Fix The Leak

During a leadership and workplace culture session facilitated by advisor Jitendra Vaidya at LIL’s fourth annual retreat, he encouraged participants to spend time “fixing the leak instead of mopping the floor.” This simple yet powerful insight resonated with many people. Continue reading for Jiten’s insights and reflections on his experience behind this perspective.

"I was trying to remember when I first heard the phrase, "Are we too busy mopping the floor to stop the leak?". I either read it somewhere on the internet or from a colleague at Google, I do not rightly remember.

But I remember that when I was managing the Site Reliability group at YouTube, this was something that I often repeated to my team. When we did the quarterly planning exercise to come up with objectives and key results for the quarter, I remember wanting to make sure that we were spending enough time on "fixing the leak" goals and not just on "mopping the floor" goals. Since then, this question has been a part of my toolbox.

It has been my experience that having this awareness is crucial to making a team more effective. You end up documenting more, training more, questioning your assumptions more and generally getting more efficient. It also forces you to do what you do as a team on a day-to-day basis with more awareness. And typically work done with more awareness leads to more enjoyment and less boredom. 

I hope you all will find this as useful while running your organizations as I have.