Janelle E. Wells, Ph.D., and Doreen MacAulay, Ph.D.
Our (In)visible Work
It is 9:00 AM on a Monday morning and you have two choices: clear out the 22 unread emails sitting in your inbox, answering quick questions that technically need a response by noon, or spend the next hour drafting a 3-year strategic plan. One task is important; the other is merely urgent.
We live in an era where extreme responsiveness has become a proxy for competence. We wear our busyness like a badge of honor, confusing the volume of our activity with the value of our impact. However, this addiction to the immediate is not just a time-management issue; it is a priority management issue, and it is seeking instant gratification that actively sabotages our ability to lead. For the high-performing individual contributor transitioning into leadership, this trap is particularly dangerous. Speed, reliability, and having all the answers are the very habits that led to your promotion, but they are also the same habits that will cause you to flounder as a first-time people leader.
Why do we choose trivial tasks over transformative tasks?
Our brains are wired to prioritize closure. Research published in the Journal of Consumer Research identifies this phenomenon as the “Mere Urgency Effect.” People consistently chose to perform tasks with urgency (e.g., deal with a deadline that is close) over tasks without deadlines, even when the urgent tasks offered a significantly lower payoff. Urgency creates a “goal-gradient” effect; as the deadline approaches, our desire to complete the task intensifies, regardless of the task’s actual importance. We choose the email over the strategy document, not because it is better for the organization, but because finishing it provides an immediate reduction in the feeling of anxiousness and a quick hit of psychological closure.
This biological hardwiring is compounded by what researchers call completion bias. Think about how checking items off your to-do list releases dopamine. The brain rewards us for the act of completion, not the quality of the outcome. For an ambitious employee, the inbox is a candy store of easy dopamine hits. Every send button pressed feels like a win.
The hidden blocker of urgency
Recent work by executive coach Muriel Wilkins suggests the problem for leaders transitioning isn’t a lack of skills; it is that when someone is promoted from an individual contributor to a leader, there are “hidden blockers.” Consider the typical career trajectory: An employee excels because they are hyper-responsive. They solve problems instantly. They are the “go-to” person who puts out fires. Management sees this reliability and promotes them, but once in the leadership chair, the game changes. The goal is no longer doing the work. The goal is now to build the capacity of the team to do the work. However, the new leader is fighting years of muscle memory.
Also, when a crisis arises for this new leader, their instinct is to dive in and fix it, choosing the urgent. By doing so, they inadvertently create a culture of learned helplessness. If the leader always answers the email in five minutes, the team learns they never have to think for themselves. The leader becomes the bottleneck, buried in low-value urgent tasks, while the high-value important work, like mentoring, strategic long-term planning, and culture building, are all perpetually deferred.
