Triaging Fires Without Kneecapping Your Team
Source: FourBricksTall
When fires emerge, triage them to determine the right level of engagement and the right people to be involved.
When things catch on fire, the best thing to do is put them out as soon as possible, right? Not necessarily. Jumping to solve every fire subtly conditions your team to ring your alarm at every whiff of smoke. This quickly turns you into a full-time firefighter, and it hinders your team’s development and demonstrates a lack of confidence that they have what it takes.
Learn to Triage
Instead, your whole leadership team needs to learn the art of crisis triage. Although this is more art than science, you can roughly rate problems in terms of their urgency and importance.
Urgency Factors:
Size and Impact: How big is the fire now? How many stakeholders (customers, employees, suppliers, etc.) are impacted? What happens if we don’t solve this? Are we temporarily dissatisfying customers or losing them? Are we late with delivery or causing legal compliance issues?
Speed: How fast is the fire growing or spreading? Is this likely to get out of hand and cause bigger and wider problems if we don’t act quickly?
Opportunity: Who on our team needs to learn to deal with this kind of fire? Who could benefit from taking the lead in solving this? Who could benefit from tagging along as a helper for the lead? If your answers here are higher ranking leaders, that pushes the urgency up.
Importance Factors:
Complexity: How big is the risk if we get it wrong? Are there lots of ways to screw it up? How many factors or teams are involved here? Is the scope limited to one region, product, or department? Generally, when there are more people, risks, and issues involved, the response needs to happen at a higher level in the organization.
Type: Is this fire actually part of a larger class of problems? What is the upstream problem that caused this fire or enabled its acceleration? Problems that originate farther upstream usually require higher level leader engagement.
Frequency and Novelty: How often does this problem emerge? Repeated problems indicate an upstream issue, so a Root Cause Analysis is probably in order. On the other hand, you also need to ask: Have we ever dealt with something like this before? Usually, large but novel problems require more involvement from leaders.
Based on these issues, you will develop a sense of the urgency and importance of this problem and how much leadership involvement is necessary. The grid below may be a helpful framework as you and your team discuss how to triage the problem.
Triage Response Plans
Once you have identified the zone which is the best fit for this particular problem, then you are ready to define your response plan. Remember that every problem is also a developmental opportunity for your team, so with each response plan you will also want to include some developmental components.
Zone 1: Urgent and Important
You will need to be involved personally either through direct action or close oversight.
High Zone 1: High Emergency
Action: Direct Engagement. You are the only person within your scope of responsibility who has the skills or the trust to do this work. It is a high priority emergency, so handle it well and do it quickly.
Development:
Tag-Along. If at all possible, invite one of your senior leaders to tag along with you as a learning opportunity for them. Even if they are just joining you on a call or shadowing you as you work toward resolution, that will prepare both them and you to let them take the lead next time.
Debrief. As soon as possible after the crisis, or even during lulls in action while the crisis is happening, debrief with your senior leader team. Make sure they understand your thinking on the urgency and importance of the problem. Engage a mutual dialog about how and why you handled the problem the way you did. Explore alternative paths. They might have a better solution or be able to offer some tweaks, or you might be able to correct some errors in their thinking.
Low Zone 1: Moderate Emergency
Action: Delegate to a Trusted Leader. This is urgent and important, but someone on your team knows enough about this to lead the response with close oversight from you. Establish a pattern of frequent check-ins and reports, ranging from every few hours to daily.
Development:
Coach. You are mostly making sure they are acting with appropriate urgency and considering all the factors. You may also provide guidance on potential solution pathways. But, importantly, you are not doing the work! Let them do as much as possible.
Tag-Along. Encourage or require your trusted leader to bring a tag-along leader who can learn from them as they work on this problem.
After Action Review. Follow the debrief process above with the senior leadership team, and have the senior leader conduct an AAR with their own team plus anyone else directly involved in the problem solving.
Zone 2: Important, but Less Urgent
Action: Delegate and Follow-up. This is an important issue, but it is not particularly time sensitive. The problem-at-hand may be part of a larger class of problems. This is a good opportunity to work on that whole set of issues, taking the problem-at-hand as the starting point. Discuss with your senior leadership team who is the best person to own this issue and what type of responses you expect to see on what timetable.
Development:
Coach. Identify one person on the senior leadership team who will be responsible for coaching the issue owner on both the work and the upcoming presentation to the senior team.
Tag-Along. In addition to delegating ownership of the issue, encourage that owner to invite a peer or more junior staff member to join them in working on the solution and the presentation.
