When a CTO tells me they just barely saved the day, I annoyingly don’t pat them on their backs. Instead, I walk them back to why they were ever in that position. The hero moment is usually evidence of a prior failure. The impressive thing isn’t rescuing the team. It’s building a team that doesn’t need rescuing.
The Trap of Getting Good at Emergencies
Organizations that get really good at firefighting build an identity around it. There are those seniors who always act as fast responders. The leaders who are expected to save the day. Mastery of emergencies is a sophisticated way to avoid the harder question: why do they keep happening?
We’re optimizing the wrong part of the process.
The praise-seeking (or, at the very least, praise-accepting) loop keeps leaders stuck in reactive mode. Getting better at handling crises is not the same as getting better at leading.
DRY for Leadership
The pattern we want to break is a simple one: solving the same problem repeatedly, just with incrementally better tools. Don’t keep building fancier extinguishers, but find out who keeps throwing around lit cigarettes!
As engineers, we parroted the importance of DRY (don’t repeat yourself) in the code, but what about demanding that same professionalism when tackling organizational issues? Invest in root-cause thinking and post-mortems that actually change something. Recurring crises are a system failure, not a streak of bad luck. You ought not view it as destiny, but realize you have the ability to make things better.
Move Upstream in the Decision Pipeline
Another type of firefighting isn’t the outage/bug that needs handling, but that you keep getting surprised because you’re downstream of where decisions get made. The fix is twofold: move yourself upstream, and bring your team closer to the shaping process.
As a leader, you ought to get involved earlier in the shaping the roadmap and in forming the strategy. That planning is where every issue discovered requires a tenth of the effort to handle.
With your team, moving upstream is about collaborating on the “shaping” of the work. Don’t wait to be given tasks that are already decided, but work hand-in-hand with Product to help define the scope of the work. Surprises aren’t inevitable; they’re a structural symptom of where you sit in the flow.
Build Margin Into the Regular Week
If the only mode for tackling systemic issues is “pull the andon cord,” you’re doomed to have each issue become a big, hairy mess. Sustainable teams carry enough slack that non-urgent but important work gets done alongside regular delivery. It should not be limited to crisis response.
Margin is a design choice of sustainable leadership, and not something you should view as a luxury. Your mindset should be one of fire prevention as part of the regular week, not a stop-the-presses move to handle raging fires once they’re already out of control.
Closing
Every time you’re proud of how fast you responded, ask whether you’re just making the dysfunction more comfortable to live with. That’s not for self-flagellation. It’s the mindset shift that moves you from reactive operator to actual leader.