BY ALAN BRUNACINI
I was hanging out with a group of young firefighters the other day in a seminar, and one of the bright lights asked me why I used the old-time term “boss” so much in our discussion. He said that the reference “boss” had an autocratic flavor and the modern worker did not appreciate anyone or anything that was “bossy.” This led to an interesting and energetic conversation that shifted to a very contemporary subject and related question I hear about a lot today in my travels: “Are you a manager or a leader?” When the discussers get fatigued, the discussion then generally evolves into the pretty simple agreement that managers manage things and leaders lead people.
Today in that discussion, the word “manager” receives a pretty lukewarm (or less) reception, particularly from young folks. Conversely, when someone says “leader,” the lights go dim and religious music is automatically piped into the room—sometimes, the students quietly swoon in the dim light when they hear the “L” word.
Now, with that as a backdrop, imagine the reaction from the young and the restless when an old geezer in a goofy shirt shows up and starts batting around the very obsolete word “boss” in place of the standard modern words “manager” and “leader.” Even if they can’t agree on which is which (leader or manager), either word sounds a lot more okay to the latest generation than “boss.”
I enjoy these outings at fire service youth camp very much. I think the current generation is terrific, even though it continues to do what every other generation has done for the past gazillion years—that is, decorate and now pierce their bodies in a way that absolutely baffles their stodgy old parents. I think today’s kids bring an electronic skill level that connects them to the world in a way we could never imagine. I don’t think we can predict the effect of this capability in the future when all old “technology refugees” kick the bucket and clear the way for the new “technology natives” to take over.
In these discussions today, I describe my context of the word “boss.” I was raised in a time before the advent of self-actualization. The reference “work ethic” had not yet been invented. Then, there was no ethic attached to it—it was just plain WORK. Times were pretty simple; there were bosses and there were workers. Together, they did the work of the enterprise—for us, it was mostly firefighting and getting ready to do firefighting. We did not sit around the kitchen table and collectively contemplate the comparison of leadership and management, although I believe that that discussion today is very relevant and legitimate.
I think that the focus and preoccupation with “the work” fit into our current discussion about customer service. In that discussion, I described that I was so attached to the work that it took years (literally) for me to understand that the customer who receives our service remembers a lot more about how we treated her than the tactical details of how we operated. I think that the discussion about what we call the boss fits into this discussion very well.
My old-school approach to all this leading, managing, or bossing labeling/naming is that how that person behaves is a lot more critical to our being effective than how that person fits into the definition of a word. I was raised at a time that when I got my first job (construction worker), my mom told me to pay attention and do what my BOSS told me to do, to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut, and if I didn’t understand something to figure it out for myself—that it was not my boss’s job to explain everything to me. My dad (man of few words) simply said, “At night, they want you tired.” That was my highly sensitive parental send-off into the workforce.
If we look at how things have changed, supervisors now must manage workers in a politically correct way. Young people are taught that if they don’t understand something to ask “why,” and starting a long time ago we all have been taught to practice “participatory management.” As an example of the new way, we old dogs were taught that if we can automatically learn the new trick of including a brief description of “why” in our initial instructions that the effective accomplishment rate of that order is tripled.
When I look back at the very first bosses I worked for, the best, smartest, and most effective ones just naturally did that. They must have come from the factory with that very innate capability because none of them (all fine people) had gone to graduate school. They all seemed to send the message by patiently including and explaining the why. They really explained (completely) what they wanted me to do because they wanted me to do a good job, not because they thought I was stupid. The instructions they gave me at an early age have continually directed me up to old age. I guess when that occurs, they call it “timeless.”
It has been an interesting experience to get to watch the “leadership train” get going. It has continued to attract a lot of riders for the past 50 years. The discussion about the names we attach to people, places, and things is a natural and very positive part of the ride. The train also has developed a lot of sidetracks as it has chugged along, and these little spurs have gone on in a lot of related and important ways. One critical part of the process is how the whole adventure always connects back in some way to “the work” that is directly connected to the business of the business.
I have had a happy time in the fire service being around when a lot of change has occurred. During most of that time, I was a boss, and I had a boss. I got to personally and very directly live through (in a very progressive place) many of the regular phases of occupational, academic, and vocational development that have happened to our service in that 50-year period. During that time, it was my job to explain some new “thing”—a new service, new technique, new procedure, new technology, or new policy. I spent a lot of time in meetings with the troops, interacting with them, trying to describe the latest new part of our collective trip to the promised land. I would typically hand out travel brochures with scenic pictures of the train ride we were about to depart on, and I would typically present a description of how lovely life was going to be when we mastered the latest/greatest change on our never-ending train ride to continuous improvement land.
