Two Dangers of Reactive Management
Responding is necessary in a turbulent world. Reacting is not. A person who never responds becomes irrelevant. A person who constantly reacts creates the illusion of importance.
Magnetism of chaos:
Jason Woodward (@jasnshell93) tweeted to me, “… a leader must set aside time and dedicate some level of resources toward proactivity or else the chaos will never end. … everything is set against you – resources tend to be drawn towards the fire.”
Responding is necessary. But you’re the Dutch Boy plugging holes in the dam if you live in reaction mode.
Two dangers of reactive management:
#1. The more you react, the more you stay the same.
Reacting to problems solves symptoms. Leaders who solve symptoms solve the same problems over and over. Proactive managers dig up root issues. Reactive managers pick fruits.
Reacting to email generates more email. Many of the emails you answer invite another email in your inbox. (I’m not suggesting you ignore email.)
Reacting to drama creates drama.
Reacting to problems solves symptoms. You need to solve them over and over.
Reactions are based on past assumptions.
#2. The more you react, the more you need to react.
Reacting makes you feel essential.
Weak people create chaos to feel powerful. You’re at the center if you create the whirlwind.
Anyone who continues using the same strategies to solve recurring issues is reactive, not responsive.
How would you feel if you weren’t consumed with a thousand fires? Insignificant?
Some leaders need problems to feel important.
Leaders who solve the symptoms of problems enhance their job security.
Reflection:
How much of your schedule reflects reactive management? Proactive?
The delusion of chaos is you’re building the future when you’re solidifying the past. The future you desire is built by seizing opportunities, not by reacting to urgencies.
What proactive action might you take today?
This is a challenging one.
Especially when curing “symptoms” is looked at high value work, and becomes part of the direction you are to follow. Like the concept explored in “Upstream”, to poorly paraphrase: We can save the people floating down the river, or we can move upstream and see if we can solve the reason why they are in the river.
The highly thanked jobs sometimes are the people pulling others out of the river.
When upstream the cause of the issue may be solved by a simple action. Not many like to celebrate the person who tied up a board to prevent hundreds of future people falling into the river, they like to celebrate the “life savers” who pulled one person out down steam. It’s more “6:00 news” exciting than the real life saver.
Giving up the reactive for the proactive, may mean something or someone will get left behind or hurt as you move from the fire in front of you to find out the cause.
Symptoms are more visible and receive a lot of kudos when you can “save the day”
Doing something that prevents fires from starting is invisible and barely gets noticed.
If your goal is to move ahead in a (big) company, you have a higher risk of being drawn to doing the very visible “look at me saving the day” activities, as “visibility” helps open doors.
If your goal is the real health of the business you are going to act in ways that solve issues that you may never know the scope of how big or bad it could have been. The risk is very few people could notice your day to day pro-activities.
Great thought provoking blog this morning!
I continue to try up-coaching, although it feels like I’m constantly fighting the current of the populous. As you’ve pointed out before. We only have so much energy to spend.
Indeed. I’ve seen this in software world a lot. It is easier to see smaller companies who understand this well and do value the proactive vs. “hero culture”. There are some on the opposite side of the spectrum with the opinion “hero culture is toxic” (because it can be avoided by being proactive most of the time).
Yes, we are humans and make mistakes so there will be cases when hero effort is needed to bring things back to normal. That should be a small percentage though, not 90% as I’ve seen in some software groups. And they key is: are we learning from the incidents requiring a hero response – this way at least we’re guarding against the same thing happening in the future. There is a new term for that too – `safeguarding`.
Dan: as every day – your post nudged my marbles and lit me up :). Thank you!
Sometimes you need to react and deal with the symptom or people will get hurt or die. When you have time, you can probe and dig to identify and solve the root cause problem.
There has never been anything like as much kudos in stopping problems happening than in fixing problems. Also, the more noise you make as you fix a problem, the more kudos you get.
Try delegating the problem fixing while you head up stream. Someone else gets the kudos (and fixes the symptoms). But you also get kudos for developing people/giving them opportunities and have the time to address the cause.
“Reacting to email generates more email” – thats so true and many times avoidable