When Rescue Is Leadership (And When It’s Theft)

How to match response to real risk and lead with more slack in the system

Most rescues aren’t emergencies. They just feel urgent because you can make the discomfort go away.

Public safety beat that impulse out of me. Spent 30+ years in fire, EMS, law enforcement, 911 operations. Real emergencies announce themselves. Everything else survives the 48-hour test.

Will this actually be a crisis in two days, or is it just loud right now?

The 911 Clarity Leadership Forgot

Dispatcher gets a call. Chest pain. Difficulty breathing. No committee meeting. No decision rights conversation. Send the ambulance. Probably the fire engine. Maybe a quick response paramedic. Match the response to the potential risk.

Lower-acuity call? Knee injury from a trip and fall? Single ambulance. Some cases get telehealth or mobile integrated healthcare. Right resource, right response, right outcome.

The pattern holds across fire, EMS, law enforcement. Triage based on potential risk. Preserve capacity for the next crisis.

Leadership? We abandoned triage. You’re reviewing things before they need your level. Looking at draft budgets that aren’t ready for your decision. Redesigning their vendor approach because it’s faster. By 2pm, the actual $50k decision gets whatever’s left after twenty rescues you shouldn’t have made.

Treating everything the same drains resources. Worse, it numbs your ability to distinguish when you actually need to heighten performance. When everything’s an emergency, nothing is.

Here’s the triage map I use to protect capacity.

Priority 1: Immediate Response Required

Safety risk. Customer-facing outage. Payroll or legal exposure. Rare, clear, immediate.

Telecom provider went down. 911 operations couldn’t route calls as designed. I engaged immediately, understood the impact, developed the mitigation plan while we coordinated restoration. That’s Priority 1. Full authority, full resources, now.

You respond immediately. This is emergency rescue.

Priority 2: Urgent but Can Be Staged

Real deadline inside 24 hours with external consequences. Customer frustration requiring proactive engagement. Decision needs your authority specifically.

Project manager escalated a slipping timeline for mission-critical hardware implementation. Delivery at risk, internal stakeholders expressing concern. I engaged, reset scope and communication expectations, clarified next three steps, and left them with ownership. Engaged to prevent escalation, didn’t take their work back. That’s Priority 2.

You engage early, clarify expectations, monitor. You don’t solve their problem.

Priority 3: Routine Response

Survives the 48-hour test. Within their decision authority. Learning opportunity if they solve it.

Team member came with an approach they wanted to run by me. Not stuck. Wanted my approval before moving forward. I asked them to state their intention: what outcome are they driving, how will they measure success, what help do they actually need? Then I let them run with it. Even if it wasn’t the path I’d choose. They’d learn more from trying their approach than from executing mine perfectly. That’s Priority 3.

Your discomfort watching them figure it out isn’t their emergency. Stay out. Coach the process, not the solution.

The Cost of False Alarms

Every rescue you make on a Priority 3 problem costs you twice.

First, you spend decision capacity that should be reserved for Priority 1s. Your finite daily budget of strategic decisions (maybe four or five good ones before your brain trades quality for speed) gets spent on problems that aren’t yours to solve.

Second, you train them that you’re the path of least resistance. Every time you take a decision back, you make the next rescue more likely. They learn dependency. You learn exhaustion. Nobody builds capacity.

When’s the last time you rescued someone from a problem they should have owned?

The false emergency feels productive. It’s actually theft. Stealing their learning opportunity and your strategic bandwidth simultaneously.

The Win: Eight Weeks Under Load

Doctoral final submitted. Critical technology cutover stabilized. Multiple programs advanced. The kind of workload where something usually breaks or someone works weekends.

The shift wasn’t more effort or better time management. It was refusing to treat discomfort like a 911 call.

I ran the triage. Is this Priority 1, 2, or 3? Spent authority where it moved outcomes, stayed out of everything else. Small fires became tuition, not emergencies. They owned solutions. I owned the standard.

Output up. Decision fatigue down. Strategic velocity increased.

The paradox of capacity: do less rescuing to do more leading.

The Protocol

Next time someone brings you a problem, ask one question: “Is this a 911 call or a missed expectation?”

If Priority 1: Safety, customer-facing failure, or legal/payroll exposure? Respond now with full resources.

If Priority 2: Deadline in 24 hours or customer frustration brewing? Engage early to clarify expectations. Don’t take their work back.

If Priority 3: Passes the 48-hour test? Within their authority? Stay out. Your discomfort isn’t their emergency.

Your authority matters most when you don’t spend it on false alarms. Professional responders know this: matching resource to need is what keeps you ready for actual emergencies. Don’t send full structure fire alarm responses to beeping smoke detectors. You’ll have nothing left for actual fires.

The 48-hour rule is your filter. Real emergencies don’t survive two days of waiting to reveal themselves. They announce themselves immediately with clear consequences. Everything else? That’s discomfort, not danger. Their decision to make, not yours to rescue.

Your Next Three Urgent Pings

Run the triage on the next three “urgent” requests you get. Label each Priority 1, 2, or 3.

Priority 1? Go. Priority 2? Engage but don’t solve. Priority 3? Stay out.

If it survives 48 hours without becoming a genuine crisis, it’s not your fire.

Save your rescue capacity for actual emergencies. Everything else is their decision to make.

What false emergency are you treating like a 911 call?

Reply “Checklist” and I’ll share the 7-day anti-rescue protocol.