If you spend your day putting out fires, find the cause…you may be the fire hazard
When I was a teenager, my family adopted the elderly dog of a family friend who no longer could care for her full time. We already had two cats and a dog, but Honey Bear (or just, Bear) was a quirky delight. She was particularly fond of me, for some reason; always wanting to sit next to me at home and eager to ride with me wherever I drove. I like to think that the last couple years of her life were some of her best. One of her ‘things’ was begging at the dinner table. This is far from rare among our four-legged friends, but she was so persistent, we called her U-Turn.
You’d tell her, “no,” point her away from the table; and, though she would do as she was told at first, she’d reverse course as soon as you turned your back. What was so amusing about this is that the woman we’d taken her in to help always would say, “if I’d train my kids half as well as I trained Bear, I’d be a lot better off.” That assertion either reflects an inflated belief in the results of her obedience training or that she had some really unruly kids. I’ve met her children, and I’m going to go with the inflated belief in her dog training skills. I think of this mildly amusing misplaced belief a lot when we hear from clients who come to us in part because they’re so challenged to focus on big picture business issues due to the amount of time they spend ‘putting out fires.’
Any of us who’ve been around at all know that unexpected events absolutely pop up and often require our immediate and full attention. But it’s also true that we easily can play into the sense that we have little or no control over events. This mindset of lacking control often contains the added rationalization that this willy-nilly approach to planning and action is par for the course in businesses like ours and/or that the impact of this approach is nominal or, at least, nominally negative. The reality—as we all understand when we’re being honest—is that we can and should do better. It’s just sometimes easier to believe that things aren’t that bad and that we’re doing the best we can.
This is when the story of Bear comes to mind. We can delude ourselves about how well we’re doing things, or we can look back over our shoulder and see that our well-behaved animal companion is coming right back to the table. How many times do we need to send her away (futilely) before we look for another solution? With Bear, we chose not to ignore or accept the behavior and went back to basics from a training perspective. After a fairly brief but intensive effort, we were able to, in fact, teach an old dog new tricks…and dinner became a bit more peaceful.
From a client perspective, some of what we’re likely to hear that indicates an opportunity to take back control of time and process includes among other things:
• We have too many meetings…and nothing really gets done
• We’re constantly reinventing the wheel
• I don’t understand how decisions are made, and
• The number one explanation for inefficiency and ineffectiveness which is sort of a catch all for the items above and more is: I’m too busy putting out fires
If I could pick one phrase to strike from the business lexicon, I’m pretty sure it would be the putting out fires one. This is because, in part, too often the person who utters that phrase is herself an office arsonist. The metaphorical fire may be set unintentionally, but it is occurring and recurring due to a lack of ‘fire prevention.’ To turn from Fire Marshall Bill into Smokey the Bear, here are a few safety tips you’re encouraged to follow. They all come from adopting a System of Management to codify how things get done:
• Have better meetings—One of the best ways to address the issue of too many meetings is to have better meetings. This occasionally includes adding meetings, which seems counter intuitive. But when you examine your de facto processes, you’re likely to find lots of mini-meetings that aren’t very efficient and don’t always include all the players or consider strategy or vision, and too often poor decisions are made and/or poorly executed. We have a client that now has a leadership meeting every week for one hour. This replaced ad hoc meetings between different subsets of their leadership team that amounted to—conservatively—2.5 times more time spent in meetings with lots of things falling through the cracks. By consolidating those efforts into a single, well-planned, clearly owned meeting, they now are positioned to make better decisions in less time and—here’s the kicker—actually execute those decisions.
• Integrate your meetings—Client leaders often come to us saying things like my people don’t get ‘it.’ When we assess the opportunities employees have to connect their work with the company’s vision and values, we often don’t see a lot of intentional touch points. One of the ways to address this is align your meetings at the leadership level with those held at the team level. In this alignment, leadership meetings focus on planning and team meetings focus on engagement. The leaders’ planning then transitions into application and execution by their teams through engagement-oriented meetings. The client that consolidated their leadership meetings has a rotating meeting focus, one for each week of the month. They work on an area of the business and develop a message and or actions for their team that is delivered in weekly all-hands meetings, monthly updates, and quarterly kick-offs. The line of sight created for every employee to see how his/her work connects to the work of colleagues and to the larger business strategy is compelling.
• Be accountable—Somewhere along the line in American business, being accountable became synonymous with being blamed. There’s an old comedy bit that I love where the storyteller—who finds himself in a bit of hot water—says, as the person in charge “I, of course, accept full responsibility…but not the blame…People who are to blame lose their jobs; people who are responsible do not.” I regularly share with folks that, if you’re not accountable for anything, two things likely are true—neither of which is particularly good:
1. It’s hard to get credit for your work, and
2. Your job security blows
One of the biggest challenges to accountability is the incessant lack of clarity that most of us allow to exist in our environments. Many of us just don’t communicate as well as we could in terms of working through the action items related to an effort, who’s doing what, using what, working with whom. Also, we don’t define what progress looks like, when we’ll check in, and/or what our authority is to take action and when we need to check in or reconvene. If you take those items and ask them as questions and provide answers from your perspective to others, you’ll be well on your way to an accountability that makes sense, helps to get things done, and feels good.
Fire in the Winter is nice. Fire in the office isn’t. A sensible System of Management as outlined will give you a great set of tools to prevent them. And when they don’t, to paraphrase Smokey, when it comes to office fires, you’re encouraged to pledge, speak up, and step in when you see someone in danger of starting one.
