Most leaders like the title but not the job. They enjoy being "the visionary" when things are calm but disappear the second smoke hits the room. Real leadership is defined in crisis, not in quarterly planning decks. Anyone can hold a strategy offsite; only a leader earns their pay when systems fail, customers scream, or a team member screws up big. If you want to know who's actually leading, look for the one walking straight into the mess while everyone else is looking for cover.
What "Running Into the Fire" Looks Like
- Step forward, don't sidestep. When something catches fire — production outage, toxic behavior on a team, catastrophic mis-estimate — you're not outsourcing it to process or committees. You show up, own the context, and set direction.
- Calm is the currency. Panic is contagious. So is composure. If you can't stay steady, your team is screwed. Your demeanor becomes the thermostat in the room.
- Clarity before comfort. People don't need hugs in the middle of a meltdown. They need clear next steps, explicit ownership, and immediate triage priorities. Comfort comes after the smoke clears.
- Accountability in real time. Don't wait for the post-mortem to assign responsibility. Crisis is when accountability matters most — who owns what right now, and how we'll know when it's handled.
Example Scenario
At a midsize SaaS company, a critical API endpoint goes down on a Friday night. Customers are flooding Twitter, support is overwhelmed, and the on-call engineer is drowning. Traditional leaders might:
- Spin up a Slack war room with 47 people and zero decisions.
- Start drafting a PR statement before fixing the root problem.
- Ask for an "impact analysis" while the fire's still burning.
A leader who runs into the fire does something different:
- Gets on the call, not to code, but to assign named ownership: Alice on triage, Raj on rollback, Sam on comms.
- Sets a success criteria: "Endpoint back online within 60 minutes, with degraded fallback if needed."
- Shields the team from executive noise, customer escalations, and internal politics until the issue is contained.
By Monday, the system is stable and the post-mortem is a focused review — not a witch hunt. The leader didn't play firefighter for clout; they created the conditions for their team to actually put out the blaze.
The Contrast With Traditional Dogma
- OKRs/KPIs crowd: They'll try to measure the fire. Good luck. "Reduce outages by 15%" doesn't help when the system is already burning. Metrics don't stop smoke.
- Agile theater: Expect someone to ask, "Can this go in the next sprint?" No. Fires don't wait for sprint planning.
- Conventional leadership: They'll delegate downward, then vanish to "manage stakeholders." Translation: They're hiding.
Running into the fire rejects all of this. It says: In crisis, your first job isn't optics, it's oxygen.
Takeaway: Crisis exposes the difference between a boss and a leader. Bosses posture. Leaders stabilize. If you can't run into the fire — calm, clear, and accountable — you're not leading; you're just holding the title.