After Action Review. The coach facilitates a debrief with involved team members (owner, tag-along, plus anyone else involved in support) after every presentation to the senior leadership team, and conducts a meta-review after the originating issue is resolved. The meta-review may involve other members of the senior leadership team so they can share what would have been helpful for them along the way.
Zone 3: Urgent, but Less Important
Action: Delegate the delegation. This issue is time sensitive, but it’s not a company-wide crisis. One of your senior leaders should be able to handle this top-to-bottom. Your role here is more distant oversight, ensuring that your senior leader is delegating appropriately. Brief updates and standard tracking are usually a sufficient level of reporting.
Development:
Coach. The CEO is coaching the Senior Leader on how to coach and delegate ownership. The conversations with the senior leader will be primarily about the delegation process not the issue-at-hand.
Tag-Along. As part of the process of coaching the coach, you will want to ask about how they are deploying the tag-along strategy.
After Action Review. The senior leader can conduct or even delegate the AAR. Pay attention to upstream issues, surprises, indications of additional complexity, or potential solutions that involve cross-functional groups. Report any key learnings upward and outward appropriately. Additional dialog and ownership delegation may be needed in some cases.
Zone 4: Not Urgent or Important
Action: Let it burn. Because this issue is not an emergency and not likely to impact other parts of the company, you can take a more relaxed approach. For issues that are borderline Zone 2 or 3, you may want to set a reminder to check back on them. For issues that are low Zone 4, you mostly want to forget about them; they aren’t worth your time or mental real estate.
Development:
Coach. Sometimes, Zone 4 fires can be a good test for your team. This gives you the opportunity to see how your team handles problems without your input while the stakes are low. When you become aware of a Zone 4 fire, you may want to be just involved enough to conduct your “test” but not so involved that you escalate the urgency for everyone involved. Quiet side conversations may be the best way to do this.
Spotlight. Zone 4 issues are often a great time to deploy your leadership spotlight. Did you receive a complaint from a customer or supplier? Do you see a warning flag in Jira? A simple forward or question can highlight the issue for the front-line team. When a high-level leader gets involved, people tend to jump into action. Because this is Zone 4, you probably don’t need any formal updates, but your people will probably give them to you because of the spotlight effect.
Common Pitfalls
Sloppy Delegation
If delegation is poor, people don’t know what is expected from them or how urgent or important the issue is. Occasionally, they may not even be aware that something has in fact been delegated to them. Good delegation involves clarity on the what, why, who, and when; usually the delegated owner can determine the how.
Forgetting Development and Debrief
Every problem, no matter the size or urgency, is an opportunity for development. As a leader, your job is to determine the appropriate deployment of development within the process of putting out this particular fire. Check the initial guidance above on how to develop your people within each zone. However, if the problem was big enough to get on your radar screen as a leader, you should either be directly involved in an AAR or receive a report on one. This is a critical part of development for everyone involved, including you!
Over-Triage
This is ranking a problem as more urgent or important than it actually is. Getting too involved too quickly may be one of the greatest temptations for founders and other leaders. At this stage, most problems should not require your direct engagement, and that number will continue to shrink dramatically over the next few years.
Under-Triage
Some fires are serious enough to need your active engagement. At the next level, you will need frequent updates so you can provide timely guidance. Mis-classifying a fire significantly increases the risk for your organization. It may cause more damage internally and externally if you don’t provide the right level of oversight. AARs are helpful for assessing whether your team appropriately classified the urgency and importance of the issue.
Miopia
Another common error is only working on what is actually burning now, not the upstream issues or class of problems. There is almost always a problem behind the problem, and behind that are people. We are usually part of the problem. How we lead, how we engage others, how we organize ourselves and our team – these are usually contributing factors to the problem. So think systems and then think people.
Triaging for Both Solutions and Empowerment
The general rule is that it is always better to help the team solve the problem. That will take longer and it may take a few tries. The more urgent and important a problem is, the more you and your key leaders will need to be engaged. However, within every problem is a significant development opportunity. Here are three developmental rules of thumb for leveraging fires to empower your people:
Give the work to the team as much as possible.
Deploy tag-alongs for nearly everything.
Always, always, always conduct After Action Reviews after major events.
Start Now
Reflect: When you learn of a fire in your organization, what fears are triggered inside you? How can you quiet those fears long enough to triage and to craft a developmental approach to the problem?
Act: Set aside some time in your next team discussion to assess how you handled the last fire your team faced. Before the meeting, each person should:
Jot down some bullet points of how you solved it and who was involved.
Classify the fire according the zones above.
Compare the guidance above to how you actually handled that fire.
Identify the most important shift your team can make for the next fire.
Join: Never Climb Alone!