5 Principles Managers Must Know to Become Leaders
March 4, 2026
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Most leadership problems don’t show up at the finish line. They show up at the starting line.
Work gets delayed, momentum stalls, and quality suffers, not because teams don’t care, but because urgency was never clearly established and focus was never protected.
The leaders with the highest-performing teams understand this important truth.
Urgency is for starting. Focus is for finishing. Leadership is inspiring both.
There is a good chance you work with a strong sense of urgency and have struggled with one or more of your team members to share your speed.
Since speed is consistently underrated, it’s your responsibility as a leader to define a sustainable tempo that fuels performance without causing burnout.
Most leaders misunderstand speed. And if we’re honest, there’s a good chance you’ve misunderstood it too. You think speed means rushing. You think urgency means pressure. You assume moving fast automatically leads to burnout.
So you hesitate. You soften expectations. You wait for the perfect moment. And without realizing it, you teach your team that starting later is acceptable.
The truth is, speed is not about how quickly work gets completed. It’s about how quickly meaningful work gets started. Focus, not haste, is what protects quality.
The best leaders don’t rush the work. They rush the beginning. They rush the beginning.
A great example of this is Curt Cignetti, the head football coach at Indiana, who has led a remarkable two-year turnaround to be the #1 football team in the country.
Most Division I football coaches are known for endless hours, constant pressure, and living at the facility during the season. Cignetti rejects that model.
His teams start on time. Meetings are prepared. Practices are short, focused, and intentional. When the work is done, people leave. There’s urgency when it’s time to work and space to recover when it’s not.
That’s not softness. That’s discipline.
Speed, when used well, actually protects people. It eliminates wasted time, unclear priorities, and last-minute scrambling. It replaces chaos with tempo. And that tempo is set by you.
Urgency starts with the leader.
If you delay decisions, respond slowly, or let priorities linger, your team learns that urgency doesn’t really matter. Even if you say it does. Said differently, your example will always be more powerful than your words.
People watch what you do far more closely than what you say. Your response time, follow-up, and decisiveness all teach your team how urgent to be.
This doesn’t mean reacting to everything. It means acting decisively when a moment matters. Urgency that lives only in the leader’s head never scales. Urgency that shows up consistently in a leader’s actions does.
Most leaders expect urgency without ever defining it. Great leaders mark the moment.
They make it clear when something needs to move now and when it does not. They remove ambiguity.
Urgency is not meant to be constant. Constant urgency creates pressure without clarity, and pressure without clarity leads to burnout. Healthy urgency has boundaries. Leaders turn urgency on when people are on and remove it when they are off. That balance creates momentum without exhaustion.
Sending emails late at night and saying, “No rush,” doesn’t help. It confuses. Over time, that confusion erodes trust and engagement.
You get more of what you reward. So if urgency and focus matter, recognize them. Call them out. Thank people for starting quickly and staying locked in long enough to do quality work.
In coaching middle school football I learned, coaches once believed speed was built through punishment. More running, more conditioning and more pressure. Eventually, many learned a better way. In a method call “feed the cats,” it teaches you to train for speed and keep legs fresh for when players need to perform.
The same principle applies to teams. When people move quickly and execute with focus, reinforce it. When they hesitate, coach it. When they rush and cut corners, correct it.
Speed is still a competitive differentiator, but not in the way most leaders think.
It’s not about finishing everything faster. It’s about recognizing when a moment deserves action and inspiring your team to begin with urgency and execute with focus.
Every leader defines the tempo of their team, whether intentionally or not.
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About the Author: John Eades is the CEO of LearnLoft and The Sales Infrastructure. He was named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices. John is also the author of Building the Best: 8 Proven Leadership Principles to Elevate Others to Success. You can follow him on Instagram @johngeades.
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