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Managing smart or fire-fighting?

Written by: Angus M Main

Article Overview: So many managers at all levels are principally fire-fighting and simply not planning, strategic and thinking deeply enough to provide the best solutions for their own productivity and for the sustainability of their organizations.

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Managing smart or fire-fighting?

Today's senior executives mainly share the principal issues of huge work-load and a perceived lack of time. What is also true is that, through coaching, this invariably changes in a remarkable way without loss of impact, results or esteem. How is that possible?

Kate was a comparatively young, Technology Development Director in a major electronics business and had numerous Project Heads reporting to her. Kate told me over a few hours of coaching that she had been running high-capex projects for a couple of years but it had been noted by her COO that her position at Board now required a more strategic and holistic application of her knowledge and experience. Also, Kate had frog-leaped over colleagues and a number of very competent people now reported to Kate or to her direct reports. This was creating on-going difficulties. Her private life was a mess and she was literally married to the business.

Within a few hours of coaching over a couple of months, Kate had made enormous progress. Her Project Heads were brought together to develop strategic networking opportunities for co-work and relationship-management with colleagues in the other countries. At the next level down, technical people were seconded in and out of the organization to improve company-to-company relations and to impact on best-practice. Kate started to turn down corporate-representative opportunities at the many hospitality functions available to senior members in the business and went back to her main sport. She gave up smoking and hung out more with her children. She developed far-reaching strategic plans for the integration of technology across the businesses and was promoted within three months to the International Board.

We all know what the key pressures on time are and the standard answers. And still we work twenty, thirty or forty hours a week more than we should. So what stops so many of us from changing that? And why, when we go into fire-fighting, do we not pause to think out a strategy for effectiveness?

Lock-in Syndrome

Lock-in Syndrome is a patterned response to pressure of work (whether externally real or self-generated). As the demands go up, so we stretch the day. We start traveling on Sunday evenings, working a couple of hours each evening when at home, arriving an hour before anyone else to clear the desk and leaving two hours later than most people to catch-up on outstanding actions (and needs from peers and immediate bosses).

Once the pattern has started, the intense focus on work and action means that the ability to focus more widely is lost. You are already locked-in. It takes a major catastrophe or critical, personal event to stimulate the re-valuing of what we do and why we do it. As leaders, it is necessary not to follow the pattern blindly but on entering that pattern, of our own choice and will, to exercise choice, review and back out.

For sure, to counteract the effect of Lock-in, we need to get a wider picture of what is happening. There are a number of things which, with awareness, might make a difference in order to take control of the situation:

Recalibrate the relative importance of what I do in the greater context of my contribution in all my life's work
Prioritizing my health and wellbeing to ensure I stay well and can contribute
Re-think the contribution I make to my family or friends
Realize that having trained my head to be busy, stillness demands effort of will to become re-habituated for creative thought
Break my workday habits - change the start of each working day as much as possible
Work out where my contribution is most essential, setting out areas of essential influence and delegating and withdrawing from unessential functions/demands.
Delegate more
Think about the skills and competencies of my immediate people (and therefore who is really best able to take over key tasks and when) and what level of support to offer them.

These actions are designed to gain wider perspective, generate calm and higher effectiveness. These are important because Lock-in Syndrome originates from patterned learning where we have lost full personal control.

Fire-Fighting

Fire-fighting is the precursor to Lock-in Syndrome (when the individual is no longer able to get back to a relaxed 'state of being' again). Fire-fighting is not wrong per se, if consciously chosen as a temporary need with a specific end, and provided one can regain one's composure after that need has passed. The danger comes when the 'high' associated with one episode is so exciting that the person is unable to calm down again. Instead, they compulsively go to the next fire-fight and if there isn't one, tend to make a drama in order to create one. Thus, Lock-in Syndrome is a patterned behavior that arises when one starts to go from one fire-fight to the next without a pause for reflection, perspective and the deliberate use of choice. Since patterns often develop sub-consciously, there are real dangers in being exposed to situations where multiple and sequential firefights are the norm. Repeated fire-fights may lead to Lock-in Syndrome without noticing how you arrived there!

Fire-fights are common in task-oriented businesses running to tight schedules and pressures. Many of us associated fire-fighting with lower and middle management but these days fire-fighting has infected the highest levels in many organizations. Fire-fighting at this level creates incipient weakness. If most of our work is concerned with putting out fires, tactical decisions may be made but the strategic development of the business, in the myriad of areas in which this is essential for sustainability, must fall short. If fire-fighting characterizes the bulk of your work life, what can you do?

