The Real Reason You're Always Putting Out Fires

You open the laptop in the morning and what do you see? Problems. Endless problems coming at you.

And they are in the Slack channel and the Confluence feeds and your direct reports just seem to be in chaos all the time. The clients are cross, complaints are piling up and you?

You are sick and tired of always having to fight the fires and never getting the chance to do the things you really want to do. It's exhausting. It's unproductive. It's unsatisfying and it's unending.

When things feel like this, it doesn't seem to matter what you do, does it? You put out one fire and another one springs up.

Now, let's assume there isn't something unusual going on. There wasn't suddenly a hack to your code, an unexpected run on a product line or an actual fire.

There can be many ways groups of people can get into these patterns of chaotic work. Which means that there are many solutions you could apply.

I've done a lot of team coaching over the last few years, helping people to figure out what's going wrong (and what's going right) between people, as well as how to fix it.

What that has taught me is that there are three areas of teamwork that, done well, can quickly improve the need for firefighting in almost every team:

1. Change the way you meet.
2. Change the way you make decisions.
3. Be absolutely clear on how authority is distributed.

These improvements help everyone in the team to step into more adult-adult conversations and to take appropriate levels of responsibility. Once that happens, fewer fires start and more of them are extinguished at source.

Imagine your team was like that. How would that feel?

Stephen

I can help you and your team with all of this through a workshop format that has helped teams on four continents.

I have limited availability from late February and some more in March. If you'd like to find out more, we can have a call soon and reserve your slot. Just hit reply and ask.

Speak soon.