BY MIKE BEYERSTEDT
In a recently performed Google search, there were 758,000 hits for “Fire Department scandal” and 236,000 hits when the search was changed to “Fire Chief Scandal.” An unfortunate reality in the fire service today is that every week, fire departments find themselves embroiled in controversies, fire chiefs’ careers are ended or derailed, and the public loses a little bit of the high regard in which they hold the fire service. When looking backward, it is hard to imagine how the fire chief who is forced to resign arrived there from the position he was in the day he was promoted to chief, one of the proudest days of his or her life, surrounded by admiring family, friends, and coworkers.
When looking at these situations to see where the train is jumping the tracks, a common theme appears: Our fire departments and fire service leaders are not being tripped up by technical problems; they are most often ensnared by adaptive challenges. This appears to be a classic example of the Pareto Principle, in which 20 percent of your efforts yield 80 percent of your results, and 80 percent of your work delivers only 20 percent of the results. Typically in the fire service, we are putting 80 percent or more of our employee development efforts into technical training where much less than 20 percent of our problems arise, yet 80 percent or more of our problems are coming from the adaptive training areas, where we are putting less than 20 percent of our focus.
Failures in emotional intelligence and leadership are clearly the major factors contributing to the tarnishing of the fire service’s previously glistening reputation. It would be unfair to say every fire department problem is a result of inadequate leadership from the chief’s office, but the standards for leadership are set at the top. Chiefs and senior staff must lead by example, modeling the behaviors they wish to see become part of the fire department culture. That culture can be positive or negative, but it is certainly not formed by mere chance. Leaders need to have a strong foundation based on honesty and integrity, hard work, leadership by example, and a genuine caring for those they lead. Some may be tempted to say this is merely common sense, but based on the fire service headlines today, it is not all that common in practice.
There does appear to be hope for the fire service as attitudes seem to be evolving. Quality, meaningful leadership training for company officers is an issue getting more and more attention on local, national, and even international stages as of late. The so-called “soft skills”–emotional intelligence, strategic planning, and career-long leadership development, which previously were rarely practiced, are now becoming commonplace in progressive fire departments in all corners of the country.
A recent American Express survey revealed that more than two-thirds of managers reported that soft skills are the most important part of management employee performance. The book Hire for Attitude notes that nearly half of new employees fail within the first 18 months and 89 percent of those failures are related to soft skill deficiencies. Examples of the soft skills include work ethic, attitude, communication skills, conflict resolution, negotiation, personal effectiveness, creative problem solving, networking, strategic thinking, team building, and influencing skills. Do any of these skill sets sound as if they could be useful to a lieutenant, battalion chief, or chief? This is not meant to imply that the technical skills can or should be ignored, but a lack of technical skills is not what is landing fire departments and their chief officers on the front pages of the newspaper.
Soft skill development is not quick or easy, but nonetheless, they are the skills that will determine your success or failure as you transition into leadership roles, and they can be attained by almost anyone who pursues them. These skills tell you what projects you can delegate and to whom you should delegate them. They will guide you as you decide whom you can trust, whom to ally yourself with, and whom to seek advice from. But perhaps the most important reason to enhance your soft skills is the impact they will have on the engagement of your employees.
Study after study has shown the positive correlation between employee engagement and business success. Gallup recently performed extensive polling on this and found that nearly 70 percent of the workforce is not engaged. It is estimated that the cost of these disengaged employees is between $250 to $350 billion dollars annually. Some may say that fire departments typically are not-for-profit entities, so employee engagement is not so critical in the fire service. However, thinking along these lines is very shortsighted. Engaged employees have been shown to be injured five times less than their counterparts, to perform their jobs with far fewer mistakes, are 87 percent less likely to leave their departments, are 37 percent less likely to call in sick, are much more efficient in the activities they are assigned, increase public satisfaction through superior customer service, and exert greater discretionary effort in their work.
What do employee engagement and soft skills have to do with one another? Simply being aware of employee engagement is a great example of a soft skill, but, more importantly, as leaders, we have the greatest impact on whether or not our departments are engaged. Some surveys suggest that up to 80 percent of engagement is determined by the company’s leaders and managers. How adept at soft skills our leaders are and how effectively they practice them determine whether or not the firefighters are engaged or disengaged. It is nearly impossible to overestimate the effect leaders have on how engaged our firefighters are, so when if we feel our departments have problems in this area, we need to look at ourselves and our actions as the possible source.
Following are three activities that can meaningfully impact the engagement levels in our engine houses: (1) We can provide leadership development much earlier, when members begin taking roles that involve leadership such as company officer development and mentoring programs. (2) We can ensure that we have a strategic plan that is something more than a binder on a shelf in which our mission, vision, and values are interwoven into everything we do. This lets our people see the big picture and helps them to understand why we do the things we do. It allows for ownership of our process. (3) We need to identify our problem people and then deal with them.
In our department, we have established a mentoring program that is very popular, and we are improving our leadership development programs. Both have been very popular initiatives that have developed surprising internal support. We are in the middle of the strategic planning process, and the early results have been very promising. Identifying the problem people and having the difficult discussions with them have proven to be very effective. The conventional wisdom may be that pointing out shortfalls is being unkind and will ruin relationships, but I have found that oftentimes the employees in question are not fully aware of the impact their behavior is having on the engine companies and their careers. The unkind thing to do is to allow destructive behaviors to continue, dooming those persons to poor performance because they see no reason to change, which limits their careers in the long term. Worse yet is the fact that your high-performing employees become frustrated and discouraged when these toxic tendencies are allowed to continue unchecked, often lowering their job performance.
Being a firefighter is a very complex avocation with competencies that seem to change by the year. Proficiency in these critical areas requires frequent technical training, which we do a pretty good job with on the whole because it is what we became firefighters for–to save lives and protect property. Where we tend to have problems is in the area of soft skills, those things we typically don’t develop in our workforce. We just hope people either have it or learn it on their own. We can do things to develop those skills, and the payoff provides synergistic benefits that have the possibility of improving every aspect of our departments’ performance and efficiency and ensures that the next generation of firefighters will come into a fire service that enjoys the same great image we inherited from those who came before us.
BIO
MICHAEL BEYERSTEDT has more than 25 years in the fire service and is chief in Gulfport, Mississippi. He has a bachelor’s degree in management and organizational development, a master’s degree in organizational leadership, and has recently completed the National Fire Academy’s Executive Fire Officer Program.
