When Urgency Isn’t an Emergency: How to Choose When to Step In

You’ve heard me talk about The Doer Trap and about how we all need to Break the Telling Habit and create the space for others to think. About how we unintentionally take over the ownership of the doing and the thinking that belongs to others by our instinct and desire to be helpful. And you might be asking the same question that I get all the time, “When is the right time to step in?”

The answer is far fewer than you think. Welcome to Chain of Learning, where the links of leadership and learning unite. This is your connection for actionable strategies and practices to empower you to build a people-centered learning culture, get results, and expand your impact so that you and your team can leave a lasting legacy.

I’m your host and fellow learning enthusiast, Katie Anderson. Stepping back is stepping up. This is a phrase I’ve been using more and more as I work on my next book, and that I’ve [00:01:00] used on some recent podcast episodes. What comes to mind for you when I say this, “Stepping back is stepping up”? When I say it to others, I’m invariably greeted with a look of concern.

In workshops, with clients, even with friends and family, they ask, “But what happens if I don’t step in?” And, “Aren’t there times that I should step in?” It’s a universal worry and fear. If I don’t step in, something bad is gonna happen. Something’s gonna fail. And yes, there are times you should step in, but those times to step in and take over the ownership of something, whether it’s a project, a problem, or the work that belongs to someone else, might not be as many as you think or at least as many as you react to.

In the previous episode, I pulled apart two words, help and support. Help is immediate and more transactional, something you do for someone. Support is when you keep the ownership of the doing or the thinking with the [00:02:00] other person, and you create the conditions for them to do it. Because while stepping back is stepping up, it’s not stepping away.

And we’ve all had those moments where there’s a big project or deadline. You’re working super hard, maybe with a team, a big push to get something done. There’s a lot of energy and focus and potentially some late nights. But you own the project or you and your team did together, and that’s the difference that I’m talking about here.

You aren’t overstepping ownership. Whether it’s an individual sprint or a collective one, the ownership was yours to begin with. The question I’m answering here in this episode is when you’re taking over ownership that wasn’t yours to do. So when do you step in? This is a question that one of my clients has been trying to answer, and many others too.

They have an incredible people-centered culture. They truly value their employees in doing whatever [00:03:00] it takes to deliver for their customers. This has been their claim to success so far. And what they want most is people stepping up to take responsibility for problem-solving, to get things done, and to make judgment calls to resolve issues as they emerge without them stepping in.

However, as the company has grown, and to be able to meet their commitment to never missing a deadline and doing whatever it takes to deliver for their customers, they’ve developed a culture of heroism. Everyone at every level is jumping in to save the day as a result, and it’s a constant state of Whac-A-Mole.

As one of their leaders shared with me, they’re always having to go back and reconquer ground they’ve already conquered day after day. They’re committed, caring leaders. They care about their people and their customers, and everyone from the front line to the senior team is working flat out to make it happen.

In reflecting on their current situation, one of their VPs [00:04:00] put it well. He said something like, “I’m tired, and I know you are too Can you relate? I know I’ve been there before, tired and getting burnout from carrying the responsibility to make sure everything happens. And our desire to step in to help often comes from a place of caring, which I explored in the last episode.

Another of their VPs reflected that he’s trying not to step in with his answer or to fix it whenever a new problem from the front line or another area of the business is raised to him, and instead redirect that person to a more appropriate person in the organization to give the support. But he feels like he’s not helping someone in the moment.

He’s letting them down. So he often just steps in and fixes it right then, and he acknowledged that he has to get past that as a leader, and their whole leadership team does, too. And because when leaders are jumping in to fix problems in the organization that are owned by others, then they don’t have the capacity [00:05:00] to develop the next generation of leaders, how to navigate the system to solve new problems, and to develop the competence and confidence to move from an independent contributor to a people leader, which means the cycle continues, and their people don’t learn how to solve the next problem that comes along.

With the best of intentions, their help has become unhelpful in the long term. When I asked what better would look like, one of their VPs said something like, “If there are ten fires a day, better means maybe there’s ten a week instead.” This culture of firefighting, leaders jumping in to help to save the day and to fix every problem, isn’t isolated to this company.

I see it across organizations, no matter the industry or where they are in the world, and it’s easy to say it’s just systems and structures. And yes, as I’ve talked about in the past, like on episode eighty-four, about what gets in the way of creating a people-centered learning organization. We do need to look at how systems, structures, and processes [00:06:00] either get in the way or enable empowered problem-solving at all levels.

