How to Stop Fire-Fighting and Reclaim your Power!

On the fifth day – five golden…tips to empower you and your career right through the next year. Don’t skip over it!

Procurement, do you ever feel that you’re constantly in fight or flight mode just running from one fire to another? Follow our tips to claim your time back.

Have you ever found yourself stuck in fight-or-flight mode at work? Have you experienced the  uncomfortable feeling of being constantly slammed, drowning in work and flying by the seat of your pants? Everything is coming at you from multiple directions. You feel like a hamster running endlessly on its wheel. This type of work pattern is called fire-fighting and it is exhausting. In a demand-driven business, it can be hard to stem the flow and keep your head above water. 

Want to get off the hamster wheel? Follow our tips below to claw some valuable time back and get yourself on track.

Reaction mode 

Fire fighting can be detrimental to a business over time. It creates a ‘pressure cooker’ environment where people are more likely to:

• Take shortcuts
• Not think through all options
• Do the bare minimum
• Take the easy road to avoid tackling obstacles or challenging people
• Not commit any time to improvements, creative solutions, or longer-term strategic projects
• Make mistakes
• Exhibit negative interpersonal behaviours 

In short, fire fighting leaves you and your organisation in reaction mode, because it only allows you to focus on the now.

Creating space

Staying in the now without an eye to the future means procurement teams could be missing a trick. Let’s not forget, with an ability to see across the organisation, procurement teams can ensure they are part of the long-term future vision of their client organisations. Procurement can create meaningful strategies that not only impact standard operations, but also drive top-line growth – big picture stuff.

Taking the time to be creative and think strategically is critical for any procurement pro – no matter what stage they are at in their career. Continual improvement programmes or small-scale tweaks to our practice lead to long-term success.

Procurement teams need to ensure that they stay relevant, continuing to add value to the organisation. In order to do this, there needs to be dedicated time where future ideas can be discussed and given space to bloom. 

Follow these five tips to create space in your work.

1. Triage

• Create a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for your team. What is a reasonable timeframe for your team to respond to a request? Two working days?
• Explore ways to centralise the flow of communication into your team – for example, a shared team mailbox.

*Create an ‘out-of-office’ on your team mailbox with an automated response, letting people know when you’ll be in touch. Don’t forget to add who they can contact in emergencies!

• If there is no team support role, take turns managing the mailbox and have fifteen-minute daily meetings to delegate and prioritise tasks.

2. Prioritise

• Ensure all team tasks are visible on a centralised spreadsheet / software, along with important classifying information such as: value, project size, dates and level of risk. Include things that you know are coming up.
• Have management review the team’s workloads and see what can realistically be achieved by whom and when. If there is no management or active leadership, you can still do this yourself by figuring out what needs your time, what can wait and what should be reassigned or delegated.

3. Re-negotiate and manage expectations

• Armed with data and information, you can have effective conversations with individual customers / clients and negotiate when project delivery dates. If your own management team is telling you that everything must be completed at the same time, a powerful technique is to politely display all of the project work and ask them to instruct you which projects to postpone in order to complete their prioritised tasks.
• When dealing with customers or clients, have a ‘one-liner’ prepared that helps you to create the space at the beginning of the engagement instead of falling into the trap of constantly agreeing to everything. Simple one-liners are often forgotten in times of stress! “Sure, I will need to check my commitments and existing deadlines – then I’ll come back to you with my availability and time frame options.”

4. Keep it simple

• If you are a high performer and perfectionist, it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-analysing or making adjustments to your work. Make sure you keep yourself honest by separating what you’d like to do versus what you need to do to meet the definition of done. 
• If you have additional ideas, keep an ‘improvements list’, a place to return to and scope out these ideas further when you have more time.

5. Fill up the space

• Once you’ve successfully managed to create more headspace in your work make sure you fill it up with something before Parkinson’s Law sets in! Translation – don’t let the time you’ve created be taken up with simply taking longer to do the transactional tasks you fought so hard to bat down.
• Have at least one improvement idea or strategic piece of work ready to get your teeth into, and ensure that you have inspiration around you to keep you on track.

Creating a downward force

Shifting focus to more strategic and value-orientated work can be a big change. If your mid- and long-term goals have already been defined and your future vision is starting to take shape (however rough or vague!), then you are more likely to succeed. You are driving a definitive, downward force in your work. 

‘Downward’ here doesn’t mean negative – it’s ensuring that workload levels don’t get above your head! Ensuring the force is positive, future-focused and true to you – this is the key to claiming your power back.

These are our top tips for optimising your time – what are yours? Tell us your suggestions in the comments below!

Want more on productivity hacks? Read this!