By P.J. Norwood and Frank Ricci
Firefighters often point to the failures of others without seeing how they were set up to fail. Setting the appropriate example allows for emulation of your followers. It seems simple enough yet, we see fire service leaders diminish their own command on a regular basis.
It is hard enough to provide positive change working in any system. It is even tougher if you are working against yourself.
A leader’s self-reflection is integral to positive growth. As a boss, you start off with all the cards. This hand is only diminished by your own behavior. Emulating those who exemplify the ideals you strive for should come naturally. But equally important is recognizing when you falter. Observing benchmarks of behavior that should be avoided can increase your influence and enhance your command.
Throughout our lives, we all will work for many different bosses. This starts at a very young age. Our parents, teachers, and coaches start us off in life, and then we are turned over to the “real world.” There are supervisors throughout our careers who model leadership, both positively and negatively.
In the fire service, supervisors must have command presence (calm, confident, and competent) on and off the fireground. Where are you lacking? Honest self-evaluation is the first step in shoring up your weakness and avoiding stepping into your own trap.
- Command Presence
- A Strong Command Presence Is Essential in All Incidents
- Full Contact Leadership: Sounds Like Command Presence
Are you a good people-person who is calm under pressure? Can you quickly formulate and communicate a plan on the fireground with confidence? Do you have command of all the departments rules, budget, bylaws, policies, or other controlling documents? Or are you just faking your way through?
As a leader you don’t have to have all the right answers, but when you don’t have the right answer you need to be able to ask the right questions.
Since we are dealing with humans, each leader brings their own varying strengths and weaknesses in each of those areas. Some leaders fail on the fireground, whereas some will excel on the fireground but struggle with the administrative side.
Those who recognize the different aspects of their roles can effectively balance operations and administrative duties. He or she can step into a command role on the fireground and eloquently host a meeting of local business leaders wrangling support for a new community initiative and then move into a finance committee and protect and justify the budget increase requests.
Most members of the fire service have worked in commercial emergency medical services (EMS), military, the boardroom, or private industry. Each role has taught us valuable lessons that you can apply to our current positions.
In this series we will review some traits that we have seen and try to avoid every day. Some of these traits will not apply to you. The hard part is looking in a mirror and realizing that some of them do in fact apply to you. To be a successful leader you must look at yourself objectively and be honest with yourself. If you feel that one of these is a weakness, reach out to some close professional friends who will be honest with you. But be prepared! If you ask for honesty, be ready—you may hear what you expect to hear.
1. Failure to Delegate
A leader recognizes that he or she cannot do it all. Just like the complexity of the calls we go to change continually, the responsibilities borne by the fire service leaders swell each day. The “do more with less” expectations affect every level of our rank structure. You must be able to delegate a task but maintain ownership of the responsibility. As the boss, you don’t have to have all the answers, but you do have to ask the right questions. Knowing your team will allow you to cover blind spots. This also allows other members of the team to shine; when they do, ensure they are acknowledged.
2. Failure to Trust Your People
A leader has the ability to assign a task and then allow it to be completed. In our profession, there are many ways to accomplish certain tasks. As a leader, you can’t afford to get caught down in the weeds at the task level. Delegate the task and let the troops accomplish it the best way they can. If they ask for suggestions, provide them. Otherwise, get out of their way and let them work, and remember your way is not the only way. The time to communicate how you want something done at a task level should be performed on the training ground, not the fireground.
Take line size, for example. Your crew should be trained in your expectations during training. If you pull up to a job at a commercial fire and you’re looking at your crew telling them to grab a 2 ½ you are already failing and diminishing your ability to make the right calls. The crew should already know what line to pull and you should be looking at the building, not them.
A common mistake is when a chief officer shows up to another chief’s single-alarm fire when they are not assigned to the alarm. This is where personality comes into play and how your intent is perceived. Most will view this as a situation where the higher chief does not trust the lower chief, especially if you arrive without transferring command and you are still giving orders and not suggestions.
3. Failure to Listen
The most important resource you have as an officer is the people who work for you. If you don’t listen to them, you will never be successful. Those doing the work know it best. Their vision is, at times, a lot narrow than yours may be, but in some cases, a narrow field of vision makes a problem much easier to solve.
One of the common traps discovered in moving up into leadership is the mindset of “if I were in charge now, I could make the right calls,” only to find when you move up those who are now in your old positions may see things differently.
In the fire service, there has been a debate for 100 years on the best type of nozzle. It is funny, as both put out fire, and like the Ford/Chevy debate you will find strong opinions on both sides (1). Here is the trap: say you liked smooth bore nozzles as a firefighter, and as a firefighter you wished the chiefs had a clue and would get input from the members who actually still have to use the tools.
Now that you are in a position to be the decision maker and have the ability to set the world right, you must resist the urge to go with what you think would be best. You now have the ability to break the cycle!
This is where you need to remember your old self: you had the right answer back then, and now you have the ability to reach out to the end users and get their input on what will work best for them. When we are promoted, we often want to do the cool things we did in our last position instead of our new tasks and responsibilities. It is up to you to remember where you came from and empower those in your old position to be able to make the calls that directly affect their position without jeopardizing you or your bosses’ vision.
Decisions should be made as close to the problem as possible, taking into account budget and overall operational goals. If you trust your personnel, permit them have input on issues that directly impact the tasks they are required to perform. Your job is to support them and, in return, they will support you.
Your job as a leader is to evaluate if the decision and the direction that your subordinates want to go in fits into the budget, strategic goals, and organizational objectives of the fire department. These expectations and guard rails are best to be laid out beforehand.
P.J. Norwood is the director of training for the Connecticut Fire Academy. He retired as deputy chief from the East Haven (CT) Fire Department, and has served four years with the Connecticut Army National Guard. He is an FDIC classroom, workshop, and hands-on training instructor, Fire Engineering advisory panel member, and Fire Engineering Book and Video author of The Evolving Fireground: Researched Based Tactics and the “Tactical Perspectives” DVD Series. He also serves on the UL-FSRI technical panel for the study of residential attic fire mitigation tactics and exterior fire spread hazards on firefighter safety. He is a public safety education group advisory member for UL FSRI.
Frank Ricci is the lead author of Command Presence: Increase Your Influence, which will be released at FDIC International 2023. This is a must-read with some of the best contributors the fire service has to offer.
