No-Brainer Management, Part 4: Tell Me What You Want

BY ALAN BRUNACINI

Last month, I started a discussion about a fire officer who was my boss when I was a young firefighter. He created a set of lessons for me that have lasted a lifetime. He served as a role model during the most formative time in my career—the time when I was attempting to learn how leadership was connected to effective performance (among a ton of other lessons). I described some of his characteristics and capabilities and related how the word “handler,” reserved for and rarely used to describe an A+, real, live, exceptional, fire-eating humanoid suited him to a “T.”

As I worked with him, I watched and covertly took notes (mental and actual) on how he operated. As I continued to observe the environment inside his company (Engine 1), I noticed that the firefighters who worked for him always seemed to be more effective, safer, and happier than those who worked for other officers. It took me a long time to refine my description/explanation of his approach, but I think my observations and personal experience as a recipient of his leadership reflected that he did a really simple set of basic boss behaviors with his troops.

When you worked for him, he would do the following:

1. Tell you what to do.

Tell You What to Do

This process was basic, simple, and effective. He matched how he instructed you based on where/how the work was to be done. If you were on the fireground, he would tell you what to do in a specific, calm, clear way. If it was tactical time (discretionary), he would involve you in the description and discussion of the work to be certain you understood what he wanted you to do. If dangerous activities were going on, he would slightly raise his voice (very big deal) to give a specific order.

Off the incident scene, he would deal with his members in a very informal, participatory way. Lots of times, his members were more aware of the routine work details, and he would engage them simply by listening to them. He had captured the ability to use his personality (body parts) to give an order without giving an order; he would personally interact with another person. When that person walked away, everyone was smarter and everything got done in a simple, quiet, and effective way. Watching this, I finally figured out that what I was seeing was what real, live, in-the-street leadership looked like.

Give You the Training and Tools to Do It

He was a great trainer. If you worked for him, you just naturally “went to school,” and that classroom was wherever our company was. He would make little graphic drawings of burning buildings and tape them to the fridge every morning. These little sketches created a continuous, shiftlong (or even longer) energetic discussion. When you got on the rig to go on a call, you knew you were going to do a preplan on wherever you were going or someplace on the way back (or both). If he thought you needed to know something (anything), he would assign finding out about that item. He seemed to have the skill and intuition to get the lesson ahead of the test. He had an unusual approach to training his troops: He would routinely create a 10-minute class or drill. He had figured out that all classes were not created (or received) equally. Sometimes, if the session was dull or didn’t go anywhere, it deserved only 10 minutes, so it stopped pretty quickly; most of the time, the class lasted two hours.

Get Out of Your Way

He had the self-confidence (and sense) to effectively leave his troops alone when they were doing their work. He knew when to personally intervene. Being approachable was a critical part of his relationship with his workers; he was always accessible, open, and affirmative. He would let us solve difficult tasks, sometimes to the point of being frustrated, but he would never let the problem hurt us. It seemed as if he had the sense of being close (but not too close) to where we were doing our work. He behaved as a boss in a way that gave his troops credit for their efforts; this created ongoing motivation to keep the troops performing better and better.

Tell You How You Did

He had a natural curiosity about how effective firefighting operations were—not only what we did but also what happened everywhere else. We continually discussed the result of what happened when we would go out and solve a customer’s problem. He connected us to ongoing feedback on what worked and what didn’t work and sometimes lots of discussion on an incident problem that could hurt/kill us. He told his troops how they did. Doing this may seem very simple (and it is), but it is rare to have a boss who consistently completes the standard work cycle with an open, honest, current nonmicromanaged review of the effectiveness of the procedures and workers.

THE INSIDE-OUTSIDE CUSTOMER CONNECTION

The reason I take the time and space to continue to describe my old boss is that his approach to managing his work group made it possible for us to always deliver effective service to the Smith Family. Working under his command taught me that we were only in business to be continually ready to hop on Big Red so we could motor out to quickly do the work required to solve the problem that (at that moment) was wrecking the customer’s life. Connecting how we operate (on the inside) to the needs of the customer (on the outside) has been for me a career-long challenge. Working for my old boss has set the stage early in my life as a firefighter to begin to understand the (no-brainer) parts of delivering positive service to those we protect.

