Fire Fighting Organizational Culture
There is an innate propensity within an organization to constantly tackle fires big and small. These are the constant interruptions that cause the organizational wheel to slow down, stop turning, and lose the sense of direction and purpose.
What if the organization culture is a prime perpetrator that stokes the fire on a daily basis? A culture that recognizes and rewards individuals with the ability to quickly put down a fire lest it would burn down the building.
What is the impact of the fires on professional lives and organizational productivity and agility? The doers i.e. people on the ground who are tasked with the responsibility to get the work done are stopped in their tracks once their time is dedicated to emergency services to put down a blaze which happens to be the most pressing situation that the whole organization unit is most worried at the moment.
The person who is further up the management chain as an enabler divert the critical resources and attention of the organization to an urgent business at hand to control the fire that has been lit by someone still higher up the chain of command. All hell breaks loose due to a faulty process or bad management decision. The situation is further acerbated by the warning messages that the fire should be put down in a timely fashion otherwise the organizational unit can’t get through the order of business for the day. The crisis meetings that follow take away productive time for everyone involved right from top to bottom resulting in employees hardly working rather than smartly working.
Such deeply ingrained is this management style in certain organizations that people at all levels are brainwashed to believe that this is perfectly normal especially people who have been groomed in this culture for a long time, as a result, such culture becomes a guiding philosophy and doctrine for the entire organization by and large.
The people who are newly introduced into the system are quick to notice the flaws in the system because they feel lost and not able to contribute productively having not been baptized on the flawed philosophy. The new entrants either vociferously or diplomatically raise their concern or mutely accept the new reality and become a part of the larger system lest be branded by the others as resistance.
This does not mean that all fires are bad. There are certain fires that make an organization agile with a keen ability to respond to changing business situations effectively and efficiently. The firefighting ability gives birth to and fosters an intrinsically evolved organizational personality that leads to innovations and inventions and becomes a guiding spirit for the organization to operate in dynamically changing situations and to survive and grow. However such situations are at best characterized as external conditions over which the organization has little control and the organization is expected to tackle or be eliminated altogether.
It is the internal fires that are man-made and started within an organization that if managed properly can make an organization super agile, resilient, and strong leading in improvement in management processes but badly managed would lead to weakening the foundation of the organizational unit and resulting in demoralized staff and employees churn.
One of the solutions could be to make a daily dossier of fires small or big that the team is called upon to extinguish at irregular intervals. Characterize the fire on a degree of priority and criticality, Come up with an action plan and designate individuals with the responsibility to put down the fire with the expected response time while the remaining resources focused on the order of business for the day. Document time that is taken by the team to put down the fire. Determine the business impact of such digression and come up with standard operating procedures to follow in similar situations for the future.
Spread the word and evangelize to rest of the team on the research study undertaken and the findings with a goal to enlist other's support and such effort gradually work towards modifying organizational culture for a greater good. Easier said than done. However, the important thing is for one to recognize the problem and work towards finding a solution rather be an unwilling actor or mute spectator in the drama.