I suggest changing the beginning of each day. This can start at home or hotel. The earlier in the day you make these changes then the better the impact of the result. Patterns are triggered by a sequence of psychological events that run rapidly and sequentially, usually out of conscious awareness or control. To challenge the pattern, it is necessary to break the pattern at an early part of the sequence. There are many things which can make a difference including:

Consider taking a morning walk, if only for ten minutes each morning; buying a dog can save your life if it helps you to exercise and slow down. It can also save a relationship if you share this activity with a partner. If you do not have any aerobic exercise, consider including some in your morning routine.
If you take stimulants, caffeine (in coffee, tea and chocolate), nicotine (smoking of tobacco), beta-carotene (in fizzy, especially yellow and orange drinks, pastilles and lozenges) then consider starting the day without these and replacing with other desired foods/activities.
If you start the day by dealing with mail or email, schedule this activity for later in the morning. Mail requires a series of quick action loops: think-decision-action, think-decision-action, and these stimulate the mind into a fire-fighting pattern... tda, tda, tda... get hooked into the cycle and a whole day can be lost - yes you have been active, but how productive? And what contribution have you made to tomorrow, next month, next year and ten years ahead?

It is best to start each day with a period of reflection. Thoughtful, strategic consideration will also get the mind to work in evolutionary processes rather than rapid decision-mode. With luck, your mind will be more able to return to this strategic work later even if you are in fire-fighting in between. The mind is like a muscle, use it differently and often and it is more flexible and fast.

The type of strategic thinking you could address may include:

Who else is influential in supporting or undermining my function and what can I do to create a better environment for the success of my function?
Which parts of my function could be managed elsewhere (in or outside the business) and are any of these options viable and useful to the business and if so, what can I do to influence that change or protect that area from a less-effective option?
Of the major things that need to be communicated in the next period, when would be the best time to communicate them, who should be involved in advance of that and how should the communication strategy be planned and carried out?
Who misunderstands me, the way I work or my motives and what might I do to get them on-side?
What are the strengths, weaknesses and perceived potential of my immediate reports and what can be done to test their perceived potential and assist them in taking on more responsibility?

These are large aspect questions that demand a period of thought and self-reflection. If you are creating your own, make sure that they satisfy these criteria. They should not be urgent as this may encourage stress responses and periods of rapid judgment without thinking-through in significant depth. Urgency will also trigger more fire-fighting.

If you think about your own needs for strategic thinking, how much should you be doing, when should you be doing it and what should you be turning your attention to? A typical answer adopted by the many people that I coach in senior jobs is to allocate two or more hours a week. The subjects for strategic thought are updated and planned as part of the process. Here are examples:

Changing communication strategies
Career plans
Internal marketing
Alliances
Organizational development
Support and resources for my team
Succession planning

Many of the people I work with on a 1-2-1 basis leave our coaching sessions with diary entries for the whole year blocked out for 'Planning', 'Strategic Development' or other appropriate phrase that suits the culture. They have buy-in from their secretaries to book appropriate spaces for this work and to protect those spaces from being regularly captured by others.

The Step Back

Step-Back is a quick method of gaining objectivity. It is a device for checking our mental state and checking whether what we are doing is the best thing, at that time.

When we notice the signs of fire-fighting it is helpful to think, 'Step-Back'. If you can do this and literally 'step back' then the physical act provides bio-feedback to enhance the effect. In any case, the pause should be enough to provide a space in which to ask yourself questions and start some productive processing that will change the way in which you are working. Questions might include some like these:

Is this the best use of my time now?
Can I bring other resources to this?
Is there a more effective way of achieving the actual objective?
What is most important both now and after completing this task?

Devise your own questions that suit you or adapt these to have the same impact.

Busy Bodies

A small number of executives at all levels believe that looking busy makes them appear important. Sadly, this is not often true; many people are not impressed. In any case, being busy does not have a relationship with good leadership. The executive who cannot flex the diary to meet with staff is not really doing their job. Being late for meetings, making and taking cell-phone calls at every opportunity, walking fast from one appointment to another show high-activity but they do not raise confidence in those who know what leadership looks like.

Whether the reason for being busy is a misguided status thing or whether there is an inability to prioritize or manage adequately, the busy body needs to be slowed down - it's time to prioritize, to think where our contribution is most needed and effective, and how to support our role more adequately, if necessary. Continuing the busy body syndrome is not a sensible option.

I worked in one American business in which people in a large European operation moved so fast around the building that they looked like they were in a mad walking race. In the US holding-company people moved around much less fast. The difference was enormous. Things were not laid-back in the US; it was about culture, not peformance. I decided to ignore that local culture when in the European business, but it took an effort of will not to be caught up in the tide. I have no idea whether it was culturally driven (it was actually a multi-racial outfit) or the caffeine. I include the story by way of interest So, do your people move alertly but in measured way? Or do they dart about like cats in headlights?

