After a few months as a leader, you’ll realize that the promise of the job is a bit of a lie.
Instead of being a visionary, you're mostly just dealing with one urgent administrative mess after another.
Fast Company, citing a Deloitte report, quantifies this reality with a stark figure: nearly 40% of a manager's time vanishes into what they politely term “administrative tasks” or “fire-fighting”.
This isn't just about shuffling papers. This is the constant, reactive scramble to address urgent, small-scale problems that demand immediate attention, diverting focus from anything resembling genuine strategic thought or meaningful team development.
It’s the daily whack-a-mole. The endless parade of minor crises, the perceived emergencies that, if left unattended, promise to snowball into larger, messier ones. So you attend to them. And attend. And attend.
This isn’t a commentary on productivity. You are, undoubtedly, productive. The issue is direction. Your efforts and your energy are deployed with relentless efficiency, yet rarely towards the initiatives that elevate the team or push the organization beyond the next immediate hurdle.
The vision casting, the deep-dive mentorship, the long-term planning become luxuries. They are the tasks you might get to, when the current barrage of “urgent” tasks somehow diminishes. Which, of course, it never does.
For many high-performing individual contributors considering the leap, the allure of impact is strong. The reality often found on the other side is a relentless cycle of reaction. You sign up to build, to guide, to strategize. You end up troubleshooting permissions errors, mediating low-stakes conflicts, and making sense of cryptic corporate directives.
It's not a question of individual incompetence. It's simply how the system is built. The easiest thing to do is always solve the immediate problem, and the organization rewards that. This focus on putting out fires, day after day, slowly drains away the very skills leaders need to be building for the future.
The real problem isn't just being busy. It's being so focused on the wrong tasks that the important ones get ignored and never get a chance to grow.