Career
Most leadership conversations begin with teams. Feedback. Trust. Motivation. Performance. But before any of that works, there’s a quieter layer underneath: personal effectiveness.
Personal effectiveness is the ability to meet expectations of self and others through self.
The turning point for many managers is realizing they’re trapped in urgency. To manage yourself and people, you could divide work into four types:
Urgent & Important
Not Urgent & Important
Urgent & Not Important
Not Urgent & Not Important
Most managers live in Urgent + Important. Crisis mode. Firefighting. Escalations. It feels productive. It feels necessary. But it’s also how burnout, stress, and short-term thinking quietly take over. This is where leadership cracks. Not loudly. Slowly. This was pretty much my everyday reality while I was at Ola. Over the span of two years, the pressure just kept piling up, and eventually the entire team walked away.
When planning, relationship-building, clarity, and development (the not-urgent but important stuff) get ignored, everything eventually becomes urgent. Then leaders blame scale, speed, or people. But the system was already broken.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: urgency culture is usually a leadership problem. Teams don’t wake up wanting chaos. They adapt to it. When priorities change daily, when feedback comes late, when expectations are unclear, urgency fills the gap. People optimise for speed because clarity is missing. Strong leaders do the opposite. They design their time intentionally:
They schedule thinking.
They protect (not urgent + important) work.
They delegate low-value urgency.
They say no more often than yes.
