THE BURN: "Whose Fire Is This?"One Question That Can Change How You Lead
Blog Post | June 23, 2026
There's a question I ask in coaching that tends to crack something open. I ask: Whose fire is this?
A client will describe their week, the staff member who came to them in tears, the board member with an urgent concern, the funder's email that needed an immediate response… and the colleague who called mid-dinner to think out loud…AND they handled all of it. Efficiently. Professionally. And now they are completely spent.
Usually, there's a pause. Sometimes a long one.
Because most of the leaders I work with have never stopped to ask whether the fire they're running toward is actually theirs to put out. We've been trained and conditioned by the culture of “work”, by role expectations, by the pull of mission-driven work to respond immediately. To step in. To solve. And we're damn good at it, too. That's part of the problem.
When you're good at managing other people's crises, people learn to bring their crises to you.
Being responsible doesn't mean being responsible for everything. It means being clear about what is and isn't yours to carry.
This is harder than it sounds in mission-driven spaces, because so much of our work feels urgent. And some of it genuinely is. But there's a difference between responding to a real organizational emergency and absorbing your board's anxiety because they emailed on a Saturday, and so you answered. There's a difference between supporting your team through a hard moment and becoming the emotional container for every hard moment they have.
When you absorb fires that aren't yours, a few things happen. You start running out of fuel. Your team stops developing the capacity to handle things themselves. And quietly, without meaning to, you've communicated that your job is to protect everyone from difficulty, which is not only exhausting but impossible.
I worked with a leader who was brilliant, deeply committed, and spent most of her week in reactive mode to other people's timelines, other people's concerns, other people's fires. The things she actually wanted to build for her organization kept getting pushed aside. She'd end every week feeling behind, even though she'd been working the whole time.
When we started naming whose fires she was actually fighting, something shifted. Not overnight. Not perfectly. But she started pausing before responding. She started asking herself: Is this mine? Do I pay this person to figure this out? Does this actually need me, or does it need someone else to step up? What happens if I don't step in right now?
The answer, more often than she expected, was: nothing catastrophic.
Stopping yourself to take a beat and to ask, "Is this mine?" "Is this theirs or is this ours?" should become a leadership practice. This is not a one-time occurrence, but something you build muscle around until it becomes a reflex. It changes how you structure your week. It changes how you communicate your role to your team and your board. It changes what you model for everyone around you about what good leadership actually looks like. I remember my husband once told me, "We teach people how to treat us." He was so right. I've carried that into my leadership work ever since.
I was the firefighter leader and here's the thing about constantly running toward other people's fires: it doesn't just exhaust you. It prevents the people around you from ever learning to manage heat on their own. The most generous thing a leader can do is sometimes not step in to let someone else figure it out, make the call, or hold the discomfort.
That's not abandonment. That's development.
If you've been feeling like you're always behind, always putting out fires, always tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix, it might be worth asking: how many of those fires were actually yours?
Going forward, start paying close attention when someone comes to you with their fire. Because the leaders who last, who build something that actually sustains them and their teams, are the ones who learn, slowly and deliberately, to tell the difference.
What's one fire you've been fighting lately that might not be yours to carry?
This is Part 1 of 4 of The Burn, a four-part series on the patterns that quietly lead leaders to burnout. New post every other week through July. Stay Tuned!
