Let’s go back to yesterday at 6AM. I’m asleep and our smoke/CO2 detector goes off which triggers our home security system, and the home security app on my phone lights up prompting me to do something. Running around the house trying to find out if there was smoke anywhere, I pressed the wrong option in the app, and…the fire department was dispatched.

I’ve never had a fire truck at my house, that was a new experience! Embarrassed, I went out to the truck and apologized to the fire crew – there was no emergency, fire, or smoke – it was a false alarm. I shook their hands, they drove away, I went inside to read a few articles that led me to vacuuming all of the smoke detectors for dust.

It got me thinking about false alarms in leadership, and within teams. They happen all the time, but we don’t notice them if we aren’t in the habit of looking back and reflecting. Here are a few examples:

• You change the direction of a project because of something you hear second-hand from a more senior leader…
• You find out that a team member is pitching the work you do to another team, and you go after the team member for not “staying in their lane”…
• You provide feedback to someone you lead, they react strongly, and you shy away from giving feedback from that point on…

Have you experienced any of these? How often did you look back to understand more context? You can let your mind wander on what happens after the false alarm, but overall a theme emerges: reacting without regular reflection robs us of learning that could prevent false alarms in the future.

For today: what’s a reaction you had in the last week, that after understanding more context, turned out to be a false alarm?

How can you look for more false alarms to learn from?

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Here are a few resources worth checking out, that I’ve been sharing with clients lately:

1 // Leaders can avoid drive-by management, and unintentional disruption. (3 min read)

2 // I facilitate lots of retrospectives for teams, and use Etsy’s “blameless post-mortem” guide to help draw out more learning. (5 min read)

3 // Befriend your inner voice, it causes more false alarms than anyone around you. (55 min podcast)