Managers, Give Your Employees Time to Reflect and Learn
Putting out fires is an irresponsible way to manage a team
At my last place of full-time employment, I worked more hours per week than I care to share here. It was survival mode, 24/7. Before one project or crisis was tied up and reflected upon, I was ushered to jump into another one. There was always a fire to put out, an emergency to attend, or damage control to attempt.
As Albert Einstein said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This management approach was indeed insane. While it kept most of us so busy we had no time to polish our resumes and look for another job, it also resulted in a hamster wheel of crisis after crisis and all of us left chasing our tails and looking like unorganized nincompoops to those we were supposed to be mentoring and supervising.
With no time to reflect on processes, figure out what went wrong or what worked well, we were left with the knee-jerk response to managing the team’s goals. When in survival mode, basic instincts take over: bark orders, put your finger in the first hole in the dike you see instead of shoring up the dam’s infrastructure, fight for your ideas because they are easier to implement that taking the time to listen to someone else’s, and basically…
