Sue’s days always started the same way: an “urgent” Slack message before 7 AM. By 8 AM, she was in the trenches. She didn’t stop until 7 PM, and every night she went home feeling like a hero. She was so busy fighting fires that she never took the time to root-cause the issues or take action to prevent them. While Sue was busy fighting fires, her peers were building automated systems that made her heroics unnecessary. She was seen as an “old-school” manager who thrives on drama rather than a leader who builds for scalability.
I’ve seen many brilliant managers stall because they were addicted to the “heroics” of crisis management. Listen to me: True leadership scales through systems, not individual heroics. If you’re always putting out fires, you aren’t building anything of lasting value. For every crisis you resolve this week, I want you to spend at least 30 minutes root-causing it and designing a system to prevent that specific fire from ever happening again.
Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto will give you some concrete ideas.
Suresh