Photo by Tony Greco.
By Jacob McAfee
The fire service has changed exponentially over the past decade. Changes in job requirements, strategies and tactics, personal protective equipment, and significant cultural changes have been coming seemingly at rapid speeds. For the fire service, these changes can be daunting and feel almost unsurmountable. As these changes occur, policy makers, department officers, or other management officials push them down the organizational structure to the firefighters with substantial resistance. Over the past 10 years, there have been too many instances where a change in policy or culture has failed because of this resistance, leading to poor service delivery, civilian and firefighter injury, or a loss of resources (money, people, equipment). To be successful, change management becomes an indispensable tool for a public service organizations’ ability to move forward. (Odagiy C, 2013, p.1)
In years past, the fire service was protected from financial hardship or a significant discussion about any return on investment. When the fire service simply provided fire protection, the costs were relatively low to the public purse, there was sympathy for workers providing a public service that protects life, and there was a pay formula that removed overt conflict (Fitzgerald, 2005, p. 649); this made it easy to maintain the status quo and build and sustain 100-year-old traditions, even if they were ineffective and costly. This is not the case in the current political and financial environment. Fire service organizations and members must understand how to change—and not just from the top. We can argue all day if we need to change or not, we can argue that change is, in fact, happening. But while we are bickering, the requirements and expectations of our profession are evolving. The word “change” seems to be almost a trigger word in today’s fire service, associated with a negative connotation.
What doesn’t correlate is that most of us seek out change every day; we seek to improve ourselves, our crews, and our service going forward. The goal is to be better today than we were yesterday. In doing so, are we not changing? Are we not seeking out new knowledge, skills, ideas, and processes on how we can be better? The same can be said for change at any level within an organization. By deflecting the idea or theory that change is needed, we neglect our most basic priority to provide effective service to our communities, highly effective teams, diverse skill sets, and impeccable character. Change can be challenging. I’ve worked at fire departments in four different states and on both coasts and served in the United States Marine Corps; change was consistently part of my day. Change can be hard because it challenges our basic necessities as human beings. Looking at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, there are five things people need to improve their productivity, which follow:
- Physiological needs (water, food, air, shelter, and so on).
- Safety needs (job security, health, personal security).
- Love and belonging (family, friendship, connection to a cause).
- Esteem (respect, recognition, status).
- Self-actualization (desire to improve).
To change something you have been doing for years challenges those basic needs and causes uncertainty and anxiety. Change isn’t the problem; it’s how we approach and perceive change. Change is frequently associated with a loss of something, whether it’s what uniform you wear or how you have done something, but it’s certainly not thought of as being positive. Change will almost certainly affect our most basic needs, causing a natural defensive reaction to push back for fear of losing something or the conditioned comfort of muscle memory. For the purpose of this article, growth equals change.
As a leader, I embrace change as much as I can; not doing so is maintaining the status quo, and that means not improving. Not long ago, a study was conducted on some of the top leaders in a variety of fields that wanted to understand the relationship between growth and leadership. What the study found was that, “It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from their followers.” (Maxwell, 2007, p.48)
The study went on to describe that the goal of each day is to get better and to build on the previous day’s progress. Think about that for a moment and relate it to any change in initiative in your organization. Is this not the goal? Each day, the goal is to improve and build off the previous day’s success while working toward the stated goals, objectives, and vision. In addition to feeling like Maslow’s needs are being taken from us, when it comes to leading change efforts, we are our own worst enemy. Generally, the fire service thinks of change as a project more than a process, and we “overestimate the importance of events and underestimate the power of the process.” (Maxwell, 2007, p. 48) To be effective at leading change, you must understand that it’s a process, not an event, one in which Kotter (2012) describes as an eight-stage process.
I think back to a simple example I learned while attending the National Fire Academy’s Executive Fire Officer (EFO) Program. It was the first day of class, and a group of classmates and I had just shown up at the classroom. As we walked into the classroom, we were able to sit in any seat we wanted. Naturally, most people, including myself, migrated to seats near people they already knew from a previous year. The classroom was set up just like the year before; the instructor stood in front of the room, and I sat next to a familiar face. It was comfortable. After lunch, we all returned to the classroom. However, all the tables, chairs, and seating assignments were changed! This wasn’t a big deal, but surprisingly, I felt uncomfortable. This simple change disrupted my basic needs related to safety, belonging, and even esteem, as described by Maslow.
My safety (personal security) was disrupted as the comfort of sitting next to someone I had previously known and built a relationship with was gone. Additionally, the rapport I had built created a connection and a friendship between my fellow EFO; now, I was sitting somewhere else. This caused me to feel anxious and unsure about how this would work out. Last, my esteem was challenged; during our previous classes and conversations, I felt that I developed a healthy respect between my prior tablemate, who had held me in high esteem. I would now have to build that all over again with someone else. Simply switching seats and sitting next to someone (a peer, for that matter) that I had not yet met caused my emotional reactions to change. If I can feel like that, even temporarily, what might other firefighters or people within our organizations feel when something significant is changing?
Although this example is trivial, it drives home the point. If small changes can create some type of fear or hesitation, how may members react when leaders within the organization challenge department fire service philosophy or traditional thinking? Leading substantial change will require evaluation, effort, perspective shifting, team building, communication, and a commitment to the process that is focused on people experiencing change rather than the change itself being successful.
Throughout my career, I have relied on Kotter’s eight stages of change to prepare, plan, implement, assess, and improve organizational and small team changes and progressive initiatives. Before we talk about the eight stages that effectively lead change efforts, we must understand the “Golden Rule” and the preparation that needs to happen before we decide to implement change.
