Firefighter of the Month

Why do we celebrate employees who rescue crises but ignore those who prevent them?

In my latest workplace comedy, I play a rather enthusiastic leader who keeps winning awards for saving the day. Every crisis earns me another trophy. Another emergency, another standing ovation! Meanwhile, a colleague quietly fixes a problem before it becomes a disaster. No emergency. No sleepless nights. No heroic rescue.

And, unfortunately, no trophy. It's funny, but it exposes a serious problem in many organisations.

We reward firefighters while making preventors invisible.

Think about your workplace. The employee who works through the night to resolve a customer crisis often gets celebrated. But what about the person who improves a process so that the crisis never happens? Or the employee who spots a potential failure weeks before it becomes a problem? Too often, nobody notices.

MIT researchers Nelson Repenning and John Sterman described this phenomenon in their 2001 paper, Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened. Their research explored how organisations become trapped in cycles of firefighting, where the pressure to solve today's problems leaves little time to prevent tomorrow's. And our recognition rituals can make things worse.

What we repeatedly celebrate becomes what people learn to repeat.

So perhaps it's time to introduce a different ritual: the Prevention Spotlight. At your next monthly team meeting, ask one simple question: "What problem didn't happen this month because someone saw it coming?"

Recognise the employee who identified the risk, improved the process or prevented the mistake. Celebrate the action, explain the value it created and make prevention just as visible as recovery. Of course, genuine firefighters deserve our appreciation. But so do the quiet heroes who make firefighting unnecessary. Watch the video and ask yourself: Are your company's recognition rituals rewarding the people who save the day, or those who make sure the day never needs saving?

Sometimes, culture transformation begins by simply changing who gets the trophy.

Explore the Prevention Spotlight ritual on Rituals of Work.