Leadership
Is It Urgent or Important? The Paradox Confounding Leaders
As CEOs grapple with today’s world of hyper change, directors need to step up and create clarity and discipline.
October 23, 2025
How Boards Can Help Executives Decide Urgency vs. Importance
The board meeting was supposed to cover typical but key quarterly business: compliance updates, committee reports, a supply-chain briefing. But the night before, a series of tariffs affecting many of the company’s foreign operations were announced. With millions of dollars and the business at stake, the meeting became a scramble, with the CEO uncertain whether to focus on building new domestic plants or creating a new strategy for raising prices.
The meeting’s initial agenda items? Most were skipped.
At a time when everything feels urgent, and priorities for boards and executives seem to shift daily, the distinction between urgency and importance is becoming more critical— and confusing to even the most seasoned executive. “The confusion arises because urgent matters tend to be highly visible and often demand immediate attention, while important matters are usually more strategic and long-term,” says Marina Ferreira, senior client partner in Korn Ferry’s Board and CEO Services practice based in Sao Paulo. “This creates a tension where the urgent crowds out the important, even though the latter may be far more consequential to the company.”
To be sure, boards and management teams have been playing some version of whack-a-mole since the pandemic, creating immense confusion and fatigue around how to respond to one crisis after another even as they try to ensure strategic priorities don’t languish in the background. It doesn’t help that some of the urgency comes from investors demanding short-term results. “There’s no place in history where companies grow at 20 percent a year for 50 years, yet that’s what the market seems to expect,” says Tierney Remick, co-leader of Korn Ferry’s Board and CEO Services practice.
This creates quite the paradox: Impatience for long-term investments undermines the performance stakeholders demand. “If you're only driving urgency for near-term accountability because of impatience, you lose the opportunity to reach your future vision,” says Jane Edison Stevenson, global vice chair of Korn Ferry’s Board and CEO Services practice.
There have been plenty of examples of companies falling prey to this paradox by primarily focusing on what’s urgent—sales and profits, for example—only to overshadow what’s important, like long-term innovation. Years after record sales, these companies find themselves being ousted by other firms that didn’t slash R&D budgets or focus only on getting profits up.
Boards can play a critical role in creating clarity and discipline by distinguishing between short-term firefighting and long-term value creation—and giving proper attention to both, Ferreira says. “Boards should help CEOs frame issues in terms of impact and risk—not only immediacy,” she adds.
This is particularly critical at a time when AI, new regulations, tariffs, and more are dominating board agendas. While these issues are important, a disproportionate focus on them can push long-standing, but less visible priorities—such as CEO succession—further down the list. “The board really needs to be the arbiter of whether the executive team will focus on what's important versus what's urgent,” Stevenson says. “They set the tone for long-term thinking versus crisis response.” Adds Ferreira: “By the time succession or leadership gaps become pressing, it may be too late to act effectively.”
For more insights on board effectiveness, visit Korn Ferry’s leadership hub.
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