It’s exhilarating, to be the one who knows how to solve all the problems. To be the one who people come to with problems. To have disasters unfold in front of you and know exactly how to address them. Isn’t it?
When was the last time you had a really huge disaster at work? Was it today? Three weeks ago? Do you not even relate to this question because you never have fires at work? Yes, that’s a joke. We all have fires at work.
Sometimes, we LOVE having fires at work. One time, when I was managing the shipping and receiving dock for a food manufacturer, we had a tote of EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil, for those of you who aren’t down with acronyms) come in that somehow got damaged in the process of getting it off the truck. EVOO is expensive, and we needed to salvage what we could, which meant using a pump to move it from the damaged tote to a clean drum. As the situation unfolded, people came by to see what was going on. They watched for a minute as we assessed and executed our solution. Then they went about their business.
My job was to hold the end one of the plastic pipe we were using in the tote to suck out the EVOO. At one point, the pump stuttered, the pipe jolted, and I lost my grip – EVOO went EVERYWHERE.
If you haven’t been on a shipping dock, this may be meaningless to you. For us, the dock was a rather large expanse that was now covered in olive oil – which is very slippery on concrete, just FYI. But even with that setback, we saved three quarters of the tote – a good chunk of change and we extended our line down runway. It was dramatic, we got to talk about it, and we had emerged semi-victorious (aside from the detail of having to mop the dock ten times to get the oil up).
Now, this may seem ridiculous. I can tell you, it felt ridiculous at the time, and it was a great story to tell. I clearly still talk about it sometimes. What I want to get at with this is that fires – events that seem out of control – make us feel good, especially when we get to be the hero who is a part of the solution. I can tell you categorically that I felt good about the role I played in salvaging the EVOO from that tote, especially because we ran on a JIT inventory system and didn’t have a lot of extra in house to burn.
But, when I step back and look at that, did my heroics actually make any kind of progress in the sustainability of the company? No. I didn’t come away from that experience with any understanding of why the tote was damaged or how we were going to keep the same thing from happening again.
What happened was that I saw a problem – a dramatic one – and I got myself involved to fix the problem. But I didn’t do anything at all to address the root cause of the issue. Maybe it had to do with the freight company, maybe the issue started with the supplier, maybe it was our own process in-house getting the tote off the truck.
Fires happen. When we fight a fire and come out victorious, we tend to have an adrenaline rush of some kind and we feel like we proved our value. Laying down fire-prevention tactics feels a lot less glorious – and when they work, we often don’t acknowledge that those tactics were effective because we take them for granted.
Fire-fighting is stressful, but it feels good. If you’re a high achiever (like me…), it can be really hard to put down the instinct to just GET THINGS DONE. I’ve known many, many people who just keep cycling through the stress of fighting the fires and never stop to address the thing causing the problem in the first place.
The other problem with promoting heroism in the workplace is the toll it takes culturally. If you are relying on heroics, no one ever gets to develop strengths and rely on the team to cover weaknesses. Do you relate to fire-fighting? How might you take a step back to identify the root cause of a problem and ask the team to solve the issue with you rather than relying on your own capacity to be super human (and requiring that of everyone around you)?
Activity: Consider the last time you dealt with a situation that felt out of control or a big mistake that could have been prevented. How did you handle it? Did you find a way to keep that situation or mistake from happening again? How might you institute preventative measures now? Would you identify yourself as someone who loves preventing fires or fighting them?