In complex organizations, “Can you take a quick look?” often translates to: we need cover by Friday. The unspoken requirement is speed over truth.

For internal consultants, urgency is especially dangerous because you operate inside a matrix: multiple stakeholders, ambiguous decision rights, and high political cost for being wrong. Urgency isn’t the same as importance. It’s the pressure to act now—often a defense against uncertainty. If you let it drive the engagement, you’ll be pulled into rescue mode: producing deliverables that look fast and helpful, while the business stays dependent and the root issue stays untouched.

Here’s why fast isn’t flawless.

1. Urgency turns partnership into rescue and in a big enterprise, that quickly makes you the unofficial program manager, therapist, analyst, and copy editor—while the line organization waits for your next artifact.
2. Urgency skips contracting – the only way internal consultants gain and keep leverage. Contracting isn’t admin. It’s the conversation that makes hidden expectations explicit: roles, authority, scope, trade-offs, and support.
3. Urgency locks you into the “presenting problem” and drives rework later. Under pressure, leaders offer a tidy story (“This is a training issue.” “It’s a comms gap.” “IT is the bottleneck.”). In a complex org, that story often exists to reduce noise before an exec update, a steering committee, or an audit checkpoint. If you accept it untested, you’ll solve the wrong problem quickly—and then get pulled back in when outcomes don’t move.
4. Urgency makes it unsafe to tell the truth. Successful consulting depends on authentic behavior: naming what you see and what you’re concerned about. Urgency makes that feel “political” or “slowing things down,” so people default to polite agreement and side conversations.
5. Urgency creates dependency and burns out internal consulting teams. Urgency rewards you for taking over if things go well and penalizes you when it doesn’t. The short-term wins become a long-term pattern where the business escalates everything to you and you are no longer focusing on what can make a real difference.

Urgency isn’t going away in complex organizations. The choice is whether it drives your work—or whether you use it as a signal to slow down just enough to create clarity, ownership, and a real partnership. That’s how internal consulting earns trust and protects capacity.

The next time you get an urgent request, try this instead.

• Treat urgency as data and contract for it. Name the pressure and propose a small slowdown that protects the enterprise: “I hear the deadline. If we skip clarity and ownership, we’ll create rework and risk. Can we take 30 minutes to confirm the decision, the decision maker, and what ‘done’ means?”
• Use urgency as the reason to contract more, not less. Ask questions that restore partnership fast: “What do you want from me? And what do you want your team to own? What decision are we enabling—and by when?”
• Do some discovery, even if not all that you want. Doing so may help you avoid enterprise rework.
• Try using language or ask questions that can help “slow down the room.” Ask: “What conversation are we avoiding by labeling this ‘urgent’? What must be true for implementation to actually happen?”
• Before you say yes to a client request, pause for 60 seconds and ask yourself what are we trading off for speed?

Internal consultants don’t ‘win’ by moving fast, they win by leaving the business more capable. The next time someone says “urgent,” make your first deliverable a clear contract.

By Beverly Crowell

Support me.

Trust me.

Respect me.

How many times have we said these words? Heard them from others? They sound really good. After all, who doesn’t want support, trust, and respect? I’m curious though, how often do we feel we get it or give it to others?

It would be easy to blame the lack of support, trust or respect on the person who isn’t giving it. I might suggest, however, that the person may not be the problem. It might instead be in how we are asking for it.

In Flawless Consulting, we talk about the importance of asking for what we want in partnering with others. Often, what we want is represented with these types of statements, but there is an inherent problem with them. They are result of what we hope to feel when working with others, they are not the path to get there. In short, these are what we call “goodness words.” They sound really good but are not particularly useful.

Why?

What is takes to earn my support, my trust and my respect may be different from the person I’m sitting across from. And sadly, whether at work or in our personal life, we expect others to just know.

In a recent conversation with one of my children, they said, “I just want your support.” To which I responded, “I thought I was giving it.” Imagine my surprise when I discovered I wasn’t. The conversation then turned to a testimony of all the ways I thought I was offering support to which they responded, “Well yes, but you didn’t do this.” And they were right. I didn’t do the thing they mentioned. I did a lot of other things I thought were important but, in the end, those things were important to me, not to my child.

Herein lies the problem with these “goodness words.” Turns out, they are not all that good. The feeling we get when we feel supported, trusted, and respected is good, but saying them alone is not enough. We need to tell people what we want to see or hear that will help us feel that way and in turn ask them what we want to see and hear as well.

So, the next time someone says to you, “I want your support.” Say, “I would love to offer my support. Tell me what that looks like for you” and don’t be surprised when they look at you with confusion. Chances are, no one has ever asked for clarity but that is what we are seeking. Yes, I want to support you. Tell me what I can do, that will help you feel that way. Challenge them, and yourself, to be clear and specific. Ultimately, “feeling supported” is the result of a series of little and big actions. The challenge is to know what specific actions matter and matter to the person seeking the support, trust, or respect.

This coming week, ask one person what support, trust or respect actually looks like to them and be ready to answer the same question yourself. If we want stronger partnerships, we have to stop asking for vague ideals and start defining the behaviors that build them.