Focus on Impact

'The misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come'

James Russell Lowell

When we concentrate on 'stuff' that just exists in our work culture but over which, on reflection, we have no chance of effective impact, then we are not being effective. It is wasted time. When we notice ourselves and others doing this, we need to re-focus on an area where we do have impact. These simple acts of letting go and 're-focusing for impact' have a fantastic effect - within seconds the 'stuff' is no longer in the picture and we are suddenly being more effective again.

These two steps do depend on having done, at some time, some reflective work on whether the 'stuff' issue (however important emotionally) is something that you can sensibly change. And if there is a chance of doing that, will it be without diminishing your energy for productive work or damaging your status? These are important questions and the answers should advise your action.

The suggestion to refocus on impactful actions seems counter to the measures for getting out of the Lock-in Syndrome (LIS) where focus is tightly upon work and I advised getting a wider picture to gain perspective. The biggest difference is that in LIS the focus is roving from one fire to the next without a pause. In that case we need then to widen the focus to gain perspective. Here, we are using focus to counter the effect of extra-curricular thoughts that are unproductive so we can become productive again.

In many organizations, there are groups of people who continually go over the same complaints and trigger other members of their kind to go into well-rehearsed expressions of helplessness and complaining. Phrases that trigger these unproductive conversations often include some of these:

HR has no productive benefit at all, in fact the reverse
IT again, they can't fix anything without messing up something else
Forget it, Facilities Management will just keep you waiting for a year or more
Learning & Development haven't a clue what they are doing

When people spend their time repeating the same, familiar complaints they are contributing towards a growing culture of we can't rather than we can. By wasting time on conversations without action and any intention of making a difference, each individual is reducing their own energy for success. Focus on action and success and the complaints disappear.

Being & Doing

Another influence on whether we fire-fight or not depends upon our sense of our contribution to the organization. If our sense of impact in the organization is tied up principally with actions then to let go of responsibilities (and actions) can weaken our sense of work-identity. If our sense of influence goes wider than our actions, we will be more resilient. We will be less likely to be affected by being given a reduced scope for decisions and action, for example. If we to contribute more to the long-term health of the organization we work in, then there has to be a tendency to be more active in other, strategic ways to create sustainable futures.

Silent Time for Reflection

'And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered' Kahlil Gibran

There is another use of time that may sound counter-intuitive to productive working - it is that of still space, or silence. Reflective thought is enormously helpful and the benefits obvious when we think about it - we get more strategic, we are able to see the wider, holistic implications of our actions. So what is this stillness stuff about? Stillness is the opposite of the busy head state. There is a range of mental activity, from rapid, logical processing to quiet, low-level being.

Emotive reaction (fastest)
Logical processing
Reflective thinking
Eureka moments
Stillness (slowest but most creative)

What is your range? Would it be useful to extend the range? If we are to be able to flexibly use our skills from logical tasking (busy head) to reflective thought and even further than that, then a quantum leap is obtained, even to the level of genius. In order to make that more likely it is helpful to exercise our minds to the full limit of our potential. This is like a physical work out for the mind. You can't be comfortable at any level of sustained physical work unless you have worked harder in training. It is the same with our minds; we need to flex and test our minds to explore more widely than we do already so that our range of competence is extended.

Conclusion

So often we let time control us rater than the other way around. Time has become a master, not a servant. When we change our view of time and notice our own sense of urgency, we can have more choice and dominion over the way we work. That should mean more planning and strategy and ultimately raised productivity.

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About the Author: Angus M Main
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Dr Angus McLeod is author of ‘Me, Myself, My Team’ (Crown House, 2000 & 2006) and ‘Performance Coaching’ (Crown House, 2003) and many articles on coaching in the international press. His first book with John Wiley is about personal leadership and is called ‘Self-coaching Leadership (Wiley, 2007). He has written 'Performance Coaching Toolkit' under with McGraw-Hill under the Open University imprint. Dr McLeod is Visiting Professor of Coaching at Birmingham City University and supervises applied resreach in the Business School. He is co-founder of the not-for-profit Coaching Foundation and inventor of 'Ask Max' the internet mentoring offering first used by Sainsburys in the late 1990's. He is Principal of the AMA Coachings School. He is also a published poet (and a healer following a miracle in 1995). Dr McLeod works from Pennsylvania and Worcester and can be contacted in the UK on (+44) 7899.75.75.85 or visit www.angusmcleod.com

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