Stop Firefighting and Wear Your Leadership Hat

One of my irks as a business operations leader is firefighting. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the thrill that comes with solving new challenges. I however do not want to solve the same ‘emergency’ every now and then. You know the drill; someone calls or sends a frantic email stating all the things that have gone wrong and how critical it is to solve the issue now. Whether it’s the customer complain, delayed shipment, safety or quality incident, you drop everything and run to put off that fire. Well, just when you thought you are done, yet another fire alarm! Before you know it, your time is filled up with unplanned activities to the extent that you don’t have time to do any strategic planning or projects.

In supply chain, there are so many moving parts and multiple involved parties. The chances of something going wrong every hour are very high. If you don’t watch out, you will be fighting fires half the time and the other half will be spent in meetings created due to lack of trust and confidence in your supply chain. If this is how your week feels like, I would like to explore with you on what has led you there and how you can come out of it.

???? Goals and Priorities Misalignment.

When your goals are not clear to you and your team, you will be chasing every fire alarm that is raised. It’s important that all be on the same page on what the Supply chain goals are and what is critical to support the business achieve the stipulated goals. It’s good practice to document this and link them to daily or routine activities that link to your strategic goals. When a fire arises check how it aligns to your goals, the validity of the ‘fire’ at hand and which ‘fire marshal’ should handle the fire.

Once this is clear, you need to ensure that your prioritization and allocation of resources is in line with the goals. Prioritization is especially important when managing a team. Without clear prioritization, it’s highly likely that your team will have an overflowing in-tray of to-do lists and will have no time to work on corrective plans and projects.

Review the top 5 fires that you and your team worked on in the last one week and check them against your goals and priorities. Were they your fires to put off? Were they real emergencies? Did solving them bring you closer to achieving your goals? How could these have been avoided?

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???? Tactical Resolution of Issues.

When an issue comes up, we often rush to solve it and calm the affected parties or effects. Whether it’s that delayed payment or a delayed order, we quickly solve it and ensure that its effects do not escalate further. How often do we go back to evaluate what really went wrong? A corrective action plan is important, but a preventative action plan is critical to ensure the issue is resolved conclusively. How should you go about it?

CAPA Process

• Detection – Define the problem in detail which should include what happened, who caused it to happen, when it happened, where why and how often has the issue recurred.
• Investigation / Root causing - This is where your root causing skills and tools such as fish bone analysis, why-why analysis, brainstorming, and flowcharts come in. Document all the causes and its cause and effect.
• Proposed action – Identify the immediate solution that needs to be taken to correct the issue. Review the processes and procedures on a broader scale that caused the issue to occur. Identify the improvements needed or new procedures needed to minimize the risk of the issue recurring. It’s important to also document indicative or in-process measures that will help flag deviations that could eventually cause a repeat of the issue
• Implementation - Execute the immediate corrective action and start implement the preventative action plans identified. Allocate the resources accordingly, to both corrective and preventative action plans.
• Verification – You need to verify that the preventative plan you put in place is succeeding in eliminating the issue. Also check that the new processes or procedures introduced do not create new risk areas that could cause new unintended emergencies.

Go back to the top 5 fires you put off last week, pick one that would have had the highest impact on your goals. Create a comprehensive CAPA for the issue, ensuring to document it and take through the team members involved.

Inadequate Planning & Allocation of Resources.

Here I am referring to how you are allocating your most important resource – Time! What percentage of your work week do you spend putting out fires and what percentage of it do you spend wearing your leadership hat. As a business operations leader, regardless of whether at beginner stage or executive level, there needs to be a fair split of your time between strategic planning, execution and reviewing your results. If you are already in the spinning wheel and have lost control of your calendar, here is where you can start.

• Review your last work week –Review the percentage of time spent on each of the buckets. Are you happy with the time spent in each bucket? Let me guess, you had less than 5% spent in strategic planning or strategic projects, right? You probably didn’t take time to review your KPIs too. These are the things that easily get lost in the hustle and bustle of firefighting.
• Create Time – How is that possible? First, look at areas you could have delegated. Remember delegation can either be upwards or downwards. It’s a productivity strategy that helps one focus on what is most aligned to their goals, and they can add the most value in. Second, review your calendar. There is a famous Kenyan Kiswahili office joke that when translated means ‘This meeting should have been an email’. How many of those do you have in your calendar? Guard your time and clean up your calendar accordingly, refer back to your business goals and priorities.
• Schedule your Strategic Hour – This could be one hour a day where you take time to work on the preventative and strategic projects or reviewing the progress on the set KPIs. This will help understand what is off – track and gives you sufficient time to action main projects that will eventually have a big impact on you achieving your goals. Guard this time from ad hoc meetings and firefighting by setting up actual appointment slots to block your calendar. When the time comes, honor your invite the same way you would honor your performance review with your manager by being prepared and bringing 100% attention to it.
• Review – Continuous improvement is the name of the game. Review after every week and keep tweaking things until this becomes second nature to you. Over time due to the strategic approach to problem solving there will be less fires to fight, and even more time freed up to focus on your leadership activities which believe me, are more fun and have the highest reward.

How else do you mitigate being in constant firefighting? Share below.

Reach out in case you try this and still struggle to get out of the firefighting cycle.