If you’re ever in an environment as a leader where things are crazy-chaotic, and it feels like all you do is play whack-a-mole, constantly putting out fires (issues) reactively and you’re not advancing any of your priorities, you need to do something that will feel counter-intuitive. You need to stop focusing on all the crises (just for a few moments), and start to build a plan to build a stable foundation for your team to work on.
Think about things like how to establish some fundamental key processes/procedures/checklists, how to create some quality checks so you’re not constantly auditing and cleaning up bad data, and how you can really move the needle on:
- People (e.g. Do you need training? Do you need to change the roles certain people have on the team?)
- Process (e.g. Do you have an approach to where you publish knowledge and how you’re sharing with your team to start to become more consistent and efficient?)
- Think about writing down procedures/guidance for your most common procedures, and incrementally improving the consistency and quality of those, while you work on covering more and more of your team’s work with some type of framework
- Or maybe the work is difficult to codify, and instead you should look at something like Agile Scrum to provide a framework to discuss/analyze/validate the ambiguity of the work and incrementally advance and validate the work
- Tools (e.g. Do you need to invest in collaboration, workflow, or other tools?)
Leadership: get out of whack-a-mole / crisis management and build a foundation of stability (people, process, tools)
mikehking 