Stop Firefighting: The Leadership Shift That Creates Real Capacity

In today’s modern fast-paced world—especially in the aerospace industry—“busy” is easy.

A shipment is late. A system is down. A requisition is stuck. A training requirement is overdue. A customer wants an answer now.

Have you ever spent an entire week doing heroic things and still felt like you didn’t move the needle forward?

That’s usually a sign you’re fighting symptoms—not constraints.

Firefighting Isn’t Leadership. It’s a Signal.

I recently had a conversation with another leader that went something like this:

“Hey, good morning — how are you today?”
“I’m good, just putting out more fires!”
“Yes, me too. I think we should wear a firefighter badge!”
“Speaking of firefighting, I have another one I need your help with…”

We had a nice chuckle. But here’s what I’ve learned:

When your team is constantly escalating, chasing, and “clearing blockers,” it’s not because people don’t know what they’re doing or that they don’t care. It’s because the system is producing predictable friction.

And if you lead long enough, you’ll see the pattern:

• The same categories of issues keep showing up
• The “urgent” list refreshes daily
• Fixes are temporary
• The team starts to believe chaos is normal

Chaos can feel like proof you’re needed. But dependence is not the goal. Your job is to reduce dependence by removing constraints.

Stop Asking “What’s On Fire?” Start Asking “What’s The Constraint?”

A constraint is not the loudest problem in the room. A constraint is the single point that limits throughput—the thing that turns normal work into delays, rework, and escalations.

In support operations, constraints typically fall into three buckets:

• Process constraints: Handoffs are unclear. Approvals are redundant. Work bounces between teams. No one owns the whole path.
• People constraints: The work requires a capability that’s thin—one SME, one experienced lead, one person who “knows how to do it.”
• Policy constraints: Rules that might be valid but are applied inconsistently, interpreted differently, or treated as “we can’t” when it’s really “we haven’t defined the guardrails.”

Most leaders see a symptom and assign a fix so they can move on to the next thing. Strategic leaders identify the constraint and redesign the system.

The Common Trap: You Become the Constraint Remover-in-Chief

If you’re a high performer, you probably default to: “I’ll jump in and get it unstuck.”

That’s fine occasionally. But if it becomes your standard approach, you teach the organization something dangerous:

“If it’s important, route it to the leader.”

Now you’re not just solving constraints—you’re becoming one.

The transition to strategic leadership means shifting from being the escalation path to creating a system that makes escalations the exception.

What Good Looks Like

When constraint management is working, you can feel it:

• Escalations decrease month over month
• The team surfaces risks early, not right at the deadline
• “We didn’t know” becomes “We saw it coming”
• The same issue stops repeating every few weeks
• Cross-functional handoffs get cleaner
• Work moves because the path is clear, not because you pushed it
• Fixes are tracked to closure, not forgotten after the meeting

You don’t need a perfect environment. You need a visible constraint list, owners, and follow-through.

The 30-Minute Weekly Constraint Review

This is one of the most practical habits I’ve seen reduce chaos without adding bureaucracy.

Once a week. Thirty minutes. Same attendees every time.

The purpose is not to talk about every issue. It’s to manage the top constraints driving the most delay, rework, or risk.

Weekly Agenda:

• Top 3 constraints (not top 30)
• Each constraint gets: current status, owner, next action, due date
• Close with: What changed since last week? What are we doing next?

Practical Tool: Constraint Backlog + RYG Tracker

You don’t need fancy software. You need a simple table the team actually uses.

Constraint Backlog fields:

1. Constraint (one sentence)
2. Impact (what it affects and how)
3. Root cause (best current understanding)
4. Owner (specific person, not a group or organization)
5. Next action
6. Due date
7. Status (R/Y/G)
8. Notes / decision log (what we tried, what we learned)

Two rules that make this work:

• If it stays on the list for weeks with no movement, it’s either not owned or not real.
• If it disappears without closure, it will come back. It always comes back.

The Leadership Shift (And It’s Subtle)

Tactical leaders ask: “Who can fix this today?”

Strategic leaders ask: “Why does this keep happening, and what system change prevents it next time?”

You still care about today. You just stop sacrificing tomorrow to survive it.

Your One Move This Week

Don’t try to overhaul everything. Pick one recurring issue that has shown up at least three times recently and turn it into a constraint:

1. Write it in one sentence
2. Name the impact
3. Assign a single owner
4. Define the next action and due date
5. Review it weekly until it’s closed

That is what strategic leadership looks like in real life.

Reflection Questions

• What issue has repeated three times this quarter with different “reasons”?
• Where do we confuse symptoms (noise) with constraints (limits)?
• What constraint is our team quietly treating as “normal”?
• Where have I become the default escalation path?
• What’s one system change that would prevent the next escalation?