Yet we also have to take a look at how we are contributing to this, too. Are we being reactive to the moment or proactive and intentional in our response? And where does our caring become carrying the weight of responsibility for everything getting done right? A lot of times we say, “Well, everything’s chaotic.

I just need to step in to stay afloat and just to keep things moving.” We all tell ourselves maybe we don’t have time to develop people or hire someone or go back and fix the problem. You may feel like you’re drowning, too, and that’s when you’re burying yourself by the weight of everything that you’ve taken on, oftentimes unintentionally.

And there’s a cost to the person you keep helping. Our help in the moment creates learned helplessness, like, “Why should I bother even giving my idea if you’re just gonna do it for me anyway?” Or, “Just tell me what your answer is.” And sometimes it may feel helpful for the person in that moment, too. “Great, I can [00:07:00] just ask you.”

I hear leaders talking about how they want engagement, that we want people to step up, but when we’re always taking over and stepping in, we’re actually taking away the very thing we want. This desire to be helpful is what leads us to overstep, and this is when we get stuck in The Doer Trap. So go back to the question that everyone asks me, and probably you, too: “Katie, so when do I step in?”

And as I said, far fewer times than you think or you actually react to, because we get in this mindset that everything is a five-alarm fire. It’s an urgent crisis that must be fixed or solved immediately, so we step in to take over and do it. Take a breath. Seriously. I have to remind myself this sometimes.

Not everything needs to be done now. Pause and assess. What would happen if I don’t step in? What is a little bit of failure or time for learning? [00:08:00] Because most things are not a critical emergency that truly needs your help now. Sometimes we’re just fanning the flames through our response and exacerbating the situation.

My client and transformational change leader, Chris Dempsey, who’s coming on this podcast soon, put it this way to me in a recent conversation. “Sometimes the building is truly on fire, and you’ve got to go fast, maybe break things. But many, many times it’s not on fire. It’s only on fire ’cause I set it on fire.”

I came from working in hospitals and healthcare systems for over a decade, focused on operational excellence and building a culture of continuous improvement. And yes, there was a culture of heroics there in the daily scramble to get work done, but the scramble was often in the system around the care.

How do we find supplies? How are we coordinating discharge, appointments running on time, and getting people out or getting things from place to [00:09:00] place? It wasn’t usually in the patient care itself. For example, in the emergency department, the actual care of patients isn’t an emergency. An emergency department is in the business of emergencies.

What looks like chaos to us from outside, think of watching The Pit or ER, is usually work the team has trained and prepared for. While it’s a presenting emergency for the patient, it’s not a crisis of knowing who owns what or what the process is for addressing the patient’s issue. And the same is true of firefighters.

Chris shared with me how he brought an actual fire department to talk to his organization’s leadership team that had been stuck in a firefighting loop for months, even years. His leaders assumed that firefighters would hate the chaos of their work environment, just like they hate the chaos they feel in theirs.

But the firefighters said, “We love it.” They didn’t say that they were burnt out or playing Whac-A-Mole. And why? When his leaders asked about the work of [00:10:00] firefighting, the firefighters said that their work actually isn’t chaos or a scramble. They know their roles and have the confidence and competence to do that.

How? They told him, “We train constantly, practicing and drilling, and when we execute, we have a plan that we execute perfectly every single time. We communicate with each other.” Basically, there’s no firefighting in how the real firefighters do their work of responding to put out fires. They know their role, what they own, and how to do it, and most of their work actually is the routine work of making sure fires don’t happen in the first place.

Far less of it is responding to the ones that do. In our organizations, we need far more fire preventers than firefighters So how do you tell? It feels urgent, but maybe it’s not an emergency that needs you to take over. So how do you tell the difference in the moment? The firefighters are trained on what’s a [00:11:00] real emergency.

The captain knows what he or she needs to do to join in, and otherwise, their people have the competence, and they know what to do. There’s a process, and a decision has already been made in advance when the leader needs to step in. Of course, when there is an emergency, you have to stop the bleed. It’s literally all hands on deck, where everyone’s jumping in with their expertise to resolve the immediate issue.

The point is to know what level of crisis, a type of failure or struggle that’s okay, and to choose deliberately to step in, not by reaction or default, knowing what the trade-off is, and you can’t do that in the moment. So what are the criteria that require you to step in immediately? Pause and think about that What are the criteria that need you to step in now?