Those discussions created an incredible opportunity for me to actually apply the material that was loaded (into me) onto the leadership train that I started riding on as a young student. In effect, the train I was on pulled into the station; the conductor said, “This is where you get off, kid”; and then I had to actually trudge into a classroom at the training academy and watch real, live, many very experienced, stone cold killer firefighters shuffle into the room and get ready for my next lesson in Fire Service Change 101.
Most of the participants had attended many meetings in those same classrooms where some change agent enthusiastically described a bright new day that would magically emerge from his newer, better, shinier idea. They had developed very skillful routines to effectively deflect change. As a young firefighter, I overheard an old soldier give a short/sweet summation of his relationship to the newly arrived change agent: “I was on this corner when you got here, and I will be on this corner when you’re gone.”
Virtually, all my “students” had to stop watching the baseball game and get on Big Red and head to the training academy to listen to “Boy Wonder” talk about his latest hallucination. It was and still is really interesting to be directly involved when regular academic organizational transformation theory (read: plain/simple change) abruptly and violently collides with the actual 1:30 p.m. afternoon class you must conduct on a B-Shift day in classroom number 3.
Many of the old soldiers would mutter to their younger crew members as they walked into the classroom, “Keep your mouth shut, and we will go home early.” About halfway through the event, a fight would break out (verbal, generally), and then the real conversation/communication would begin. Most of the meetings ran beyond the regular quitting time. I quickly learned that proposing a change to a group of smart, experienced firefighters that they have never thought about or considered would always produce a lot of loud, interesting, and funny noises.
Being involved in a bunch of those “let’s get on the change train and go to a swell new place” experiences caused me to get to hang out for a long time with essentially all the various components of what is involved in actually (not academically) improving the performance of a busy, energetic service delivery organization. Being part of that process involved me in trying to explain changes that involved basic systems we used to conduct operations. Some of these explanations had a lot of pieces and parts. A big part of gaining understanding involved creating a discussion that produced the right set of questions. Firefighters are great question askers, and having to somehow answer two of those very simple questions created two lifetime projects for me that are still underway.
In the early ’70s, our service began the initial development of the incident command system. I was the person who got to investigate, study, and bring home the initial development process that occurred in Southern California. After we brought it home, we then had to miniaturize the large-scale big deal command system to fit the little routine, local tactical deals to which we typically respond. We packaged up our own hometown version of the system into lesson plans and presented it to our response chiefs. They patiently listened to all the system descriptions of the new deal (all stated in overview system terms). When I was finished, one of the senior chiefs respectfully raised his hand. I called on him, and he said, “Chief, thank you for presenting all the details of the fine new command system, BUT what do you want us to do when we are in command?”
Almost 40 years later, I am still answering his question, and I don’t think/hope that we will ever finish the answer because we will never learn the final thing about incident command. The foundation of how we answered his question was the development of the eight standard command functions. The basic functions have held up pretty well throughout the years, but we are learning new stuff about the safe and effective application of them virtually every day. His very basic question has kept me happily busy for a lifetime, and now I have passed the question down to my two sons, who have taken the answer to a new electronic level (Blue Card Command).
The second question that has produced a lifetime project for me to answer occurred during the time when we were introducing the improved customer service currently being discussed in this column. A major word that continually emerges when we talk about taking care of Mrs. Smith is “nice.” I used to underline it in the letter she would send us and would do the four marks and then a line across to keep track of every five times it came up in conversations, discussions, and classes. One day, I was in a meeting with the troops in the beginning of the “nice” campaign, and a member of the class asked me, “Chief, lately you have been talking about ‘nice’ a lot. What do you want us to do that is nice?”
We started out this month bouncing around the connection between leadership and management and how the dynamics of the two have created a lot of interesting energy. I described my old time entry into the workforce when the word “boss” was used in a very natural way. During my time being gainfully employed as a fire officer, I stuck with using the word “boss” simply because they told me on the train ride that leaders deal with vision, mission, and values and managers deal with quality, quantity, time, and cost.
Those are all critical things that must be done to keep the train going, but I think that of all the old and new things we can call ourselves, the person who is the closest and the most directly connected to actually influencing the work is the “boss.” I also think that an absolutely legitimate question a worker can ask the boss is, “Boss, what do you want me to do when I am ___?” It is also absolutely critical that the boss be able to answer the question in terms the worker can understand.
Next month, we will discuss how we answered the question, “What does ‘nice’ mean?”
Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the fire service Web site bshifter.com.
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