BY ALAN BRUNACINI
I am more than lucky because I still get to attend fire service conferences, seminars, and workshops where I interact with firefighters from virtually everywhere. It is always a fascinating experience to get to listen to our troops who relate all of their thoughts, ideas, and concerns about the past, present, and future of our business. It is also a joy to get to see that firefighters are far more similar than different in interests.
Although it seems as if we always feel there are more changes going on now than ever before, I can think back (for about 50 years) and recall that we have consistently had that same concern that we were being assaulted by the most current fleet of dive bombers dropping change at us at a rate we could hardly absorb. When we think back at the change agenda of the past, it seems that the color of fire trucks and the length of the firefighter’s hair seem now to be pretty easy to deal with as opposed to the microscopic passage of the products of combustion through our personal protective equipment and the political backlash to firefighter pensions. I can still remember when a “tea party” described a social event where my grandmother spent the afternoon with her bridge buddies eating watercress finger sandwiches with the bread crust cut off.
A current topic we now hear about is generational confusion. It is interesting to me to get to hear the old guys (like me) say that the youngsters now showing up to be firefighters must be from Mars and they will wreck all the nifty stuff we created because they “feel differently” about the service than we do-to us, it was a calling (?); to the kids, it is “just a job.” I can think back when my elders said the very same thing about me in 1958. It seems that every generation gets to see that history pretty much repeats itself. I have reached the advanced age where I relate to the young generation a lot as their grandfathers do, with more patience than their folks (who actually have to raise them).
Although many firefighter concerns involve very real and legitimate issues like technology adoption, service delivery challenges, developing officer skills in younger members, and changes in public support, a lot of other conversations I mostly listen to are related to fire service leadership. It seems that there is an almost timeless and very real challenge for bosses to create a process, a plan, and a set of relationships with the humans they manage to effectively create a game plan for the organizational team to move in the same direction to achieve a common goal. We have had an ongoing discussion in this column about where we have looked at a (No-Brainer) management plan that coaches us on functional boss behaviors. Using these behaviors greatly assists a boss in developing a set of effective personal skills that might mobilize and support an effective trip to the future.
We have in past columns connected a set of rules of engagement to our body parts to create a very simple and highly doable way to increase the personal effectiveness of bosses. These rules (as they taught us in kindergarten) are very practical and can instantly be applied by each of us to enable us to do our job better, be happier, and make our relationships more positive. Becoming more effective as a person will translate into our better relating to our troops, leading those people to a unified place and helping our customers. We could go to the moon if we increased the effectiveness of every boss in the organization by just 1 percent. This improvement would send an enormously encouraging message to those we lead and might very well produce a 1 percent improvement in their effectiveness.
We also had a column discussion about the connection between the organization and the customer. Virtually every way we deal with Firefighter Smith on the inside eventually gets delivered to Mrs. Smith on the outside. Typically, the best way to improve customer care is to send the bosses to school first. Learning how to lay hose and raise ladders is critical to delivering service, but they are managed differently than Chief Smith’s lecturing his troops to “be nice.” Hose and ladders don’t have feelings. The act of being nice when Mrs. Smith is having a personal fire/medical crisis requires us to have emotional skills. We now expect our troops to be bilingual, to speak both rational and emotional language fluently, and to do physical labor and emotional labor simultaneously. Today, bosses must be trained in boss school to effectively manage this new combination of skills for delivering this integrated service that both fights the fire and serves the customer.
We then had a discussion about two critical leadership areas that involve performance and behavior management. We basically outlined operational and tactical performance in standard operating procedures that describe the details of how we do specific tactical operations. The procedures fit into a standard model that includes training, application, critique, and revision. The model creates and connects all the steps required to perform effectively. We followed describing the performance process with a discussion on how critical it is for the organization to support and assist our members in managing their behavior in a functional and a supportive way. Dysfunctional on- and off-duty behaviors many times create enormous dysfunctions in the organization, and these problems can be better managed (and, hopefully, prevented) by effective leadership and responsible followership.
The next part of the No-Brainer program we now must discuss is a management area that relates to how the various pieces and parts of the system relate to each other. I call that process “organizational alignment.” How the geometry of that alignment occurs is a reflection of the management activities discussed in recent columns. This is a new area to me, and I am working my way through trying to better understand (and explain) how bosses can more effectively connect everyone in a way that facilitates consistent, unified service delivery that is effective and safe by a highly diverse group doing the work on every level.
