By Ian W. Cassidy
Leadership is one of the biggest challenges facing the fire service today. I have observed that many leaders shift their core beliefs and practices every time a new article or book hits the streets—as one of my friends and mentors has termed it, “leadership by article of the month.” This article discusses two essential elements that successful leaders must possess and uphold if their team is to enjoy long-term success.
Having been a part of the fire service since I was 18 years old, I have worked with some amazing officers and senior members who taught me what it means to be an excellent firefighter and leader. The best leaders I worked with knew exactly what got them out of bed each morning before coming to shift. They had their “why” figured out, and they could demonstrate and communicate it to every other member of the organization at any given moment. Although I have no doubt that these leaders read and studied articles on leadership to help them clarify their positions, it is clear to me now that they studied them for clarity. There was rarely, if ever, a time when they drastically deviated from their course to pursue a new one based on an article or a book they had recently read. These leaders had figured out their core doctrine, and they stuck to it. Figuring out your “why” hinges on many things; I will focus on two: mission clarity and decision-making skills. These two elements are interconnected; the absence of one drastically affects the other.
Mission Clarity
Mission clarity is the foundation on which a team’s success is based. A team that doesn’t know what success looks like in the eyes of its leader is destined to fail. A company/crew or an organization’s mission should paint a picture of what success looks like regardless of the type of incident involved. The leader of a company or an organization should make the mission easy enough so that all members can understand it and broad enough so that the team can still maneuver easily when the bell goes off.
I worked for a battalion chief who understood the value of mission clarity. He talked it up on a regular basis and made sure that each of his officers knew what success looked like. His mission was simple: “Make the situation better.” It worked well because it was easy to understand and provided leeway for the members. Company members knew they had the latitude to operate professionally in any way we saw fit to mitigate the problem, and the chief was confident that when the company cleared the incident, the situation had been improved. In this system, there is no micromanaging; therefore, members were empowered and became more efficient. There was less ambiguity throughout the battalion. This simplified mission statement decreased the amount of organizational energy the supervisors (battalion chief and company officer) expended.
Furthermore, the empowerment that each team enjoyed created an atmosphere of learning and enhanced decision-making abilities. For example, when the team could have mitigated the incident in a more efficient manner, the issues were discussed in after-action reviews (AARs) or over the phone with the officers involved. It wasn’t a scolding session or a disciplinary issue. It was a discussion about “why.” The chief took the time to communicate his intent (mission/end state) frequently enough so that his doctrine, which was always in line with the organization’s and the public’s, was so ingrained in the minds of his officers and other members that their decisions were similar to those he, himself, would have made. It prepared all members for making decisions that would contribute to the leader’s view of mission success.
A sports team doesn’t take the field and allow its members to run whatever play they feel is most appropriate. They had been provided with mission clarity beforehand, and they practiced each play, but they could maneuver into a different play during the game when directed. Successful teams, because of their practice together, can anticipate a change in play and react. They know their leader and teammates so well that a shift in plays creates only minor bumps in the road. Like sports teams, a successful fire company or organization with a clear mission and used to working in unison can easily act on called plays and also be able to shift into another play with little disruption.
Decision Making
Allowing subordinates to make decisions is empowering and creates buy-in. There are two categories of decisions in the fire service: emergency and administrative. Decisions made on the fireground are emergent (high risk); those regarding station life are administrative (low risk). Good decisions are needed to achieve a desired end state. To make good decisions, you must practice making decisions. Before empowering my company to make decisions, I set clear boundaries that explained the areas in which they would be operating. Specifically, if a decision could hurt, injure, or kill; waste taxpayer money; or damage the station or apparatus, I needed to be included in making the decision. If these parameters were absent, they were free to make the decision, but they would also own the decision.
With a clear understanding of their operating area, the crew can make low-risk decisions that usually affect their daily life at the firehouse. A typical morning would start with a briefing I gave to the crew along with all the tasks on hand for the day. Outside of any scheduled activities, they decided in what order and how they would complete these tasks. This gave them the opportunity to decide how their shift would play out and created a buy-in atmosphere when completing tasks. If poor decisions were made, there was little to no risk, and the consequences were usually just inconvenient. When mistakes were made that provided opportunities for learning how to complete these tasks, we would talk about them. This practice, over time, morphed many daily tasks into the way I would have done them had I just given orders at the beginning. This is the foundation for making the larger, strategic, high-risk decisions as trust builds and responsibility expands.
Over a year (sometimes more), I expanded their decision-making opportunities to some higher-risk (fireground) tasks. At a house fire, for example, we arrived on scene, and I completed my size-up, gathered my gear and tools, and completed a 360° walk-around of the home. Typically, I would come back from my 360 and expect to see my two back-seaters with a flushed, charged hoseline at the front door that had been forced but was still closed to control the interior conditions. This time was no different, except that the senior firefighter had also taken a quick second to punch a hole in the ceiling to check for fire in the attic space, something that I would usually do just before we made entry. It wasn’t profound or amazing, but he realized that my 360 was taking a bit longer because of the layout of the home, so he made a decision that facilitated getting the first line to the fire. This decision came on the heels of crew training and AARs of previous fires where he learned why we do things this way. Without jeopardizing any of his assigned tasks, he expanded his view of the incident and started to think about the next actions that needed to be taken. He was putting himself in my shoes.
