There's a version of leadership that looks busy, looks needed, and looks like it's working but turns out to be the least effective version there is. This summer I read Bob Chapman's Everybody Matters, and one distinction from the book kept coming back to me weeks after I'd finished it: firefighting versus firelighting, as two fundamentally different modes of leadership.
Chapman's point is simple to state and harder to live by. A firefighting leader spends their energy reacting: jumping from one problem to the next, stepping in to rescue a team the moment something goes wrong. A firelighting leader does the opposite. They don't chase problems. They ignite something in people, so the problems get solved without the leader showing up with the extinguisher every time.
In the book, the differences are listed like this:
Firefighting:
- Reactive by nature . You wait for the smoke before you act.
- The leader becomes the bottleneck. Nothing moves until they arrive.
- It looks like leadership. You're busy, visible, indispensable in the moment.
- But it trains the team to wait. Why solve it yourself if the boss will show up and solve it for you?
Firelighting:
- Proactive. You set direction and conditions before the fire starts.
- The leader gives people a clear goal and what Chapman calls "responsible freedom": enough trust and enough boundary that people can act without asking permission first.
- It looks like less work in the moment. There's no dramatic rescue to point to.
- But it compounds. People start noticing problems and opportunities on their own, because they've been given a reason to care and the room to act.
So where does this show up outside a factory floor? For me, it maps almost exactly onto something I run into constantly in software development: the difference between a team that escalates and a team that owns.
I've worked with teams where every non-trivial decision routes back up. Not because people lack the skill, but because nobody ever handed them the responsible freedom to decide and be wrong(!) sometimes. I've seen a lot less the opposite: when a senior person spends real time upfront on direction and guardrails, then genuinely steps back.
The firefighting leader is always in the room. The firelighting leader made themselves less necessary on purpose.
What makes Chapman's framing uncomfortable: firefighting feels like good leadership. You're solving things. You're needed. Firelighting feels, from the inside, like doing less: set the goal, hand over trust, get out of the way.
It takes a certain confidence to accept that the visible, heroic version of leadership is often the weaker one.
Here's where I land on it. I don't think anyone is purely a firefighter or purely a firelighter. Stepping in is a human instinct. It's the easier move, and it feels good in the moment. Stepping back takes more discipline. It's not a switch you flip once; it's a pull you feel every day, and most of us lean firefighter by default because that's what comes naturally.
That's why it starts with awareness. You can't choose to light a fire instead of putting one out if you don't first notice which one you're reaching for. So next time I catch myself stepping in to fix something, that's the question I want to ask first: am I the right person for this, or have I just never given anyone else the fire?