When I became a manager, I attended a one-week training course. At one point, the instructor asked the participants to get out a pen and paper. “Think back to when you were 6 years old. What did you want to be when you grew up?” After a few minutes he asked, “How many of you wrote ‘manager’?”

When no one else responded, I raised my hand. The instructor looked at me in amazement: “At the age of 6, did you know that you wanted to be a manager? Did you know what a manager was?”

“No,” I replied, “but I was pretty close. I wrote ‘fireman’.”

Many times since then, I have heard managers complain, “The fires never stop. I don’t know how much of this my people and I can take. We never have time to do any real work.”

I have suggested to these managers that perhaps they should take some time to plan, that there may be a way to prevent future fires so that their groups can get back to their “real work”. They usually reply, “I wish we had time, but we don’t. We have to put those fires out or we’ll lose everything.”

Many companies have a habit of handing out “Firefighter of the Week (or of the Month or of the Year)” awards to employees. They don’t actually call the award that, of course, and the goal is laudable: they want to recognize people who come to the rescue in an emergency: the project team working all weekend to submit a proposal on Monday morning, the account manager interrupting a vacation to calm an angry client, the hotel clerk offers the presidential suite to a late-arriving guest whose room has been mistakenly given away.

While heroic deeds are valuable in specific situations, these companies would be better off awarding prizes for fire. prevention. When a manager’s department spends a great deal of time putting out fires, it’s a sign that something is seriously wrong.

Years ago, as a graduate student, I spent a summer working on a planning project for a small town. One of the city agencies I worked with was the fire department. I remember meeting with the fire chief and his two deputies to discuss performance measures for the department. “What proportion of your time does the department spend putting out fires?” I asked. I knew it would be a relatively small number. When they were reluctant to answer the question, I gave them some guidance. “Would you say 5 percent?”

The chief looked at me and replied, “That’s too high. If we were to spend 5 percent of our time fighting real fires, the entire city would burn to the ground. The number is probably more than 1 percent, 2 percent as maximum”.

The chief’s point was that people’s confidence in the fire department does not come from knowing that it put out one or three or a dozen fires yesterday, but from knowing that it is Ready to help them in an emergency.

The primary job of a fire department is fire prevention and preparing to respond to emergencies. Prepares by studying the city and the businesses within the city to learn what the building structures are like, what kind of work the businesses do, what materials they use, etc. The department also spends a lot of time studying fire science, rescue methods, and emergency medical procedures to understand how best to fight various types of fires and respond to other emergency situations.

If a manager in today’s corporate world finds that his group is spending more than a small amount of time fighting fires, he must realize that his efforts are misplaced. She needs to focus on fire prevention. She must enable employees to anticipate potential hazards and work to resolve those situations before a fire actually occurs. She must empower employees to learn new skills and find their own solutions to problems. Heroic acts provide great anecdotes for the business books, but no company can bet its future on the constant heroics of its employees.

Managers must thoroughly understand their company’s business processes and methods. When they understand the overall processes, they can select the optimal work methods that will prevent fires from starting in the first place. The key to solving any problem is understanding its root causes.

Yes, managers must be ready to fight a fire at any time. But those who learn and practice this new role will find their operations run smoother; your employees are more flexible, responsive and productive; and they have fewer fires to fight.