I do not support freelancing on incidents. Some may argue that this was freelancing. I would submit that this action was more in line with being an offline or a standing order. As stated earlier, we had trained and talked about these actions many times prior to his being empowered. So, while he wasn’t given a direct order, he knew the consequence was low and the benefit would outweigh it. He was thinking, and his action assisted in the incident’s mitigation.
Company Tactics for Mission Success
Following are a few of the techniques I use in developing my company and the leaders who will replace me. Those who work with me know that what I want to achieve is that four captains, not a captain and three firefighters, get off the truck. That’s not to say that our paramilitary hierarchy goes out the window—far from it—but the decisions made on any scene aren’t coming as a shock to anyone because the crew gets an explanation of “why” I made a certain decision daily. This helps them to anticipate my actions in the future and to begin to digest the doctrine in a way that will, hopefully, make them more capable officers when they promote. In the meantime, I can enjoy multiple future leaders who are thinking similar things that enable them to catch more problems in their infancy so that they are easier to resolve and to keep on-the-job injuries and complaints to a minimum.
Another tool I employ is for team members preparing for promotion tests, typically for company officer. When members come to me on their time off or when they bid into my house, I invite them into the office and ask them what their expectations are for their company. These folks obviously don’t have crews assigned to them yet, but they have worked for many officers in the past and should have some idea of what they will expect from their future crew. I then assign them to bring me an outline of their first-day speech covering their expectations. We then meet again, and I have them read each of their expectations to me. I then ask, one by one, their reason for each expectation. The result has been the same each time. They give me a few generic reasons, sometimes one or two good ones, and then say they don’t really know or that’s the way it has always been done. I then give them another few days to explain their reasons for their expectations. When they finish that step, something great happens—they begin to realize who they are. They can see clearly where they may have a bias or where good or bad company officers influenced them, and this is the whole point. Once these future officers realize who they are, they won’t have a need to lead people by whatever wind of change comes their way. They’ll use great leadership articles for their intended purpose—to bolster and clarify their positions—and not to drastically alter the course of their company/organization.
Organizational Tactics for Mission Success
If an organization is to be focused on its mission, its members must be introduced to this skills-building process in the fire academy, not at the station/battalion level. When I was a training captain running recruits through the fire academy, one of the first talks I gave regarded academy end state. I told each recruit that my intent at the completion of the academy was for them to be thinkers, not robots. I was clear that they would always be following the orders given by their officers, but we took extra time in each evolution to give them an explanation about why we do things “this way.” This sparked conversation and clarity on the tasks that followed and how each contributed to the overall strategy. After the 2010-11 academy, and now seven years later, these firefighters are excelling in their craft and are light years ahead in their thinking from where I remember being at their stage. Although I fully understand the time constraints recruit academies typically have, this practice is worth its weight in gold for long-term succession planning and creating teams of thinkers. An organization of men and women who know why they come to work each day, what the mission is, and what mission success looks like doesn’t have a public perception (complaint) problem and is probably catching issues (fireground or administrative) in their infancy, which leads to safer working conditions and less time off for job-related injuries.
Jack Sparrow Syndrome
An equal number of new and veteran officers have never come to a full realization of why they do what they do. They haven’t taken the time to thoroughly understand what makes the great officers they worked for great. Part of the reason for this is the fire service culture in which many have grown up. Most firefighters are rarely given an opportunity to make decisions that influence station life, let alone the fireground, until they are officers; it’s a “seen but not heard” scenario. The result, many times, is officers who either make no decisions for fear of failure or who make all the decisions that perpetuate the problem. Mission clarity is a completely foreign concept, and many come into the role without any developed doctrine on their mission. This ambiguity often forces new officers who desire to be great leaders to rely on the current trend in their favorite publication to explain their intent. This creates an environment where the rules change each month and the crew or organization is thrust into feelings of uncertainty and distrust. What’s more, the crew or organization’s members are likely reading the same articles, which only solidifies their feelings that their leaders don’t know what they are doing and are playing this leadership thing by ear! If you’ve ever seen the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, you know that the character Jack Sparrow had a compass that pointed to whatever he desired most at that time. I liken Captain Jack to Captain or Battalion Chief Smith in the fire service. It is said that credibility is built on time, endurance, and consistency. Captain Jack Sparrow may not rely on credibility, but Captain/Battalion Chief Smith surely does. When the picture of mission success changes frequently, credibility is eroded, as is the ability for other members to make decisions that contribute to mission success.
If you find your company or your organization constantly revisiting issues that revolve around poor decisions, it may be because of a lack of mission clarity. It may be that the monthly shifting of the compass needle has created an atmosphere in which it’s every pirate for himself. Take a step back, seek out that clarity from your superiors, translate it to your team, and talk it up daily. Take time out of your day to discuss the decisions you made on a given incident or issue (formally or informally), explain the “why,” and be clear about what success looks like. These practices will make your organization, battalions, and companies more resilient when problem solving and will boost their morale.
Ian W. Cassidy, a 20-year veteran of the fire service, is a training captain at the Northwest Fire/Rescue District in Tucson, Arizona. He is a certified fire instructor II and fire officer I and teaches the National Fire Academy leadership series in Arizona. He has served in various leadership roles in divisions such as emergency medical services, training, and special operations (hazmat and technical rescue). He is a contributor to the ISFSI Training Officer’s Desk Reference.
