to carry it. I was training everyone around me that intensity was a reliable way to get my attention and my time. I was depleting myself on problems that weren't mine to solve. And worst of all, I was robbing people of what they would have learned by owning something hard all the way through.

Great leaders understand that not every emotional signal deserves organizational movement. That urgency is contagious, and catching it before evaluating it is almost always a mistake. Instead, they know that presence is not the same as intervention.

So much can wait. That's not a cold conclusion. It might be the most caring one.

Leaders who know this don't check out, they check in. They stay close enough to participate when it matters. And when something is unambiguously urgent, everyone around them knows it. Because it's rare. And that's the whole point.

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