Why You Should Think Twice Before Rewarding Problem Solving

How many times have you had a meeting pushed or deadline missed in your organization under the pretense of “we had to put out a fire?” For the average company in corporate America, it seems like there are an awful lot of “fires” to put out on a weekly basis. These “fires” might be client escalations, product defect, resource issue, or another type of urgent matter. What they all have in common is that they interrupt operations and must be resolved.

However, should individuals be rewarded for fighting these fires? Most companies would say, “of course.” We’d caution against making this a common practice. 

Organizations that incentivize individuals to put out fires can overlook the implications this may have on the business. Some of these pitfalls include:

1. Solving problems becomes reactive   If your organization prioritizes addressing the “on fire” items (implying the issues that have gotten to the point that they need immediate escalation), this often causes problem solving to become reactive rather than proactive. Sure, organizations can have escalated issues that they were otherwise unable to predict. Those should undoubtedly escalate and be resolved in that moment. However, when there is the corporate culture of generally not addressing problems until there is a fire, this causes people within the organization to adapt to this cultural norm.   What does this look like? It means that they might see a problem repeat itself or could otherwise anticipate an upcoming problem, but then they wait to escalate until they know it will get the time of day from the correct parties. This means that they become reactive problem solvers. This is especially evident in hierarchical organizations where there are more layers for “approval” to solve business problems.   Let’s provide an example in context. Jane works in customer service for a software company that provides health care providers with a platform to take HIPPA compliant notes during patients’ visits. Jane has heard from several customers that the interface is running slowly or even crashing when trying to load. Per the company’s procedures, she puts in a ticket to the internal engineering team to report a potential bug. The company has a lot of priorities and engineers see this issue, but are focused on new developments and other bugs. As Jane hears more of these complaints over coming weeks, she escalates this again. This makes it onto the backlog of work for the team, but still isn’t prioritized. Now the company’s largest company is calling their Account Manager saying that they are considering other options and want to terminate their contract. Suddenly, after the sales team escalates to their leadership, all key parties are brought in to solve this issue and retain this key customer.   In this real world example, something that started as a small issue became a corporate “fire” and was only given the attention when it was truly urgent. Folks like Jane are then incentivized to only escalate issues that are “urgent” since the issues don’t get the priority needed until then. Suddenly, the organization starts to become one that feels like there is constantly a fire and rarely a proactive solution.  
   

2. Firefighters become fire starters 
   

When promotions, bonuses, and recognition are doled out to those who fight fires, some individuals (whether consciously or unconsciously) start to ignore small issues to wait until they are bigger problems to solve. They know this will give them the recognition of being problem solvers.  

These organizations' leaders often only see the fire being put out, but don’t see:  

• The proactive work of teammates to prevent fires in the first place 

• The corporate firefighters’ contributions to creating the fire in the first place (whether through inaction or action) 

These incentives create a false heroism and continue to fuel problematic behavior that can lead to issues’ severity intensifying unnecessarily. 

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What should you do? 

Revisit your internal processes to align incentives with behaviors you want to reward. Incentivize flagging issues early on and collaborative and proactive solutions.  

To do this, work with a business process expert in or outside of your organization to find a way to conduct issue root cause analysis. From there, you should be able to track what types of issues recur in your organization, their impact, and where to devote resources.  

Is all reactive problem solving bad?  

No. Some corporate fire fighters truly do save the day and uncover something that went undetected or that they were unaware of that adds tremendous value to the organization. Our caution is that organizations need to pay attention to the trends, understand their organizational incentives, and find ways to also have visibility into and rewards for proactive problem solving.  Too often proactive problem solving that helps organizations operate efficiently is invisible work to leaders.