You’re working in your office, focused on completing a project due later today. You smell something. "Must be someone warming up a snack in the lunchroom," you think. You continue working.

Moments later your concentration is shattered with an unfamiliar siren sound. The sound is deafening to the point of painful. A frantic colleague bursts into your office, yelling – "Fire! Fire!"

You run out of your office and the stench of fear, anxiety, and smoke smacks you in the face. At first stunned by the commotion, you quickly evaluate the work area and follow the flow of people moving toward the exit.

You follow the crowd. Passing by the windows overlooking the front entrance, you are suddenly amazed and relieved at the same time. The fire trucks are already arriving on the scene. You hear a voice from outside. It’s the fire chief, bellowing out over the loudspeaker, "Please stay where you are, please stay where you are, we will contain the fire and get each of you out safely".

You feel relieved at the confidence in his voice and at least for now, the panic of the workers has been controlled. You still feel the anxiety of not knowing where the fire was or what would happen next, but there is a sense of calmness returning.

Suddenly, the rush of fear returns. You hear glass shattering and a voice screaming. It’s coming from a senior-level management office, on the floor right above you. You rush over to the window to see what is happening. Panic turns to anger. What you hear in chorus from the screaming voices of top management from their perch on top of the building is, "Thank goodness, you’ve arrived. But please watch your hoses and where you walk. Don’t trample our flowerbeds and try not to over water the fire! Hurry, we don’t have much time for this now!! We have a business to run!"

Many times I feel like the fire chief who is turned away by the owner of a burning building. Arriving on the scene of a client’s business, met with a litany of "fires", words of despair and stress expressed by managers and employees alike, to be asked, "can you make the fires go away?"

While the sincerity of the request is real, it is immediately followed by the conditions upon which I will be allowed to enter the building with my fire fighting equipment. "We’re understaffed so we can’t pull anyone away from their jobs." (In consulting, this means, we can’t afford the time to send anyone to training.) "We’re behind on our projects so we can’t evacuate." (Same interpretation.) "The turnover is killing productivity and profits." (We haven’t budgeted any money for this project because we’re spending too much money and time putting out fires.) "Just do something to motivate our people." (We’re understaffed already so even if find an arsonist, we won’t let him go. We need bodies. Maybe you can just talk to him or her.)

In other words, put out the fires but don’t trample the flowers, don’t overdo it with the water. And, please, don’t tell us the cause if you find it. We don’t have time to fix it anyway. And hurry, let us get back to doing things the way we always did it. Just put out the fire.

The manager of a business today, by many accounts, spends upwards of eighty percent of his or her time putting out fires. Senior level executives, managers, supervisors, and owners, instead of managing the business, improving the present, and planning the future, are busy prioritizing the severity of each outbreak, evaluating which ones need their help and which ones they hope will burn out buy themselves. They constantly are looking for new ways to remedied situations rather than solve or eliminate the problems.

As an example, let’s look at job turnover. When asked what is the number one problem they face today, managers select in survey after survey, recruitment and retention of skilled and loyal employees. "We just can’t find good people." "The ethics of the worker today is different." " No one wants to work any more." And so on and so on.

But instead of investing in the training, development and satisfaction of the current workers who do stay, in the current workers who they would like to "clone", managers and owners find themselves spending enormous budgets on hunting for high performing, loyal, ambitious, and motivated employees on a game preserve with hordes of fellow hunters pursuing prospects whose available count is the lowest in decades.

The numbers don’t lie. By the year 2000, one in three workers will be 45 or older and boomers, almost thirty percent of the population, are turning 50 at a rate of 11,000 people per day. By 2011, the first boomers will hit 65. If they all retire between now and 2030, there won’t be enough workers to take their place.

An imminent and impending problem exists.

• The Generations-Xers are a much smaller demographic group than the boomers or matures. Gen-Xer’s also don’t look at work as their life, but work as part of a bigger life, which includes fun, family and personal growth.
• Most women who want to work will be employed by 2000. And 80% of all childbearing age women will become pregnant. Gen-X employees will demand more flexibility and appreciation for family and social commitments as they put work into perspective as a part of their total life.
• And the pool of cast-off employees, a result of downsizing, will shrink as most companies are as lean as they can go.

Begin At The Soul

Where should management start? "The solutions to workplace pressures begin and end with corporate culture", according to Bill Nelson, president of the Kansas Region of NationsBank. "Those are values that begin at the top and permeate every aspect of a company."

Instead of reacting to the real threat of a long-term labor shortage, management must become more proactive to meeting and improving the lifestyles of their current employees, in order to retain first, and then attract workers who will fit their company.

Buying more fire extinguishers – that is, the quick fixes - is an immediate response to a turnover or employee shortage problem. Managers and owners are experts at dousing fires while productivity, morale, the bottom line, their real responsibilities, erodes. Discovering and eliminating the source of the fires is the obvious permanent answer to a threatening problem. Meanwhile . . . .