How Great Leaders Prioritize in a World Where Everything Feels Urgent

About this episode

Barbara Nicholas discusses how leaders can prioritize effectively in a culture of urgency.

Everything is urgent—until it isn’t. When every ticket is a fire, teams don’t move faster; they burn out. In this episode, Barbara Nicholas (CEO at Polly) borrows a lesson from search and rescue: urgency only matters when it actually changes outcomes. Most white-collar work isn’t life or death, but we’ve built cultures that pretend it is—and people are paying for it in cognitive overload and constant distraction. Barbara walks through how she operationalizes a triage system across her company...

People in this episode

Host: David Rice

Guest: Barbara Nicholas

Topics covered

• leadership
• prioritization
• urgency
• team management
• cognitive overload

Keywords

• leadership
• prioritization
• urgency
• team burnout
• cognitive overload

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Polly

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