Fire Your Firefighters

If you have people in your company that respond to the same emergencies and problems again and again and again, but do nothing to actually improve the system or process that is causing those emergencies, you have what we call firefighters. And people even call themselves firefighters. I fight fires all day long. It's one of the most dangerous things I hear when I start working with an organization or when I'm helping an organization in their interview process.

We hear a candidate say, It's one of the most dangerous things I hear because inevitably, What that usually means is that people are not systematically seeing the patterns in the work that they do. They're not economizing the output that they need to, so work becomes simpler over time. And that's what we want. We want A players who can do that consistently.

We need to pay for those A players, and we're going to pay a premium for those, but we're going to get the correct output and the correct behavior in the organization. A players both, great behavior, great output. We want people that can do both. And otherwise, if you're a firefighter all day long, if you are just simply letting things happen to you, that's a B player.

By default, it is a B. If you want to be an A, you've got to be able to start seeing patterns in the work you're doing and saying, how do I get rid of this? How do I eliminate this? How do I get rid of this portion?

Eliminate something as a waste of time, energy, and effort. How do we make sure something doesn't happen again? Those are the true A players that we want in our organizations. Be very leery of the firefighters.

If you've got a couple of firefighters, odds are you can get one great person. You take both those salaries and get one great person. That would be three and four steps ahead in their role and that's what we expect out of our A players. They get ahead in what they do.