Welcome back to weekend coffee chats, the Young Professional series, where we discuss topics and skills relevant to the day-to-day life of a young employee in a multinational.
I’ve been recently thinking about a scene I’ve watched in the series “call my agent” where one of the agents (Gabriel) lashes out at his new boss who gave him an earful for having another problem saying something along the lines of ” you keep panicking whenever there’s a new problem, but our jobs are to solve the problems, without them our jobs don’t exist. If you don’t want problems then why did you join our line of work?”
I think about that line whenever an issue comes up at work, something unexpected falls apart and I’m left wondering how the hell does this keep happening ?
This happened a few times and it can be demoralizing if it happened to you as well, so the scene helped me reframe what’s actually expected.
See it seems regardless of your role or location on the organizational chart, you can count on having some fire fighting tasks come your way. The difference is whether it’s so rarely happening that you don’t mind it, or it’s so often you forgot what a calm day is like.
So how do you know if the firefighting is actually a larger part of your role than expected ? For either to decide on a new role, or to help with your current role to assess whether there’s an issue with the process you’re using or it’s beyond that. Some flags may include:
- Issues keep coming up, and you’re expected to resolve them at the soonest
- new issues keep coming up even when old ones are completely resolved
- issues happening even though you’re following the proper process or method
If some of the above sounds familiar, then welcome to the supporting functions club. Regardless how much you develop your processes, you’ll need to accept and anticipate some of the following: That a system may crash, an item may be sent wrongly, a customer may not receive your important email, a client has a massive issue, a proposal is rejected and has to be redone in half a day, and many more depending on your organization and industry.
So what do you do in the case you have a bit more fire fighting in your role than you’ve expected it to? Well I’ve tried some things that occasionally work such as:
- accepting that it’s part of the role that likely won’t go away and its not an indicator of whether we’re doing a good job or not
- planning time for it in our calendar (I usually leave 2 hours in the morning empty for this)
- not blocking every min in our calendar in case we need to move things around because of that issue
- if certain issues keep on being repeated, creating a tracker to document them and then using it to track the root cause and working on addressing that
- checking if we can work on improvement projects with other teams or colleagues, to address the root cause of the repeating issues
I try to also zoom out and remember the value I’m bringing to others in helping sort these issues out , rather than focusing on the issue itself. In the end, as Gabriel says, we are there to resolve issues (indirectly or directly).
If you are deciding on a new role though, this could help you choose to take it on or not, make sure you ask about it in your interviews as these things aren’t usually mentioned till you actually start.
Would like to know in the comments if you deal with firefighting in your role or not, and how you address it? Could be helpful for someone else reading through.
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Disclaimer: None of this information is to be used as advice, it’s just for entertainment purposes. Additionally all information used is publicly available.
Weekend Coffee Chats 