Maybe it’s a true emergency, a real safety issue where someone’s going to be immediately harmed. Like when your [00:12:00] kid is running to the street, it’s a time to jump in and grab them, not ask, “Honey, what’s the process to be safe when crossing the street?” Human safety is always the time to step in, but then go back and figure out what preventative measures might need to be put in place, so it won’t happen again.

Or maybe there’s a critical quality issue that’s gonna get to the customer. Somehow a defect got to the end of the line or the work didn’t get done as fast as needed to make an important deadline. So you might need to step in to help your team fix it now and ensure everything is done right. But then afterwards, make sure you and your team go back and solve to the root cause, so you don’t keep reconquering the same problem week after week as my client is finding themselves doing.

Or other times it might be that you need to step in to do something to fill a short-term stopgap. You don’t have the organizational capability or capacity right now. Maybe you don’t have a team member that’s there to do the work or the people assigned to the team don’t yet have the level of competence developed to do it at the [00:13:00] pace that’s needed.

In that case, maybe you do have to step in for the moment to take on ownership of a task for now, while you find someone to fill the role that’s open or develop someone’s skills to do it more competently and confidently. But when you step in, step in intentionally and only for a limited time. Don’t get stuck in The Doer Trap by taking on ownership of doing and thinking that really isn’t yours to own.

All of these can feel legitimate and be legitimate, and you need to figure them out in advance. The challenge, of course, is not getting stuck there and letting it happen every day. I invite you to reflect for yourself and with your team, what are those real critical situations where failure is not an option?

How soon should I or we intervene when someone is really struggling? Or when is it actually okay for some failure, some mistakes, or more time to be imperfect to happen? As I talked about in the previous [00:14:00] episode of this podcast, struggle is part of the learning process, and we have to get comfortable with people not having the answer immediately or needing a bit more time to think or try something.

When we step in to get it done now, we circumvent that time for learning for them, but also really discovering what a better solution might be. That company that I talked about earlier in this episode, the one that deeply cares about their people and their customer but finds themself in crisis mode every day, is working to shift how each and every one of those leaders responds.

Their senior executive defined the reality of urgency for his whole team. I remember him recently saying something to his team like, “What we do best is firefight, but there’s nothing anyone can do that’s going to be catastrophic. The more we allow people to make a decision or make a mistake, the less firefighting we’re going to have to do.”

He kept reiterating, “Nothing we do will be catastrophic, [00:15:00] even missing a client deadline or a deliverable. Everything else, it’s okay to give some space and to let them learn through some failures and stumbles.” And it’s when you actually have defined this that you know when you can step in. What are those real crises?

What’s really going to be catastrophic for you or your team or your clients? And otherwise, how you can resist the urge to overstep, to step in when it’s not yours. Once these lines are clear, there’s still a choice you have to make every time. So before any given interaction or situation where you feel that things are getting urgent or you feel the pull to step in, take what I call an intention pause, even 10 seconds to take a breath and ask yourself, “What’s my role and purpose here?

Who really owns this work or the thinking? How does this situation compare with our criteria for intervention? And is it more important right now for me to do this or give the answers or for the other person [00:16:00] to develop the competence to get there?” This is one of the best ways to align your behaviors with your true purpose and desired outcomes, moving from being reactive to proactive.

And yes, there might be a cost to stepping back in the short term. The work might take a little longer. It might not come out the way you would have done it, and you’ll likely spend more time providing support while someone builds their competence. But in the long run, it pays off, and you get out of the vicious cycle of The Doer Trap.

There are times to step in, but it’s about how you do it. It becomes a trap when it’s your default, whether or not it’s intentional. And what happens if you do step in, for whatever reason, when there’s a real stop the bleed moment, or there wasn’t enough time to get the work done and it needed to just be moved forward?

Be sure to do it explicitly. Know what you’re doing, the choices you’re making, the trade-offs of the impact, and then ensure you come back. Being explicit can be as simple as saying it out loud. [00:17:00] For example, to the other person, “I want you to be the owner, but right now the short term doesn’t allow for it.

After this, we’ll come back to figure out what support or time you need for the next time.” In a true emergency, you might not have time to say anything. It truly might be an all-hands-on-deck situation. You have to put the fire out, but then you come back. It’s about returning the learning opportunity and going back to solve the original problem.