There has been great interest wherever I have had a conversation about alignment, particularly from bosses, who say they are challenged by misalignment but have never had it as a leadership discussion topic before. Although we have not engaged the details of alignment very much as managers, there has been a robust conversation among the workers (below us) about the dysfunctions that occur when there is no strong central plan.
When we look at both ends of the alignment process, we see an interesting contrast. On the front end, there are critical activities and functions (like the functions of command) we should all do the same on every level. On the other end, there is a strong need to foster the individual differences we all bring to the system to create the strength that comes with diversity and becomes the foundation of continuous organizational improvement.
Do in the Same Way
Let’s look at some of the things we should all do the same.
• Basic organizational values. These are stated in our mission statement and in other basic organizational directives. The behaviors that emerge from all that doctrine will more than anything define who/what/why the organization really is. Many times, there is a fundamental conflict between the stated goals of the organization and the actual culture inside that same system. The value statement is composed of (very important) words; the internal culture is composed of highly practiced actual habits. It is challenging for everyone in the system to create an understanding of those values on their own level and then to establish a connected response on that same level that acts that value out. Strategic-level bosses get to make broad, overall decisions and allocate department resources. Tactical-level managers connect and coordinate the top and the task level together effectively. Task-level supervisors (company officers) have continuous access to the workers and direct, ongoing contact with the customers. Getting these three levels together is an enormous task, simply because each group has its own set of challenges. If those challenges are not communicated and shared, we then get to hunker down in our own organizational silo with the very lonely feeling that no one else understands the problems on “my level.” This feeling causes us to view the outside organizational world in very defensive terms-now, it’s my team against everyone else.
• Team performance operations. They are actual service delivery operations that absolutely require a consistent, uniform approach from everyone involved. Many of them occur in the delivery of emergency services that necessitate that we enter a hazard zone. We have presented a very simple performance model that describes both the process and the relationships we need to create such operational consistency. Although this may sound simple, many departments still operate in a separate, independent-many times, very different-way based on what shift is on duty in that very local place inside that system. This divergent approach cannot stand up to managing and trying to operate with different players or trying to solve nonregular tactical problems; it then turns into a chaotic tactical rodeo.
When this confusing dysfunction occurs, it often evolves into every individual unit, and sometimes even every single individual, having to save itself/himself from the hazard the confusion created. Creating this internal, multilevel consistency sounds pretty basic (because it is), but it is also a huge, long-term project that requires a set of bosses with an agreed-on playbook to take control of the players on every shift and in every place and to inspire them to follow the same plays or to be enormously inconvenienced by attending a lot of meetings and doing a lot of paperwork (preventing meetings/paperwork = big deal motivator).
• Safety practices. A major responsibility of bosses on every level is to create systems that protect workers from the hazards of their job. Firefighters are exposed to hazards that range from routine to very special. The organization must develop, apply, and continuously refine safety systems that protect workers from those hazards. It becomes critical that those safety systems be used in the same way whenever it is possible those hazards are present. Tactical bosses must always evaluate the relationship between the severity of the hazard present against the capabilities and limitations of the safety system to determine the operational position and function of their troops. Our basic safety approach depends on the risk analysis capabilities of the boss to develop the “go”/”no go” decision. Doing this requires skill, training, experience, and fortitude (backbone) on the part of the person calling the shots. The system cannot be consistently effective unless the safety standard operating procedures (SOPs) are consistently applied. I am not overstating or overdramatizing the need for these directives to be executed everywhere by everyone, as can be seen when we consistently read the repetitive daily American fire service obituary report as soon as we turn on our computers in the morning. Basically, every hazard that injures and kills us has its own very connected safety routine that has been developed over the past 50 years; in most cases, if that safety practice had been followed, the tragedy would have been prevented. The basic problem is that we are disconnected rather than aligned. Within the past two weeks in my travels, I have watched a medium-size city fire engine drive (lights/siren) at 50 miles per hour through a red light. The difference between the slow-down/full-stop safety SOP and the thrill show performance I watched is what organizational alignment attempts to correct.
I generally attempt to develop a bundle of thoughts that fits into one month’s installment. I guess this one will take another column. Until then, please reflect on what we can do to better connect with ourselves.
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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