VOLUNTEERS CORNER ❘ By ED DOLAN
As a volunteer fire chief, it must be a priority to set and hold regular meetings with your officers. If you speak to chiefs from successful departments with a quality track record of officers all pulling in the same direction, chances are that they meet on a regular basis. Career departments, businesses, government agencies, and the military all have regular meetings of appropriate staff; every volunteer fire department should as well.
- Staff Meetings: A Leader’s Best Management Tool
- Fire Officer Development: The Morning Meeting
- The Firehouse Kitchen Table: The Importance of the Morning Meeting
The Importance of Meetings for Chiefs
Regular officer meetings in volunteer departments are a must. As tough as it may be to get the group together regularly because of varying scheduling conflicts, it must be done. How does your officer meeting unfold in your department? Are meetings even held? Do they recur regularly? Who sits in on them? Let’s examine the benefits of what regular chief and company officer meetings do for the overall good of the department as well as offer a sample agenda for a potential meeting.
As chief, I held meetings that were attended by all line, training, safety, and medical officers. Some personnel may be asked to step out if a sensitive personnel issue arises. However, having this group together once a month or, with the assistant chiefs, two to four times a month worked well for us. It kept all officers up to date on the various aspects of the fire and administrative duties of the other officers. Each officer should report on what he’s been doing, observing, and so on since the previous meeting.
In this era of text and video conference meetings, regular face-to-face meetings are still very important. It’s easy to misinterpret a text, body language, or voice inflection on a topic when everyone is not sitting around a table together. By conducting face-to-face meetings, you set an example for the junior officers on the importance of consistency when leading a department or company. You also expose junior officers to topics they may not currently deal with but that they will as they move up in rank. This is important to legacy and consistency during officer changes.
Meetings as Professional Development
Meetings help shape professional development in your officers. Many volunteer members lack the necessary businesslike skills to help them transition through the ranks. Junior officers will build confidence in themselves by sitting and participating in these meetings. The chiefs can listen to a young lieutenant presenting on why he wants to switch over the attack lines to two-inch with a smooth bore vs. the current 1¾-inch with fog tips. Dicing through the pros and cons together and reaching a conclusion teaches teamwork and pumps up morale—the type of input that every chief values. Whether he realizes it or not, through these meetings, the chief is mentoring his officers and developing structure, discipline, interpersonal skills, and emotional intelligence.
These meetings should clearly lay out and reinforce expectations; it’s simply hard to work under someone who does not do this. The relationship between the chief and his staff is like a marriage; both sides need to understand the expectations from each other or the relationship develops cracks and eventually may fail.
The Chief/Officer Meeting: Sample Agenda
Following is a sample agenda and topics from a meeting we held, with the highlighted leader or member addressing a specific subject.
Chief: Budget and capital spending update. This is where your current fiscal year stands as far as operational funding spent, what’s left to spend, and what it will be spent on. Capital expenses should be for major items like a new addition to the building or a new truck purchase. Everyone should have a clear picture of the finances.
Captain: Update on apparatus and equipment. Brief everyone on the upkeep, repair, and condition of apparatus and equipment. This area of the agenda usually drives what you will need/want to acquire in the coming years.
Chief/Captain: Review or cover any personnel issues. These issues should be handled in a timely fashion. Unless it’s a very serious issue, the intent of this part of the meeting should be to correct the issue or problem with the member and keep him in the department.
Captain: Review your roster of members. The captain should brief all members on anyone who has dropped off or may have personnel issues that limit the time he can give the department. The captain should designate someone to reach out to the member and let him know the officers are there for him.
Chief/Captain: Update on short- and long-range goals. Are the organization and officers hitting benchmarks for goals, projects recruitment, training, and such?
All members: Training. Every officer should have his fingerprints on training—i.e., what members excel in, what they need to improve on, and what the department has coming up or wants to add. This directly impacts every firefighter, every officer, and the outcomes of incidents.
All members: Reviewing the runs since the previous meeting. This encompasses what members did well and what can they do better. Are you seeing the benefits of training paying off at incidents? Name firefighters who are making strides in development. Line officers should review pointers and mental “nuggets” they bring up on runs to firefighters. Every officer should be in tune with the performance of the firefighters in their command.
All members: Mutual-aid partners. This area should cover the performance of your mutual-aid partners when they help on incidents. Do they meet your department’s expectations in performing assigned duties? Do they need excessive oversight from one of your officers? Can they respond in a timely fashion? Are they trained enough to actually be a positive for your department? We do not hit on the same cylinders from department to department. You must keep your eyes wide open when evaluating your mutual aid. Forget about the idea that, “Oh, they are a nice group.” There are a lot of nice groups in the service. When we call them, they must meet our needs as firefighters and departments.
All members: The “go-around.” Conclude the meeting by having every officer bring up any other outstanding issues. Foster and encourage them to do this. I have found that this is a tool toward a well-informed officer corps all working in the same direction. When you communicate with all ranks and levels, the department has a consistent message.
ED DOLAN is a 33-year fire service veteran, having served 17 of those years as a chief officer. He is an assistant chief with the Catskill (NY) Fire Deparment. Dolan also has more than 30 years of experience on interstate emergencies and has been employed by the NYS Thruway Authority, where he oversees the day-to-day operations for maintenance and emergency response in the Catskill section of the state.