The “Golden Rule” is that change cannot be based on a personal agenda. Only propose change within your organization to improve service delivery; increase safety; enhance professional development and training; or have it be driven by a regulation, standard, or stakeholder expectation.
The overwhelming reason change is so difficult is… well, you’re dealing with people. People more frequently associate change with a loss of something vs. a gain of something positive. Just as in the example above, moving chairs to a different table and sitting next to different people initially made me feel like I was losing personal security, esteem, and belonging. To overcome these issues and minimize the perceived threat, take the following three things into consideration:
- Change should come from an identified gap or information learned from an evaluation. Keep in mind the gap is the distance from where you are to where you strive to be as an organization. Negative or positive change will move you closer to your desired destination.
- Observe and assess the organizational culture and get to know your people. Often, people are a product of their past environment. Past leadership may have not mentored or trained their firefighters, there may have never been any change proposed previously, and they have normalized their past processes and behaviors that size up any change to the status quo as a threat to their existence. As a leader, it is your job to understand this history and identify how each employee has experienced it in his career. You don’t know what you don’t know, so ask.
- Communicate strategically—clearly, early, and often.
“Leadership fails when they look to lead a group of people before they know anything about the people they are leading; listen, learn, and lead.”
–Maxwell, 2001
You can identify gaps from various department reports and assessments such as accreditation and program compliance assessments; stakeholder meetings; past grievance trends; past employee discipline trends; department analytics; survey results; and, most importantly, feedback from employees, just to name a few.
“If you spend too much time focusing on the past and the present, you will surely miss the future.”
— John F. Kennedy
Culture Assessment
Two ideas you may use to help assess the culture of your organization that I have found successful include the following:
- Meet with each employee, seeking feedback on their ideas, expectations, and problems.
- Ask a standard set of questions to all employees and create a trend report of aggregate information that helped identify common themes. This helps identify specific issues that normally may be hidden within the team are addressed. This report is briefed to all department employees so they are aware of common issues within the department and how it will address those issues to improve its people, its brand, and its mission.
When meeting with employees, I ask them the following standard questions:
- What are the three most significant challenges the department is facing, and how would you address them?
- What are the most significant strengths of the department, and how would you capitalize on them?
- If you could change anything in the department right now, what would it be and why?
- What are your personal or professional goals?
- What secondary/extra duties are you involved in?
- Do you think your skills are being used appropriately? If not, what do you want to be involved in?
- What is a talent or skill that you have that I don’t know about?
- What are your expectations of me?
Observe, and be aware of the interaction you see daily; administer anonymous surveys seeking information on what is good and not good and seek employee input on how they would fix it; invest in active conversation and listen to what your employees are doing and saying; work with the union and be as transparent as possible. This qualitative and quantitative data will help identify gaps your organization may have and identify common themes or major issues that allow meaningful, people-driven change to accomplish your mission, not agendas or personal pursuits.
Communication is key to any firehouse or fireground. Communicate early and clearly, lay out expectations, solicit feedback, and produce discussion. The most critical piece in early communication regarding any possible change is to establish the “why” behind it, connect how it will benefit the team and the organization, and what may happen if change does not occur. Make sure most of the communicating is done in person in some fashion; secondary communication through some other electronic or written means should be used as an anchor prior to any face-to-face communication.
Communicate often! As people feel change coming or expect that change will come, their natural reaction is to do a combination of things: ask questions, start rumors in the absence of information, align with factions for or against the anticipated change, and so on.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article, which will be posted on Friday, July 20.
Jacob McAfee, MS, CFO, CTO, MIFreE is a 19-year fire service veteran and the chief of the Fresno City College (FCC) Fire Academy and director of Fire Technology programs. He is a former fire chief for the Department of Defense (DoD). McAfee has served as chief, assistant chief (AC) of training, AC of fire prevention, and AC of operations. He is also a United States Marine Corps veteran, beginning his professional service in Yuma, Arizona, and going on to serve in Iraq from January to October in 2003. On return from deployment, McAfee was stationed at Camp Pendleton in California to serve as AC of operations before deploying to Iraq again in 2006. After honorably completing his military service in 2007, McAfee entered the DoD federal fire service for the Department of the Navy (DoN) at NAWS China Lake in 2008. He worked for the DoD as a fire service professional for the Marine Corps, the Air Force, and the Army.
McAfee is a registered instructor for the California State Fire Marshal’s Office and the California Specialized Training Institute, where he teaches hazardous materials, intermediate and advanced incident command system, swiftwater rescue, urban search and rescue, and technical rescue. He completed the National Fire Academy’s Executive Fire Officer Program (EFOP), and has Chief Fire Officer (CFO) and Chief Training Officer (CTO) credentials from the Center for Public Safety Excellence (CPSE). In addition, McAfee reviews CFO credential applications and serves as the mentoring curricula subject matter expert for the CPSE. He has completed the Harvard Kennedy School of Executive Education’s “Strategic Frameworks for Nonprofit/Nongovernmental Organizations” class and serves on the professional development and education committee with the Institute of Fire Engineers as a member grade.
As a certified peer fitness trainer through the American Council on Exercise, he developed and implemented the IAFF/IAFC Wellness Fitness Initiative at multiple departments. McAfee is fire service author who has been published in Fire Engineering and other fire service periodicals and has presented nationally for ARFF operations. He has master’s degrees in occupational safety and health and emergency management while currently pursuing his PhD in emergency management with Capella University.
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