The Firefighter — The Leaders in Our Neighborhood

You know this leader. They’re the first one in the building when something goes wrong. They’re the person who gets the call at nine o’clock on a Sunday night and says “I’ll handle it” before anyone finishes explaining what happened.

They’re fast. They’re capable. They’re at their absolute best when everything is on fire.

The problem is what happens when nothing is on fire.

I coached a VP — we’ll call him Damon — who was legendary in his company for crisis response. When a product launch went sideways, Damon was the one who pulled the team together, worked through the weekend, and got everything back on the rails by Monday morning. People respected him for it. His boss praised him for it. Damon’s entire reputation was built on his ability to run toward the fire.

Then something strange happened. The fires stopped.

The company stabilized. The team matured. The product pipeline was running smoothly. And Damon — the person everyone counted on when things went wrong — started to unravel.

Not obviously. He didn’t fall apart. He just… couldn’t sit still. He started finding problems that weren’t there. Escalating things that didn’t need escalating. Sending all-hands emails at 7 AM about issues that could’ve been a Slack message at 10. His team started walking on eggshells because they never knew which issue was going to become an emergency.

When I asked him what was going on, he said, “I just feel like I’m not adding value if I’m not solving something.”

There it was.

The Firefighter’s problem isn’t that they’re bad at handling crises. They’re usually exceptional at it. The problem is that the crisis has become the identity. When there’s a fire, they know exactly who they are. When there isn’t one, they feel invisible. Unnecessary. Like the value proposition that got them promoted has expired.

So they do the only logical thing: they go find another fire. Or they start one.

I told Damon something he didn’t love hearing: “You’re not a firefighter. You’re an arsonist who doesn’t know he’s holding the match.”

He laughed. Then he got quiet. Because he’d never considered that the urgency he was responding to was urgency he’d created.

What it’s like to live next door to The Firefighter.

If you work for one, you’re exhausted. Not because the work is hard — because you can never tell what’s actually important. When everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis. Your team loses the ability to triage because their leader has trained them that every issue is a five-alarm fire.

The other thing that happens — and this is the part The Firefighter never sees — is that the team stops bringing problems forward early. They learn to hide the small stuff because they know it’ll get escalated into something it’s not. The spark that could’ve been handled with a conversation becomes an actual fire because nobody wanted to mention it when it was still small.

The Firefighter creates the conditions for the very thing they’re addicted to solving.

If this sounds familiar — if you felt something tighten in your chest three paragraphs ago — here’s the thing.

The instinct that makes you run toward the fire is a good instinct. It served you well for a long time. You built your career on it. You earned trust because of it.

But at this altitude, the job isn’t to fight fires. The job is to prevent them. And preventing fires is quiet work. It’s boring. It’s the kind of work that nobody notices because when you do it well, nothing happens. That’s the shift The Firefighter struggles with most: the transition from being valued for what you do in the moment to being valued for the conditions you create.

I use a thermostat analogy with my clients. You can be the thermometer — reacting to whatever temperature the room is. Or you can be the thermostat — setting the temperature deliberately. The Firefighter is the world’s most responsive thermometer. What they need to become is a thermostat.

One thing to try this week: the next time something lands on your desk that feels urgent, wait two hours before responding. Not two days. Two hours. See if it resolves itself. See if someone else handles it. See if the urgency was real or manufactured. You might be surprised how many fires go out on their own when you stop running toward them.

The question on the porch:

When was the last time you had a calm week — and felt good about it? If calm feels like failure, that’s not a work problem. That’s a wiring problem. And it’s worth looking at.

The Leaders in Our Neighborhood is a series about the patterns we all recognize — in the people we work with, and sometimes in ourselves. If something here hit close to home, that’s not a problem. That’s a starting point.