Avoiding a Culture of Emergencies

There is enormous variability in the frequency with which teams have emergencies.

Some teams have emergencies regularly. We need a new report; someone has to put together a presentation; we need to change plans to incorporate new feedback. Other teams essentially only have emergencies due to exogenous or hard-to-predict factors: us-east-1 went down; we’re getting sued; our CEO got in a car crash. This variability is universal across industries and company sizes; I’ve even heard of non-profits with a culture of constant emergencies. Madness.

As you would expect, better managers have fewer emergencies, and worse managers have more. And at the extremes, it’s common to find that the best managers basically never have preventable emergencies, and the worst managers have teams which are constantly in a state of emergency, to the point that they’re 100% reactive.

There are a few factors that contribute to a very significantly lower rate of emergencies on well-managed teams, and happily they’re easy to copy:

Good Managers Know How Hard Things Are

One of the dumbest form of emergencies is simple underestimation of the amount of effort required to get a team’s projects done. Good management can prevent this in a few ways.

First and most importantly, managers need to be deep experts in what their teams actually do, and put in real effort to stay informed. If they’re an engineering manager, they need to be a solid engineer themselves and also stay up-to-date on the state of the technology that their team owns, their biggest challenges, and their capabilities. Bad managers love to black box their teams in the name of delegation: “I shouldn’t need to inspect what’s going on with my team, they should just handle it.” Good managers trust but verify by staying informed before delegating. They know if that report they’re suddenly asking for is easy or hard to produce.

Next, good managers just ask questions. Contrast two identical situations where an ask came from your CEO:

• “Hey, I really need a report on how project X is going – what would it take to get that this afternoon?”

• “Give me a report on project X TODAY”

Simply asking the question resolves a surprising amount of emergencies before they get started. If it’s truly impractical to get the report this afternoon, it’s better to just find out upfront rather than pulling all of the fire alarms immediately.

Finally, good managers set expectations and communicate reasoning. “I need you to get me a report on project X but if it’s going to take more than 30min let me know before you do anything. I want to get a readout to a new sales prospect but it’s not essential.” Especially when seniority gaps are large, a little expectation-setting goes a long way.

Good Managers Know What’s Important

A huge amount of artificial emergencies stem from managers who don’t understand what is actually important for their teams.

If you don’t know what matters for your team, the latest thing that just popped into your brain often feels critical. If you didn’t have strong conviction about whatever project was in-flight, any new good idea always seems like it could be worthwhile. Bad managers can’t stay on target, and because they can’t stay on target they never say no to new work, creating constant emergencies for their teams.

A simple technique that works here is to always make sure that you have very strong conviction that what your team is working on matters, and actively force yourself to make sure you always know why their roadmap is important. This is critical to give you the courage to push back on the worst sorts of emergencies: executive requests like “[CEO] needs a full proposal on how we’d tackle this idea today.” If your team is really working on business critical needs, responses like “we can get you that after [critical work] is finished” or “how about we get you 5 bullets and a summary, because we’re finishing [work we all agreed matters]” actually become available arrows in your quiver.

Good Managers Have a Mental Model of Their Team and Company

This is a more subtle concept, but one of the most important.

Good managers have a strong mental model for how their team operates and the role it plays within the company, and have a strong understanding of the state of the business and industry. This empowers them to more accurately forecast what will be needed of their teams in the future.

For example, let’s say that I’m running a Product Design team. I know that my team currently outputs pictures of what we’re going to build. But I also know that AI is shaking an already dynamic landscape: for example, there’s more AI prototyping including from non-designers, a rise in vibe coding, and all of this amid rising UX standards for enterprise software.

With this simple mental model, I can make a number of moves that will prevent emergencies down the line:

• Invest in AI prototyping tools so that we’re staying at the forefront of the industry; when your CEO comes in and says “I just tried Lovable and it’s awesome, are we using it,” the team will already have a well-formed opinion and momentum

• Invest in a framework that all teams can use for vibe coding

• Hire fewer, more senior designers and preferentially allocate them to more complex parts of the product where AI prototyping tools are least likely to suggest workable solutions

This concept always reminds me of college-level math. If you take college-level electromagnetism, differential equations, or probability and statistics, you’ll often find that there are two ways to pass your tests:

• You can memorize a bunch of heuristics for how to solve certain problems, and skate by via pattern-matching

• You can actually internalize all of the material, so that you can solve any problem covered by the source material that you’ve learned

To really prevent emergencies, you need to be in the second state when it comes to your team.

Good Managers Care

And finally… good managers simply care more about their teams’ well-being. And if you care about your team, you’re much less likely to throw a hand grenade into the room and walk out the door while your team is still inside.

Despite the many bitter comments that you hear on internet forums and bars at 5pm, in my experience many managers really do care deeply about their teams. I’ve had so many conversations with managers who are working their butts off to prevent emergencies from impacting their teams.

The simple fact is that in many cases emergencies are a choice – specifically, they come from making the choice to satiate some desire by sacrificing your own team’s time. You can prevent this: you just need to care more about your team’s long-term productivity than a short-term boost to your career or mental health.

Takeaways

One of the best parts of following this advice to prevent emergencies is that it really will make your team happier and more productive, and it will do so almost immediately. Nobody wants to live in a world of constant emergencies, but it’s all too common across every industry. Great people want to do great work, and a culture of emergencies is anathema to the focus that great work requires. If you can find a way to keep your team operating from a level-headed playing field, you’ll have unlocked one of the best talent retention mechanisms that exists.

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