Daily Speculations
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Daily Speculations |
Steve Ellison suggests this article:
Performance Under Fire
By: Murgallis, Robert P., Harvard Business Review, 00178012, Jul/Aug2005, Vol. 83, Issue 7/8
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN a team like the New England Patriots and a team of high-performing firefighters is the time pressure. In football, you can call a time-out. There's no time-out during a fire. You can't tell the fire to wait a minute while you consult somebody or look up the solution in a book. This is one business where you have to make very quick decisions on the basis of very little information.
Intuition is critical to high-performing firefighting teams -- it can mean the difference between life and death. But our kind of intuition is learned. Through training, reading, responding to emergencies, and talking with veterans, we learn the cues and signals that indicate that certain things might occur. We have a vast mental data bank that is based on experience and training. If a fire is a certain color, we know the chances are pretty good that a particular product is burning. In a wildland fire, for example, you know that certain trees burn at a faster rate. And you know that a fire burns uphill more quickly than it does downhill. But your training has to be such that you recognize those cues immediately. You can't start pondering and planning and getting an official weather report before making decisions and taking action.
The fact that there is seldom chaos when firefighters go into a burning area can be summed up in one word: confidence -- confidence in their skills and in one another. Confidence is contagious. If leaders are self-assured, capable, and knowledgeable, their people will respond with high performance. Being a leader in name only and driving and intimidating your teams will reduce the effectiveness of any unit. People need to be guided and motivated. Even self-motivated individuals will lose their drive if you don't provide them with positive reinforcement. The trick for you as the leader is to make your team members believe that you believe they have worth.
Like most high-performing teams, firefighters need a mission. It's the mission that sets the priorities. If your mission is to stop the fire from getting to a certain place, all your actions and decisions will be targeted toward that outcome. Often the mission will force you to make very difficult decisions. You may have to anticipate letting houses burn that haven't even caught fire yet, because they're not defensible based on the type of roof they have or the fact that they're surrounded by highly flammable brush. You can't waste your resources if you're going to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number. But it's hard trying to explain to home owners why you decided not to protect their homes.
People who can't cope with that kind of pressure shouldn't be leading high-performing teams, and in my line of work, leaders who don't perform don't last long. On September 12, the day after the attack on the World Trade Center, the New York City Fire Department contacted the National Fire Academy to ask us if we could help them restore their command structure because they had lost so many of their top people. As part of that effort, I saw one of the team leaders struggling. He was a nice person, but he really didn't have a good understanding of what needed to be done. His training and expertise in other areas did not equip him for the situation. As his inability to cope became more apparent, an unofficial leader emerged from among his crew who shepherded the project along. I've seen this happen many times on high-performance teams: If a leader is not up to the job, the top performers will step up to produce a leader who can carry the ball.