ISSUE #104

Why being excellent in a crisis keeps you exactly where you are.

You are very good in a crisis.

When the deployment fails at 2 AM, you are the one who knows which service to check first. When the customer escalates, you are the one who can walk into the call and make it stop. When something breaks that nobody has seen before, the room turns to you.

That competence is real. You built it over years, and it is the reason you hold the title you hold.

It is also the reason you have held it for a while now.

Here is the pattern I watch play out across technology leaders in their forties, most of them with a decade of strong reviews behind them.

Early in a career, responsiveness is the whole game. Being the person who handles it is how you get noticed, how you get trusted, how you get promoted. The organization learns your name because your name is attached to problems that went away.

Then the level changes, and the mechanism quietly inverts.

At Director and above, the organization has built its operating model around your availability. Every fire you personally extinguish becomes evidence that fires get extinguished. Nobody escalates a problem that is already being handled. So the prevention work never gets funded, never gets staffed, never gets scheduled. Your reliability is the reason the underlying problem stays invisible.

There is a second cost, and it is the one leaders underestimate.

Your brain adapts to whatever you ask it to do most often. Ask it to switch context forty times a day and it becomes genuinely excellent at switching context. It does not become better at holding a six month view, because you have not asked it to. Attention behaves less like a resource you spend and more like a set of grooves you deepen through repetition, and reactive work deepens exactly the wrong ones.

The capacity you need for the next level is the first thing reactive work consumes. Not your time. Your capacity.

By the time this becomes visible, it usually shows up as a role you did not get.

The window matters here. Executive roles open on organizational timelines you do not control, and the assessment of whether you are ready happens well before the opening exists. It happens in conversations you are not in, based on where people have watched you spend your attention for the last two years.

If that record shows a person who is superb at resolution, the conclusion is that you are superb at resolution. Nobody means it as criticism. It is a category, and categories are sticky. The people making the decision are not asking whether you could think strategically. They are asking whether they have seen you do it.

Quietly, this becomes a self reinforcing loop. The more fires you handle, the more the organization routes fires to you. The more fires route to you, the less evidence accumulates that you do anything else. Working harder inside the loop tightens it.

None of this is solved by better time management. You cannot schedule your way out of a system that is optimized to interrupt you.

What actually separates the leaders who make the shift is a change in what they measure.

Firefighters measure resolution. Time to detect, time to mitigate, number of incidents closed, how fast the customer stopped being angry. Every one of those metrics rewards the fire existing in the first place.

Navigators measure absence. How many recurring problems stopped recurring. How many escalations resolved without them. How many decisions got made correctly by someone else because the context was already there.

Three questions worth sitting with, none of which have comfortable answers:

What percentage of last week went to fighting fires versus preventing them? Check the calendar, not your memory of it. Memory is generous about this.

When did a recurring problem in your area last disappear permanently? Not get faster. Disappear.

If you were unavailable for two weeks, what would break? The length of that list is your actual job description, regardless of what your title says.

Most leaders read those three questions, recognize themselves in all three, and change nothing.

Here is what stops capable leaders at exactly this point.

Prevention has a visibility problem. When you resolve a major incident, everyone sees it. There is a bridge call, a status update, a thank you from someone senior. When you prevent an incident, nothing happens. There is no artifact. Nobody sends a note about the outage that did not occur.

So the shift asks you to trade visible, immediate, socially rewarded work for invisible, delayed, unrewarded work. And to do it during a period when your reputation is built entirely on the first kind.

That is a real cost, not an imagined one. For roughly a quarter, you will look less responsive than you used to. Someone will notice. Somebody who used to get an answer from you in nine minutes will now wait for the person who actually owns it. That friction is the mechanism working, but it does not feel like progress while it is happening.

The people around you will also resist, and they will resist for reasonable motives. Your team escalates to you because you are faster and because being wrong is expensive for them. Your peers route around process because you have always been the shortcut. When you stop being the shortcut, their week gets harder before yours gets easier. Almost nobody has an incentive to want this except you.

There is a harder version of this, and it is worth naming honestly.

For a lot of technology leaders, being the one who handles it runs deeper than a work pattern. It is load bearing for how they understand their own value. Being needed feels like being valuable. Handing the fire to someone else can feel like handing away the reason they are in the room.

I know that one from the inside. It took a performance review and five words from my business unit leader to make me look at it directly, and I did not enjoy the conversation. I had spent years believing that being in every critical decision was what strong leadership looked like. What it actually produced was a team that had never been given room to become the answer, and a version of me who could not be promoted without breaking the thing I had built.

The leaders who make the shift are rarely the ones with the most discipline. They are the ones who found a way to make the invisible work visible before the ninety days ran out.

That usually means naming it in advance. Telling your leadership, explicitly, that you are moving from resolution to prevention, what you expect to get worse first, and what number you expect to move by when. It converts a period that looks like disengagement into a period that looks like a plan. The same quarter, described two different ways, produces two entirely different assessments of you.

It also means picking the right first fire. Not the biggest one and not the loudest one. The one that recurs most predictably, because predictability is what makes prevention provable. You want a problem whose disappearance somebody else will notice without you having to point at it.

Start with one. Leaders who try to exit firefighting across their whole portfolio at once tend to last about three weeks, because the first genuine crisis pulls them straight back in and the retreat feels like proof the experiment failed. One fire, fully prevented, with a number attached to it, does more for how you are seen than a broad intention that quietly collapses.

If you are reading this and recognizing the loop, that recognition is the useful part. The next move is deciding whether you want to run it alone.

If you want to map what the shift looks like specifically in your organization, including which fires to stop catching first and how to frame it upward so it reads as strategy rather than absence, book a call and we will work through it: https://meeting.techleadership.net/

You will not get promoted for being the best firefighter in the building. You will get kept there.

That is the part nobody says out loud. Excellence at the current level rarely functions as a stepping stone to the next one. More often it is the most comfortable reason anyone has to leave you exactly where you are.