From Firefighting to Continuous Improvement: Build Your Leadership Oxygen Flow

Put On Your Leadership Oxygen Mask First

Imagine you’re on an airplane. The flight attendant instructs: “Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.” At first, it’s aviation safety guidance. But it’s also one of the clearest metaphors for leadership I’ve encountered. You cannot support your team, improve your system, or sustain performance if you cannot breathe.

Yet, so often, leaders operate as if they are invincible. They burn through hours, make heroic interventions, and push through exhaustion. The result? Short-term wins, long-term fatigue, and a culture where firefighting becomes the norm.

The principle of the oxygen mask is simple: to be effective, leaders must create space for themselves to act intentionally rather than reactively.

The Shift: From Reactive to Proactive

Early in a leader’s career, it’s easy to get pulled into daily fires. Variability, equipment issues, staffing challenges, and urgent deadlines dominate attention. Every day feels like a sprint, and the focus is survival.

Over time, leaders must transition from this reactive mode to a proactive one—planning, anticipating, coaching, and improving. But this transition doesn’t happen automatically. It requires discipline, clarity, and a deliberate structure for how to spend time.

It’s not about a “better calendar.” It’s about understanding what activities truly create impact, building routines that prevent burnout, and making space for improvement. Leaders who ignore this step end up constantly exhausted, their effectiveness eroded, and their teams unconsciously mirror that stress.

A Story of Burnout and Recovery

Years ago, I worked with a manufacturing plant where one frontline supervisor stood out—for all the wrong reasons. He worked 10- to 12-hour days, seven days a week. His commitment was unquestionable; he was determined to support his team and ensure production goals were met.

But dedication came at a cost. He was constantly reacting to problems, stuck in a cycle of firefighting. His energy was consumed by interruptions, small issues, and the invisible weight of constant oversight. Burnout was inevitable.

We approached this with structured coaching. Our goal was simple: help this leader create a sustainable leadership routine. The process was practical, grounded in observable behavior, and ultimately transformative.

Step 1: Capture the Current State

The first step was awareness. We asked him to track his activities over several days:

What was he doing?
When did he do it?
How long did it take?
Why was he doing it?

This exercise acted as a mirror. It revealed not only where his time went but also how his energy was being consumed. Every fire he was putting out, every ad-hoc decision, every task he could have delegated became visible. For many leaders, seeing this in black and white is a revelation.

Step 2: Ask the Right Questions

Once the data was collected, we analyzed it systematically. The goal was not judgment—it was clarity. We asked:

What can be eliminated entirely?
What can be simplified?
What can be delegated?
What can be moved to a better time?
What can be combined with other tasks?

Even small adjustments yielded significant impact. One breakthrough involved timecard reconciliation. Previously, he completed this task at the end of the day, after employees had gone home, creating delays and repeated follow-ups. We moved the activity earlier, while staff were still present. This simple adjustment saved time, reduced errors, and freed mental bandwidth.

Step 3: Reinforce with Standard Work

The final step was documentation. We captured his new routine in a simple Leader Standard Work document. This wasn’t a rigid schedule—it was a tool to support intention and consistency. Weeks later, when I visited the floor, he smiled and pulled the folded sheet from his pocket. “Fantastic,” he said. That paper had become his leadership oxygen mask—a tangible reminder of how to structure his time to breathe and lead effectively.

Understanding Why Leaders End Up Firefighting

Burnout among leaders is not unusual. Across industries, five recurring causes emerge:

Unstable Processes: Variability, missing materials, unclear instructions, and equipment issues drain time and energy.
Poor Visual Controls: Without visual cues, problems remain hidden until they escalate.
Lack of Team-Based Problem Solving: When teams cannot resolve issues independently, everything escalates to the leader.
Unclear Expectations: Ambiguity in roles and responsibilities forces leaders to fill gaps constantly.
No Escalation System: Without a tiered response, every problem feels like an emergency.

Firefighting becomes a system failure, not a personal shortcoming. Leaders cannot sustain effectiveness without a framework that prevents crises from dominating daily life.

Build a Leadership Flywheel

The alternative to burnout is not better multitasking—it’s building a leadership system, a flywheel that creates momentum. Here’s how it works:

Fix a recurring issue.
Free up time.
Use that time to coach the team.
Empower problem-solving at the team level.
Create more space for leadership attention.
Repeat.

Each cycle compounds, producing more capacity and less reactivity. Leaders stop chasing emergencies and start preventing them. The flywheel effect is both liberating and sustainable—it transforms the culture from reactive to proactive.

Start with Small Wins

You don’t need a six-month initiative to make progress. Start with one recurring frustration. Ask:

Why does this keep happening?
Who needs to be involved to fix it?
What standard or visual cue could prevent it?

Implement small changes. Share wins. Celebrate progress. Reinforce learning. These micro-improvements matter. They set the tone for long-term culture change and demonstrate that leadership is about enabling work, not merely responding to it.

Normalize the Norm

Fire-free leadership isn’t about perfection—it’s about making the right behaviors routine:

Starting and ending the day intentionally.
Leading standard processes with confidence.
Coaching and supporting learning consistently.
Creating space to anticipate problems and improve the system.

These behaviors reduce burnout, increase engagement, and create an environment where people feel supported and successful. Leadership becomes less about heroics and more about designing systems that sustain performance.

Five Practical Tools to Support the Shift

For leaders moving from constant firefighting to proactive leadership, these tools are essential:

Daily Time Tracker: Document activities, start and end times, and purpose. Reflect on patterns to identify where energy is consumed unnecessarily.
Eliminate-Simplify-Delegate Framework: Regularly review tasks and ask:
- Can this be eliminated?
- Can this be simplified?
- Can this be delegated?
- Can this be combined with another task?
Leader Standard Work: Include check-ins, visual reviews, problem-solving, coaching, and dedicated improvement time. Document routines to reinforce consistency.
Escalation Pathway: Clarify when and how issues should be escalated. Build tiered systems that allow leaders to triage rather than react to every problem.
Daily Coaching Habit: Ask one question per day:
- What’s the biggest issue right now?
- What support do you need?
- What can we improve today?

These tools are simple, yet when applied consistently, they create momentum, build habits, and reinforce a culture of proactive leadership.

Final Thought: Leadership Is a System, Not a Heroic Act

Too often, organizations celebrate heroic leaders who “save the day.” But heroics are not sustainable. Systems—not heroes—create consistent performance.

If you find yourself trapped in firefighting mode, you are not failing. You are operating inside a system that needs redesign. You can change it. You can build structure. You can coach rather than chase. You can breathe.

For one supervisor, it started with a simple time tracker. For you, it may be a single question in your next huddle, a visual cue, or a minor adjustment in workflow. Each improvement opens the door to the next.

Put on your leadership oxygen mask. Once you have it, you can help others do the same—and build teams, systems, and organizations that thrive sustainably.