How to Stop Firefighting in Business

You know the feeling. You pull into the parking lot, and before you even get out of the car, you’re already bracing for impact. What machine is going to be down? What customer is going to be upset? Which fire am I putting out first today?

I worked with a leader who described his mornings exactly like that. Every single day, the walk from his car to his desk was spent mentally preparing for whatever disaster was waiting. Not planning his day. Not thinking about strategic initiatives or growth. Just bracing for what was sure to be another fire drill.

Three months later, after we started building out their operational infrastructure, he told me something that never gets old to hear. He said, “I don’t even know if I need to be here anymore.” Not because we eliminated his role. But because his day went from constant triage to actually leading. The fires subsided. The chaos stopped. And for the first time, he had to figure out what to do with the space that opened up.

That transformation didn’t happen because he worked harder or hired more people. It happened because we identified the system that was producing the emergencies and rebuilt it.

Prefer listening? Check out this week’s Solo Session where I dive deeper on how to stop firefighting in your business.

The System You Designed

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: firefighting is not a phase of growth. It’s not a workload problem. It’s not a people problem. It’s not your busy season. It’s a system you built.

There’s a Deming quote I come back to often: “every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” If all you see is chaos, late shipments, rework, and a team that can’t make a decision without you, that’s not bad luck. That’s the output of the system you’ve been reinforcing for (probably) years.

What happens over time is that leaders, through thousands of small decisions and reactions, become the gatekeeper of everything. Every problem flows to you. Every decision routes through you. Every exception, every customer issue, every question about what to do next lands on your desk. And the organization learns something dangerous: stop thinking for yourself.

You didn’t set out to build this. Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to create a system where nothing moves without them. It happens gradually, through reinforcement. Through every time someone brought you a problem and you solved it for them instead of coaching them through it. Through every time something went sideways and you stepped in to fix it yourself because it was faster. Through every reaction that taught your team it was safer to ask than to decide.

How You Removed Their Ability to Think

I worked with a company where one of their longest tenured employees was consistently underperforming. Leadership was frustrated. They’d had the conversations, expressed their disappointment, even considered letting him go. Classic people problem, right?

Except it wasn’t.

When we dug in, we discovered that this person’s role had fundamentally changed over the years. The responsibilities had shifted, the expectations had evolved, but nobody had ever told him. While his title did change, his pay hadn’t. To compound the issue, nobody had sat down and actually defined what success looked like in the role he was supposed to be doing now. Leadership couldn’t even articulate it when I asked.

They’d been trying to hold someone accountable for a job that was never clearly defined. Every time he “underperformed,” it triggered another round of frustration, another firefight, another conversation about what to do about this person. The real fire wasn’t his performance. It was the absence of clarity that made performance impossible to measure.

Here’s the part that really stuck with me: even after we laid this out, leadership struggled to see it. They kept circling back to the idea that this person should just know. They couldn’t accept that the problem was clarity because they’d never experienced what clarity actually looked like. They’d been operating without it for so long that the dysfunction felt normal. It took multiple iterations before it clicked.

This is how firefighting perpetuates itself. The leader can’t see the system because they’ve never been outside of it.

The Cascade Nobody Sees

One of my favorite examples of how firefighting compounds is reactive maintenance. Most manufacturers I work with talk a good game about preventive maintenance. But the reality is that most of them wait until equipment breaks before they fix it. Parts are often perceived as too expensive to keep on hand, there’s never a good time to take a machine offline, and the maintenance schedule defaults to whatever emergency happened today.

Then a critical piece of equipment goes down at the worst possible time, right in the middle of a major order. Now you’re not dealing with one problem. You’re dealing with five. The customer needs to be contacted. Partial shipments need to be arranged. The broken component needs to be expedited. Production schedules need to be reshuffled. And you, the gatekeeper, are in the middle of all of it because nobody else has the authority or the context to handle any of these things independently.

The data backs this up. Reactive maintenance costs three to five times more than preventive maintenance. Small and mid-size manufacturers lose an estimated 15 to 25 percent of productive capacity to unplanned downtime. And most of that isn’t equipment failure. It’s the cascading organizational chaos that one failure triggers when no systems exist to absorb it.

We never have time to be proactive. We never have the bandwidth to set up a preventive maintenance schedule, or document the process, or train someone to handle the customer communication. But we always find time when it’s an emergency. Always. Because there’s no alternative.

That paradox is the clearest signal that the system is broken.

What Firefighting Does to Your Team

The cost of constant firefighting goes far beyond rework and overtime. It changes how your team shows up.

I’ve worked with teams where people have essentially stopped thinking. They come in, do exactly what they’re told, and nothing more. No initiative, no ideas, no problem-solving. If something goes wrong, they wait for someone to tell them what to do. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” That phrase should terrify every leader who hears it, because what it really means is: I’ve learned that thinking for myself isn’t safe here.

I call this beaten animal syndrome… terrible analogy, I know. But it’s vivid and that’s why I continue to use it. You see it when people have been burned enough times for using judgment, making a decision, or bringing an idea forward that didn’t land perfectly. At some point, they stop trying. Not because they’re incapable. Because they’ve learned that the safest path is compliance.

