Those of you who know that I live in California might be thinking, “Has Dave been impacted by the fires?” I’m in Northern CA, we do worry about fires (I have my go bag and lists at the ready), but I’m not directly impacted by the tragedy we see in Southern CA.
This post is about the firefighting each of us seems to get sucked into every day. It was sparked, so to speak, by an email from the CRO of a client. We had a meeting scheduled to discuss a major strategic transformation she was guiding her team through. The cancellation not said, “Fires….”
I wasn’t put off by the rescheduling of the meeting, things happen. Any reason can be fine—“Have to pick my kids up…… Boss called me into a meeting…. My head just isn’t into it…..”
Responding to the CRO, I said “No problem,” but also posed a couple of questions, “Is it your fire to fight? Do you need to fight it now?”
It seems, regardless of role, we are in constant firefighting battles. Our well structured/planned days are disrupted, early in the morning, by “fires.” By the end of the day, we look back at all the important stuff we needed to accomplish. It’s not been done, we push it to another day, pushing the important projects we had scheduled for that day to yet another.
You know how it works, all these important projects get deferred, because something came up. And at some point these important projects, themselves become fires.
In coaching my clients, when we have a few moments out of firefighting mode, we get into discussions in four areas:
- Is it your fire to fight?
- Is the react/respond strategy the best for firefighting?
- Does it need to be fought now?
- Have you planned your time to accommodate fires?
Is it your fire to fight? This is a huge challenge, particularly for high performers and great leaders. Something comes up, all our instincts are to jump in and deal with the issue. And, usually, we have great ability to deal with the issue. We may have seen it before, or we have enough confidence in our own experience, we know we can address it.
But, over time, I’ve come to the realization, the majority of fires we choose to fight are not ours to fight. While we have great capability to address the issues, they really are owned by someone else.
A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a CMO having the same issue with his team. He was saying, “I don’t accomplish what I want to accomplish because of all the firefighting I do!” We did an inventory of his firefighting in the past week, looking at where it was his to fight. 90% of the fires he had spent all his time on were actually someone else’s—someone on his team or owned by someone elsewhere in the organization.
We went through the fires his team should have been handling, I asked the question, “Why didn’t you ask them to take care of it?” We discovered a couple of categories: He hadn’t thought of it, he just reacted. He knew he should delegate it, but didn’t think the team members had the capability to handle it.
He kicked himself for the react/respond modes, committed to delegating those in the future.
We spent a lot of time talking about the ones that he knew he should delegate but didn’t. We went through the “whys,” “They are busy, I didn’t want to distract them, they are new to their role, they don’t know how to do it, and so on……”
I then said, “This means whenever this type of fire recurs, you will always have to handle it? What would happen if you started building their capability to handle these things, then trusted them to do their jobs?” The light bulb went off. He committed to do so. (And in our subsequent meetings, he’s shared how he is getting better at doing this and the positive impact it is having on his team.)
Give the fires to the person/team responsible for that particular fire. If they don’t have the skills, help them develop them so you don’t have to fight future fires. But the magic is empowering them to fight their own fires.
Is the react/respond strategy the best for firefighting: Our reactions to fires are often unconscious. Like real firefighters, we tend to want to spring into action and solve the issue. We don’t slow down to ask ourselves the question, are we approaching this correctly? Recently I was at a Starbucks, a couple of firefighters were having coffee, I asked if I could talk to them. We talked about SoCal, then I asked them about how they approached a fire incident.
While it may appear to outsiders, they spring in to action, in reality they have huge amounts of training, looking at all sorts of possibilities. Then when called to the fire, while to outsiders it appears they are moving very fast, in reality they have spent a good amount of time trying to understand the situation and how they best approach and control the fire. In a truck on the way to a fire, they are getting as much information about the site and structure as they can. They are understanding wind conditions, where hydrants are, risks to people and surrounding properties. They are so well trained they know how to approach virtually every situation and manage it. And for situations they have never experienced, they know how do develop a plan to address it.
The lesson we can take away from this is, in any business oriented firefighting, we have to take the time to understand what’s happening and develop a plan, before we spring into action.
Does it need to be fought now? One of the most interesting things I see in working with clients, is the majority of fires we jump into fight, actually don’t need to be fought now. We are so pre-programmed with our react/respond mindset, that we don’t take the time to think, “Can this wait until I can get the right people and the right approach to deal with this?” I have been involved in businesses ranging from very early stage startups to some of the largest organizations in the world. As I reflect on these decades of experience, I realized, the majority of the fires I or others have fought, could have been deferred. We didn’t need to address them immediately, but we could wait, perhaps a few days, or a couple of weeks. But the majority didn’t require us to drop everything, shifting our attention to the fire.
The other thing I’ve discovered in this process is, often, they are no longer fires. The issue passed, we didn’t really need to do anything, it resolved itself.
Be cautious about leaping into action, sometimes waiting is much more powerful to wait.
(Some of you may ask, “What if the customer is insisting on something immediately?” It’s important to recognize the customers are as bad at fighting fires as we are. Sometimes a discussion about why they need it now and if another date, to get a quality response would be acceptable, is the most powerful approach. In reality about the only time the customer really needs an immediate response is if something we have sold them stops working and stops them from being able to do business.)
Are you managing your schedule to be able to accommodate fires? This may seem contradictory to the previous point but it is actually complementary. Through the course of our days/weeks, things happen. Perhaps not fires, but something happens that requires attention or juggling our schedules.
The problem is that we so pack our agendas, that we don’t allow any time to deal with these. We know they will happen, we don’t know specifically, but we know something will happen that may require us to completely re juggle our days.
But we pack every hour of every day with meetings, activities or other things to do. Too often, we seem to want to prove our value by how packed our calendars are and how busy we are.
But stuff happens—always. We need to start managing our days differently. We need to purposefully schedule free time each day. This gives us the flexibility to better manage our time and responses when something happens.
Some of you might think, “Dave, you don’t understand, our schedules are packed!” But that’s part of the problem, we don’t allow any buffer for stuff to happen. The unanticipated request from top management, one of our people needing help on something, a customer request.
Some of you might say, “well what if nothing happens, we’ve wasted our time?” Believe me, you will always be able to fill that up. But even leaving it open gives you some of the time for one of the most important things you need to do: Reflect, think, imagine new things.
We tend to pride ourselves on our abilities to fight fires. But the reality is firefighting distracts us from the most important part of our jobs. Isn’t it more important to do those things? And if we did, fewer fires might occur.
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of the post! I do confess, sometimes their excitement and tendency to complete each others sentences annoys me. But the content is good. Enjoy!
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