It’s coming back in three ways. First, coming back to the person, restoring ownership and supporting their learning and growth of what happens for the future. Second, it’s about coming back to the process, making sure that you or your team didn’t just slap a Band-Aid on the presenting problem, but that you’re looking at root cause and system issues so that you can put in place countermeasures and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Stop every day from being whack-a-mole, and just like the firefighters, focus more on fire prevention than firefighting. And third, come back to yourself. Reflect on how you’re [00:18:00] showing up and what might you need to adjust, not just how you respond there, but how you can create more conditions for learning the next time As leaders, part of your responsibility in creating the conditions for your people and teams to be successful is creating the right amount of space for learning.

Giving the right amount of time for a project to be completed successfully, including the learning process and the trial and error to get there. Giving the right amount of time for the level of competence and confidence for the people doing the work to develop. Some other reflection questions to ask yourself is, what do I need to do differently so we’re not always hitting those criteria to take over?

So it’s not every time, yes, it really is a time where I need to step in. For example, reflect on how am I contributing to this sense of urgency? Is this really a five-alarm fire? Does it have to be fixed today? And where can I introduce a little more time, a day, or [00:19:00] even half a day for the learning to happen?

A phrase I learned from my coach and mentor, Margie Hagene, that I often repeat as a reminder to others and myself is, “Today is not the only day.” For most things, it isn’t something that has to happen today. It’s how you make the trade-off between helping in the moment and fixing it, or supporting in the long run by creating the conditions to develop people to solve the real problems.

So what can you do to hold back from overstepping when it’s not really an urgent crisis, and let people learn through doing so that you have to step in or feel like you have to step in less and less? Create a virtuous cycle instead. Let’s go back to the fire department that Chris brought in for his leadership team.

Their captain explained that he only steps in to do the work for his team if they need more people and expertise in the moment based on what’s happening. The fire captain said to Chris that, “When it’s a big one, [00:20:00] I show up, but if it’s a small one, I don’t. And every single day I’m thinking about who are the next 10 fire captains, and I’m thinking about how to develop them and giving them feedback on their response.”

And that same senior leader who told his team that nothing’s going to be a catastrophe if there are a few mistakes or setbacks recognized in reflection that changing the culture started with changing his own response to every issue that came up, and realizing that what had gotten him promoted in the first place was not what’s going to be successful in the long run.

I remember him saying something like, “My claim to fame was running into fires, and I’ve had to learn not to run into fires anymore.” Today’s not the only day. Leadership is about making that switch from seeing your worth as being tied to being a superhero who saves the day instead on your superpowers to create the conditions for other people to step in and solve the problems that are in front of them.

It’s about how you’re clear on the direction [00:21:00] and then provide the support to help other people figure out how to get there. It’s not about saving the day or making sure the project is as successful at all costs. And when you take on the responsibility for all the doing and all the thinking, you never get to have time to focus on the things that you actually own.

Building the capability your organization needs to meet its strategic goals, developing your people, and developing yourself. And that’s ultimately the most fulfilling part of the work. It’s about seeing other people have that light bulb moment where they’ve accomplished something. They’ve solved a problem and didn’t need you.

You’re still accountable for the outcome. You’re just not responsible for all the doing and the thinking. And when you can make this switch, your caring stops become carrying. This is the art of unburdened leadership. And it’s also about knowing that you’re doing your best. It’s about intentional practice, getting a bit better every day, and being kind to yourself, too.

That’s what I mean when I say stepping back is stepping up. It’s not stepping away. It’s providing support [00:22:00] and creating the conditions for others to move forward. And it’s about you moving forward, a little bit wobbly, but getting better day by day in doing so. As you reflect on this episode and when to step in, consider these questions.

What are the criteria for you and for your team that would require stepping in immediately? And when might be actually okay for more stepping back to give more space for others to try something and learn by doing, even if it’s not perfect? And then think of a time when you overstepped recently. How could you come back now to the person or to the initial problem so that the ownership and learning opportunity are returned?

For more ideas on how to Break the Telling Habit and get out of The Doer Trap, I invite you to go back to listen to episode 88 about that difference between help and support, and episode 71, where I talk about how you can own the thinking process and not the thinking. And of course, an early episode, episode 13, on how to Break the Telling Habit.[00:23:00]

If you or your organization needs outside support in making this shift from The Doer Trap to creating an organization of competent and confident problem-solvers at all levels, I’d love to help. I partner with leaders and their teams through my trusted advisor work, custom facilitation, and executive learning programs, and keynote speaking to inspire and equip you for more effective leadership.

You can find out more at kbjanderson.com. I’ve dropped the links to this and the related episodes I mentioned in the show notes. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow or subscribe now to Chain of Learning and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues so we can all strengthen our Chain of Learning together.

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