Last month, we talked about how the jobs of a tiger attendant and a firefighter are similar in that they both present high hazards for the worker. The two workers routinely do their work around a severe, an unforgiving, and an immediate hazard that can almost instantly threaten their safety and wreck their personal well-being. Mother Nature originally designed tigers and fires to complete the special identity and function of the powerful natural objective, which is to survive. To do this, the tiger must be ferocious, and the fire must be devastating. Both roles (fire/tiger) necessitate that their “attendants” routinely operate in their regular jobs up close and personal to these very hazardous natural instincts. Doing this work is basically an unnatural act—normal, sensible folks don’t get up in the morning, put on their attendant/firefighter uniform, and trudge off to occupationally spend the day closely connected to fangs and flames that can easily and naturally quickly assassinate a frail human (comparatively).
The ongoing routine of doing these jobs can lull us into a complacent approach about working close to Mr. Tiger/Fire every day; this is “just another day at the office”; relaxation can be fatal. The point of all this tiger/fire talk is that if you are a zoo or a fire department boss, you had best create a functional (positive) internal environment that continually creates an awareness of and respect for high-hazard work that makes up the basic nature and function of the organization. How the internal leadership system (boss) treats the workers will directly determine the quality and the length of the lives of those workers. That regular, positive treatment will become the launching pad to recovery when a negative thing occurs. The connection between negative/positive is an unusual process and is kind of tricky to describe.
How We Operate in Good Times Builds the Foundation for Recovery in Bad Times
I cannot remember ever receiving a leadership lesson that taught me it is smart (organizationally) “to fix the roof when the sun is shining.” The roof example means that how we operate in good times becomes the foundation of our recovering from bad times. When tigers and fires are just another day at the office, it is really a big deal that the boss create and maintain positive and functional support for workers doing safe and effective everyday work that creates the foundation for the tough conditions that high hazards potentially can create. That positive foundation must use educational near misses and related experiences (from other fire departments and zoos everywhere) to continually “fix the roof.” In my last column, I started the discussion about a boss influencing the inside organizational environment by operating in a positive and progressive manner. Although the effect of a boss being positive is very simple (a no brainer), it seems as though it may be a rare leadership ability, especially when you review surveys where workers rate their bosses.
There is an interesting contrast between positive and negative for a boss. A boss is paid to handle a full range of positive and negative things that just naturally occur in the real world. When you sign up to be a boss, you had better get ready to routinely receive and deal with the negative end of the scale. A lot of human drama gets acted out at night; I learned, after having been a boss for a while, that I never received good news in a phone call after about 10 p.m. The positive/negative contrast after routinely answering a ton of these late-night calls is that the most effective way for a boss to deal with and to play a role in correcting something negative is by being positive—it’s easy to say and hard to do.
After absorbing a lot of reoccurring road rash, I painfully learned that when something went upside down, if I reacted negatively, I made what had already occurred worse instead of better (lesson: functional boss behavior > make things better). Inside the organization, many times my negative hyperventilating was the biggest headline on the vine—simply, my Big Boss negative reaction became bigger news than the problem that had occurred. Many times, a mistake makes the boss angry and the boss reacts in such a negative way that it creates career-long emotional injuries in the very vulnerable (at that moment) participants. The most common injury in the American fire service is hurt feelings.
My reference to being positive (not happy) means that when something goes wrong (and it will), the boss should facilitate a recovery by listening a lot, being intentionally and rationally involved in stabilizing the situation and supporting the welfare of the involved players, facilitating fixing the immediate problem, and then leading in a way that will prevent it from happening again. Doing this positive recovery routine is typically not easy.
Flubs create emotional wreckage; lots of times, what happened is not simple, and effectively fixing it always involves a lot of work. It is much easier, and certainly a lot quicker, for a boss to negatively react to a problem by executing the participants, disconnecting from an effective solution by passionately screaming about having “zero tolerance” for whatever occurred, and then dozing off into the usual state of boss oblivion (forgive my sarcasm). I worked for this guy for 20 years; he taught me that screaming is a lot quicker and takes a lot less effort and ability than fixing.
Every boss has a boss; and when something negative occurs, it is a regular organizational event that the boss must be informed. Bad news day is showtime in the internal relationship because the workers will now learn a lot about their leader based on how that person reacts and responds to a negative event. This is where the “kill the messenger” reference comes from. I reported to a number of bosses; the really effective ones asked in the beginning, “Is everyone okay?” They listened quietly in the middle and asked at the end, “How can I help?” They seemed to understand, based on their personality and the experience of our working together in the past, that they would get the details of the situation as soon as we sorted out what actually happened; included in that report was at least the beginning of a recovery plan.
Good Management Fosters a Positive Environment
Workers want to be a part of an organization that is well-managed. This is another no brainer. Operating in a system that cannot effectively conduct its regular, day-to-day support affairs is difficult, frustrating, and demoralizing. We currently talk a lot about leadership and breathlessly ask the question, “Are you a manager or a leader?” If we answer, “I am a leader,” the game show hits the Bingo! button, plays religious music, and the colored lights blink. That is all well and good. Some effective level of leadership is absolutely necessary to move along into the future; but while we are on the leadership-directed trip to paradise, some manager has got to buy diesel fuel.
Leadership is based on vision, values, mission, and medium- and long-range strategic planning, which is very sexy (and very important). Supervision/managing is about doing the short-term, regular, recurring things that, rain or shine, cause the system to effectively “deliver the mail” every day. These mundane things are not sexy; in fact, when we do them all well, they are many times transparent—until they are not done.
Early in my career, we studied the process of management and supervision (a very out-of-fashion word now). We have discussed in past columns my attending an old-time management class built around the acronym POSDCORB. It was way before Google, so you had to memorize it so you could recite it back on the quiz. It stood for the standard pieces of the management process: Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, COordinating, Reporting, and Budgeting—again, not very sexy but very necessary. I don’t believe that those activities are any less critical today; in fact, they may be even more critical than when I studied them in the 1960s.
I got to be a boss for a long time and was involved in making adjustments when things were out of order; that’s one of the things bosses do. Most of the organizational problems that landed on my desk started in a fire station where there was a local boss (company officer) continually in attendance, and the problem traveled all the way downtown and now was a felony. It could have been fixed by a boss who acted like a supervisor/manager and quietly solved or prevented the problem before it even became a misdemeanor. After it works its way to the strategic level (me), it will now become a huge—many times very confusing—organizational adventure that could have been prevented if the local boss had addressed whatever the problem was before it had any seniority. Most of the time, when a company boss pulls the “No” card, the problem evaporates.
I hear folks say that we must now think out of the box. My old-school response is to really and completely manage what’s in the box before you think out of it. We are a high-performance organization that is about 90 percent management/supervision and 10 percent leadership. I also believe that creativity and innovation effectively help us go where we need to go and be, but we had better have enough diesel fuel to get us there.
I also have observed that a well-managed approach causes the levels to be more internally aligned with each other because we are stable enough that everyone can understand, practice, and refine doing their job in their assigned roles. When this occurs, it is a simple description of “synergy,” where 2 + 2 = 5.
I was a member of a fire department that had a short and very simple mission statement for 25 years: Prevent Harm/Survive/Be Nice. Those five words created the basic definition of what “well managed” looked like when it occurred. Every morning when I went to work, I tried to plan my day around that statement. When I went home, I tried to evaluate the score that day for serving Mrs. Smith. When we both had a good day, it was directly connected to how well we managed.
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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Who Moved My Chair?
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