How To Stop Constantly Fighting Fires At Work

Are you constantly fighting fires at work? Do your problems remerge worse than before? Is your overall performance dropping? If you’ve answered yes to all of these questions, you are in constant firefighting mode at work.

It is stressful. It is unproductive, and it is costing your time, money and your health.

Thankfully, there is a way out of this.

Let’s get you out of the firefighting mode and into proactive management.

Productive teams don’t fight fires.

Some teams and companies glorify firefighting. This is usually evident in the praise of the hustle culture, long hours at work and working weekends. However, research shows that constantly fighting fires leads to more errors and more firefighting. Productivity drops the more hours you spend on firefighting.

The most productive teams rarely fight fires. They implement these simple models to ensure fires don’t happen:

• Strategic Systems
• Tactical Tools
• Cultural Conventions

Let’s break down each of these models.

Strategic Systems

Strategic systems are difficult to implement but produce the best results. Firefighting is usually a result of not having systems in place to deal with problems as they arise. They also arise if you don’t have any systems or processes to run your team and your business.

To stop fires before they begin:

• Standardize your operations as much as you can.
• Identify classes of problems and develop systems to deal with them.
• Create a problem solving process to analyze persistent problems to uncover root causes.
• Develop a system to fix, resolve and document problems as they arise.

Tactical Tools

Strategic systems take some time to implement and work out. In the meantime, you will have to fight fires as they ignite. Here are some tactical tools you can use to put out these fires faster.

Firefighting tools:

• Create a triage team to triage problems and assign problem solvers.
• Assemble a temporary problem-solving team.
• Shut down operations, fix the problems, and restart it again.

Cultural Conventions

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. If your culture glorifies firefighting, your strategic and tactical attempts to eliminate fires will fail.

To develop the culture that prevents fires in the first place, you must:

• Create an environment where continuous improvement is the norm.
• Develop training for new and existing team members on how to spot and analyze problems.
• Stop tolerating fire-fighting and quick-fix problem-solving.
• Focus on building a problem-solving organization.
• Change how you see deadlines. Go for a fixed time and variable scope.

Creating a culture where fires a prevented is a big undertaking, but it will have the highest return on investment. Culture underpins everything about your team and your company.

Today’s Action Steps

To get the ball rolling, you must do three things:

• Put out any immediate fires using one of the tactics.
• Call a triage meeting to identify the root cause of the most damaging fires.
• Praise someone who embodies continuous learning on your team (there is always one).

Then spend the time to devise a strategy to eliminate fires and build a culture of proactive management.

Outro

Changing the fire-fighting culture is a difficult task. But one that must be undertaken if you want to spend less time doing meaningless work and live a healthier and happier life.

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And that’s all for this week.

See you next Monday.

P.S. I’d love to hear what challenges you are facing in your business. What can I write about to help you personally?