He taught those who worked for him the following lessons:

• Mrs. Smith is the only reason we are in business. She is our outside customer. He continually led a never-ending company discussion about how critical it was for us to be prepared to do “the work” required to physically solve the incident problem. We must process whatever we are doing in relation to how it is affecting what we do for Mrs. Smith. If what we are doing does not affect her, we should ask, “Why are we doing it?” The longer I was around him, the more I understood that how we were treated and how we behaved in our firehouse got delivered out to Mrs. Smith at her house.
• We must look at the situation through both her personal terms, which are emotional, and our professional terms, which are (hopefully) rational. He was a real-life model for his troops when and where he personally responded. He had an interesting and unusual combination of characteristics that provided the ability to relate to tactical, very rational stuff that required quick, tough direction. He could just as effectively communicate with a scared 85-year-old woman who just had a fire in her kitchen. Later in my career, I was challenged to lead an effort to create this rational/emotional versatility in how we delivered service. He was the behavior picture I always tried to move us all toward.
• When I worked in his fire company, we pretty much only did firefighting. We never referred to or really considered anyone a customer. We referred to anyone who needed or received our service as a “victim” and, unfortunately, we many times treated the person as a victim. Twenty years later, I had a minor role in developing a customer service initiative that was built on the feedback we consistently received from those who received our service. The most memorable thing about our time with the Smith Family is how the family members feel they were treated by our troops. They consistently use the word “nice” when they describe how we treated her. NICE = respect/ kindness/consideration/patience.

I mentioned last month that my boss was highly courageous. When I look back on how we treated the people we helped, our company would consistently deliver what we now call “added value.” The big bosses frowned on our doing this; they maintained that our singular role was firefighting, period. When the fire was out, we were ordered to go home (sometimes very quickly). He had the guts to not pay much attention to doing this. He would direct us to do anything we could to make the customers more comfortable or assist in their recovery. As a baby firefighter, I marveled at how naturally he did this. He was simply 20 years ahead of the old-fashioned system. He was capable and assertive enough that the hardheaded (obsolete) bosses above him pretty well left him alone. Inside the department, he was somewhat of an organizational junkyard dog. Courage was a critical personal component in qualifying as a “handler.”

Now, when I look back on his being my boss, I think I have enough experience (road rash) to really understand how effective he was because he had two basic parts (I guess he could be called a schizophrenic). He had the physical capability to do the manual labor part of what we did. He was very fit, coordinated, and physically skillful. He loved to engage in a battle with the fire. He had an expression I heard a gazillion times and I dearly loved to hear him say, “What we do, my lads, is find the fire, cut it off, and put it out!” The other side of him was just as effective in delivering what we have come to call “emotional labor.” He had the ability to connect to a person who was out of balance for just about any reason and to relate to how that person felt at that moment. He would use that interpersonal connection to “nudge” that person toward the okay end of the feeling/recovery scale. He seemed to do this in whatever situation he was involved in. Later in life, we developed a description of his skill: “emotionally literate.”

His stature as a leader caused members of the department to connect to him when they needed support, assistance, and personal kindness. I watched a steady stream of firefighters seek him out for help. He was a trusted, positive figure at a time before employee assistance programs, peer support teams, and any kind of stress-management assistance. He had the personality and skill to interact in a way that would point a troubled person in a positive direction. While I watched a steady stream of those seeking assistance come to him, he never violated the trust they had in him. I used to tease him that his role many times resembled being a bartender. He simply applied his customer-service approach inside and outside.

As I have been around awhile being a boss, I many times recall and reflect on his basic approach. I really have not been able to improve on his four-step plan simply because the work process has not changed very much throughout the years. Today, we may depend on connecting more electronically to the workers, but they consistently want their boss to tell them in clear, doable terms what is expected of them. They also want the system (mostly the boss) to effectively prepare them to be successful doing their job. When we get past the ready/get-set stage, we are generally anxious to “go” so we can get the job done. Effective bosses know when to have a “loose hand” and when to tighten control. We have now invented a term that describes an insecure, overly supervising boss = micromanager, who typically disrupts the performance process. After we play the game (finish the work), we want to know what the score is. We all need feedback on our performance.

Today, we call the effect my old boss created using his before/during/after approach “empowerment.” Watching that empowered routine work has made me realize that how the leader of the work group manages the team directly translates into the quality of the service the customer receives. My boss led our company with a simple, effective system that produced for me a customer service delivery model that I have studied and applied throughout my career. His capability created the most effective connection between our systems on the inside and the outside situation our customer calls us to solve.

Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the fire service Web site bshifter.com.