The Manager As a Firefighter

When I first became a manager, I attended a weeklong training course. At one point, the instructor asked the participants to take out a paper and pen. "Think back to when you were 6 years old. What did you want to be when you grew up?" After a few minutes, she asked, "How many of your wrote down 'manager'?"

When no one else responded, I raised my hand. The instructor looked at me in astonishment: "At 6 years old, you knew you wanted to be a manager? You knew what a manager was?"

"No," I replied, "but I came pretty close. I wrote down 'firefighter'."

Many times since, I have heard managers complain: "The fires never stop. I don't know how much of this my people and I can take. We never have time to get any real work done."

I have suggested to these managers that perhaps they ought to take time to do some planning, that there may be a way to prevent future fires so that their groups can get back to their "real work." Typically, they reply: "I wish we had the time, but we don't. We've got to put out those fires or we'll lose everything."

Many companies make a practice of handing out "Firefighter of the Week (or Month or Year) awards to employees. They don't actually call the award that, of course, and the objective is laudable:

They want to recognize people who come to the rescue in an emergency – the project team that works all weekend to get a proposal out by Monday morning, the account manager who cuts short a vacation to soothe an irate customer, the hotel clerk who offers the presidential suite to a late-arriving guest whose room has mistakenly been given away.

While heroics are valuable in specific situations, these companies would be better off giving awards for fire prevention. When a manager's department is spending a terrific amount of time fighting fires, it's a sign that something is very wrong.

Years ago, as a graduate student, I spent a summer working on a planning project for a small city. One of the city agencies I worked with was the fire department. I recall meeting with the fire chief and his two deputies to discuss performance measures for the department. "What proportion of its time does the department actually spend fighting fires?" I asked. I knew it would be a relatively small number. When they were reluctant to answer the question, I led them a bit. "Would you say 5 percent?"

The chief looked at me and replied, "That's way too high. If we had to spend 5 percent of our time fighting actual fires, the entire city would be in ashed. The number is probably more like 1 percent, 2 percent tops."

The chief's point was that people's confidence in the fire department does not stem from knowing that it put out one or three or a dozen fires yesterday, but from knowing that it is ready to help them in an emergency.

A fire department's major work is fire prevention and readying itself to respond to emergencies. It prepares by studying the city and the businesses within the city so that it knows how the buildings are structures, what kind of work the businesses do, what materials they use and so forth.

The department also spends a lot of time studying the science of fire, rescue methods, and emergency medical procedures to understand how best to fight various types of fires and respond to other emergency situations.

If a manager in today's corporate world finds that her group is spending more than a small amount of its time fighting fires, she should realize that its efforts are misplaced. She needs to concentrate on fire prevention. She must enable employees to anticipate potential dangers and to work to resolve those situations before fires actually break out. She must empower employees to learn new skills and to seek their own solutions to problems. Heroics provide great anecdotes for business books, but no company can bet its future on the constant heroics of its employees.

Managers must thoroughly understand their company's business processes and methods. When they understand the overall processes, they can then select the optimal work methods that will prevent fires from breaking out in the first place. The key to solving any problem is to understand its root causes.

Yes, managers need to be ready to fight a fire at a moment's notice. But those who learn and practice this new role will find that their operations are running more smoothly; their employees are more flexible, responsive and productive; and they have fewer fires to fight.