Brene Brown talks about the marble jar therory, which is the idea that trust is built through small interactions over time. Every time you respond to an idea with criticism, every time you step over someone to fix their mistake yourself, every time you react to a problem with frustration instead of coaching, you’re pulling marbles out of the jar. Eventually the jar is empty and you’ve got a team that shows up physically but has checked out mentally.

Rebuilding that trust doesn’t happen with a speech or a team meeting. It happens marble by marble, interaction by interaction. The team has to see over time that the rules have actually changed. That thinking is safe again. That contributing won’t get them burned.

I’ll be honest about something. I was a terrible leader for many years. I made every one of these mistakes. I built systems where I was the gatekeeper, created environments where people stopped contributing, and wondered why nothing worked without me in the room. The difference between then and now is that I learned to see the system for what it was. That’s the first step for any leader reading this.

Why Leaders Stay Stuck

If the system is this obvious once you see it, why do so many leaders stay trapped in it? In my experience, there are two reasons.

The first is that they genuinely don’t know the steps. They know something needs to change. They can feel it. But when I ask them what they’d do differently starting Monday morning, they don’t have an answer. “What do I actually do tomorrow?” is the question nobody has answered for them. Most of the content out there about getting out of firefighting mode is conceptual. Implement lean. Be more proactive. Empower your team. Great. What does that mean at 6 AM when the first shift starts?

The second reason is harder to talk about. Some leaders measure their own importance by how busy they are. Not by what they produce, but by how much activity surrounds them. If every fire routes through them, if nothing moves without their input, if the phone never stops ringing, that feels like value. That feels like being needed. And when the fires stop? There’s an identity crisis waiting on the other side. Some leaders, whether they’ll admit it or not, create fires because they need something to fight.

Both of these are real. Both of them will keep you stuck indefinitely if you don’t confront them honestly.

The Path Out

The path out of firefighting mode follows a specific sequence, and the order matters.

It starts with clarity. Define roles, responsibilities, expectations, and what success looks like for each position in your organization. Not in your head. On paper. If you can’t articulate what “good” looks like for someone’s role, you have no right to be frustrated when they don’t meet a standard that doesn’t exist.

Most leaders I work with believe they’ve been clear. They haven’t. They’ve had conversations. They’ve expressed expectations verbally, probably in passing, probably while walking through the shop. But they haven’t documented anything, they haven’t confirmed understanding, and they haven’t defined success in a way that’s measurable. We think we’re being clear. We’re not.

Consistency comes next. Once expectations are documented and understood, they have to be applied the same way every time. Today’s priority can’t be tomorrow’s afterthought. The standard can’t shift depending on who’s working or what mood leadership is in. This is where coaching conversations happen. Not accountability conversations, not yet. Coaching. Reinforcing the standard so it becomes the baseline.

Accountability comes last. Only after clarity and consistency are genuinely in place can you hold people accountable in a way that’s fair and productive. Attempting accountability before the first two steps is just firefighting with a megaphone. You’re yelling louder about standards that were never clear to begin with.

Where to Start When Everything Feels Broken

Once you understand the clarity, consistency, accountability sequence, the next question is: where do I actually begin?

I try and think through everything in terms of the framework for building effective business systems: Planning, People, Process, Technology. The order is intentional, and it’s the opposite of what most companies do. Most companies start with technology, buy a new tool, implement a new procedure, and hope it fixes the chaos. It doesn’t. Technology amplifies whatever it sits on top of. If the foundation is broken, technology accelerates the dysfunction.

Start with planning. Pick the one system causing the most friction, whether that’s your maintenance process, your order handoff, your customer communication, or your production scheduling. Define what it needs to accomplish and what success looks like.

Then people. Who owns this system? Who operates within it? What do they need to know? Involve the people closest to the work because they understand the real process, not the one on the whiteboard from three years ago.

Then process. Document what actually happens today, not what’s supposed to happen. Map the workflow. Find the gaps, the handoffs that break, the steps that get skipped. Improve from there.

Technology comes last. And sometimes it doesn’t come at all. Some of the most impactful improvements I’ve helped implement didn’t require a single piece of software. They required a conversation, a documented process, and a leader willing to let go of the fire hose.

The improvement cycle that makes this sustainable is Plan, Execute, Review, Revise, Repeat. Every improvement goes through this loop. You plan it, you execute it, you review what happened, you revise what didn’t work, and you repeat. It’s not a one-time exercise. It’s the operating system for continuous improvement.

Final Thoughts

Here’s the question I’d encourage every leader reading this to ask themselves: do I actually want this to change?

Not in the abstract. Not “yes, of course, firefighting is bad.” Do you want to come in tomorrow morning and not be the person with the fire hose? Because on the other side of that change is a version of leadership that looks very different. It’s quieter. It’s less dramatic. It might feel, at first, like you’re not doing enough.

The leader I mentioned at the top of this article went from bracing for impact every morning to wondering if he was needed. That transition was fast, about three months, because the underlying culture was actually strong. There was one specific root cause creating disproportionate chaos, and once we addressed it, the system stabilized. Not every situation resolves that quickly. But the point is that it does resolve.

It took you a while to get here. It will take some time to walk out of it. Start with one process. Start with one conversation. Start with the honest admission that the system producing all these emergencies is one you designed, even if you didn’t mean to.

Because if you built it, you can rebuild it. Completely differently.

That’s it for today.

See you all again next week!

Dave