As I am approaching ten years of IT engineering team management, I identify more with this model than I would have just a few years ago. Years ago I would be going from crisis to crisis in a vein attempt to try and put out smoldering fires myself. It is exhausting fighting all those fires. In hindsight ... there will always be smoldering fires. I now put more thought into which fires to focus on myself with those precious few hours one has in a given day and which to coax team members to try and put out themselves.

A bit more of a tactical view of this scenario as it pertains to production outages can be found in this article here: http://bit.ly/rDCS7