Do you feel like you are always fire-fighting?

A short while ago I wrote an article on the Eisenhower Matrix and how useful it can be in helping you manage your time. If you’re interested, please feel free to take a look.

I’ve been fortunate enough to receive some really positive feedback on the article, which led to a number of people explaining to me that they are finding themselves struggling to be effective because they live in a constant state of ‘fire-fighting’. I thought it might be helpful to talk about the symptoms and effects of what this looks like and propose some solutions that might help explain how you can get away from being a ‘fire-fighter’.

The symptoms tend to be the things you know about because you can ‘feel them’. The effects are the things that you might not know about. These can be exposed with a bit of careful questioning and feedback with some members of your team.

The symptoms you might feel can include…

  • There is never enough time to do everything; you are unable to complete all the actions that you want to in one day.
  • You plan your day but you rarely achieve everything that you want to.
  • You work late into the evenings and/or respond to work emails over the weekend just to try and buy you some time mid-week.
  • Urgent requests and things that need to be dealt with now regularly come across your desk.
  • You might find it hard to get to meetings on time.
  • You can be frustrated by other people’s behaviour.

The effects are often as follows…

  • Developing people (and yourself) is a lower priority than it should be. If you’re always dealing with the urgent and important issues – how can you ever get to the important issues that are not urgent? Developing your people (and yourself) falls into this category.
  • You are contributing to a culture, which undermines the value of planning. Why should people plan if they’re just going to have to deal with urgent priorities?
  • People will feel that you don’t have time for them because you’re really busy. The impact of this is that they won’t tell you what is concerning them because they don’t feel you have time to listen and they don’t want to bother you.

If this describes where you work  – you’ve already taken the first step and identified that there is a problem.

Firstly, don’t assume that people dislike fire-fighting. Some people love it. It’s exciting, it gets attention and it makes them look good because they’re able to put fires out and get thanked for it. It is a terribly ineffective but it happens!

If the top-level leadership keep thanking the ‘fire-fighters’ it becomes easy to ignore the people whose leadership prevents fires from starting – they’re the real heroes who will keep your organisation functioning!

However, you can’t change anyone else, you can only change your approach. This advice is designed to help you ‘lead by example’. It is meant to help you lead the way, be proactive and do something differently.

  • Firstly, make it really clear and visible what it is your team is there to do. Create a vision and take it to your leadership. Tell them that this is what you are going to do and get into regular conversations until they sign off on your Dept/Team vision.
  • Quantify your vision with a mixture of leading and lagging measures. Make it clear to the team (or yourself) that success is judged on the movement of these numbers – up or down.
  • Understand what everyone is working on and make sure that they are aligned with this vision and understand these metrics. Are they contributing towards the movement of these numbers every single day?
  • Plan your time so that what you are doing impacts a leading or lagging indicator. This will  work towards making your vision a reality.
  • Plan your day to 70pc capacity in order of importance. Important tasks are the actions that you need to complete in order to move a project forward. If people are waiting for you to approve something before they can work – do this first so that they can get on with what they need to do.
  • Challenge the ‘urgent requests’ respectfully. If someone asks you to do something that does not fit in line with your vision, ask them what you should stop doing so that you can focus on this request. This level of healthy challenge should go back up the organisational hierarchy. The senior level leaders NEED this challenge or they will keep pushing initiatives your way – and get frustrated when ‘things don’t get done.’ Trust me, when you keep delivering on what you say you’re going to do – your stock as a leader and as a professional will rise.
  • If you’ve recruited well and chosen good people with the right attitude, they’ll surprise you. Delegate what you can – push some responsibility down into the organisation and give them an opportunity to learn some new skills with your support.
  • Challenge time-consuming processes – do you really need to check or sign-off everything? Would you be better off explaining what you want to happen and getting people to make decisions in line with your INTENT. David Marquet explains this far better than I do in this video.

If you follow through on a few of these practices, you’ll find yourself steadily moving from the top right and into the top left box of the Eisenhower matrix.

This change in behaviour leads to the following…

  • An increase in productivity – you will get more done during the day because you’ll be working more efficiently.
  • You’ll develop your people by giving them more responsibility – this will pay dividends in the future.
  • You’ll be able to clearly articulate what you have delivered as opposed to delivering the reactive requests that come across your desk. Your performance as a leader will be quantifiable.
  • You will be in control. You will create a less stressful, more efficient working environment.

Wouldn’t you rather live in this world than be constantly fire-fighting?

If you’ve enjoyed this article and found it useful – please like and share, you’ll be doing me a huge favour!

If you’d like to have a conversation about changing a ‘fire-fighting culture’ or anything connected to improving your leadership capability or the leadership capability of your team, please feel free to get in touch – [email protected]