Last month, we continued telling the story of my first assignment as a battalion chief (BC). I successfully participated in the promotional exam process, and the department bosses acted out their feeling that I was too young (age/experience) by sending me to a “punishment place” where they had historically assigned/sentenced anyone who was a nonconformer. I assumed they felt they were sending a message inside the department through my assignment that you had better be careful of getting ahead of yourself in the promotional line. I did not do a very good job (to say the least) of reading those organizational tea leaves. Now, based on not telling promotional “time” very well, I was packaged up and sent to Siberia. Up until then, I had spent my career on a fire company working with the A+ team and never imagined being the boss (BC) of department rejects. I describe them as “rejects” only by a negative organizational definition and then the assignment that went with that description. I was surprised by how well the “rejects” operated as we responded to fires. As I interacted with them, it became an enormous educational process for me.
I described in my previous column also the problems that can arise when you attach an inaccurate and, many times, premature definition to a person or group you have not thoughtfully and accurately evaluated or if you have not contemplated the effect of developing and acting out a negative (or not so nice) definition of that person or group. That is the reason “profiling” has become such a major current issue and law enforcement crisis in our society.
My being assigned as the battalion boss of such a negatively categorized group created a huge new experience for me because I had always imagined myself as being on a team of winners (a former definition I developed). Now, I was the coach of the last-place team on the department approval scale based on someone else’s definition of the inhabitants of my new battalion. The problem for me was that although I was aware of the dynamics of how they all landed where they did and I had always thought it was nutty for the organization to isolate them, I never had any reason to consider what it would take to hang out with them as their boss. Now, I was doing exactly that. The whole adventure produced a ton of lifelong lessons.
All Rules Are Not Created Equally Performance-Behavior Rules
The lads taught me early on that all rules are not created equally. Organizational rules are necessary for the routine and special work we do in dangerous places and for maintaining the ongoing trusted status we have in our community. How the rules are packaged and presented and how bosses extend compliance encouragement and sensible enforcement determine their effectiveness. I have discussed endlessly on these pages how critical it is for us to recruit and select candidates who naturally have a set of personal traits that fit into our system, including following our rules of conduct and behavior. Doing this creates a huge head start in the rule game. It is a critical function for bosses on every level to manage the boundaries expressed by our rules.
When we examine organizational rules, they describe basically what we must and must not do. That is why we connect the reference “conduct and behavior” to them. They attempt to create the guidelines for maintaining good order inside our department so we can be safe, effective, and happy. When the rules work effectively (which they normally do), we are under control and not out of control. We hope that all this occurs by the voluntary self-discipline exerted by every member. When this doesn’t happen, then it is the role of the boss to add whatever “inspiration” is needed to get up to the standard of the rule. Effectively managing this human behavior gap (read: enforcement) combined with encouragement is a major function of an effective boss and will determine where that person is on the leadership capability hierarchy scale. This capability is a deal breaker. An effective boss must be able to adjust a worker’s behavior, strengthen the ongoing relationship with that person, and maintain a positive internal organizational environment.
The organization uses rules as an effective way to describe and manage what we do; the system owns those performance-behavior rules. Those same rules are generally not directed to how we feel (as opposed to what we do) because the individuals are the very personal custodians of how they feel. It is pretty tough for a boss to order someone to feel a certain way. This limitation is the front end of an important ongoing dilemma. The back end is that that same boss must use personal and positional resources to create and maintain a relationship with the workers and the internal environment so the workers can positively influence that other person’s feelings. How workers are treated by their boss and the kind of place in which they work create the feelings of the humans inside a system.
Attitude
We use words like attitude, morale, personality, style, spirit, and self-esteem to describe how an individual’s feelings are acted out. These same words were used to negatively define the group I was sent to manage. I quickly learned that my workers had been defined in a substandard way based on the assignment bosses’ defining them as having a “lousy attitude.” As I interacted with the exiled inmates, I began to understand that many of them had a very interesting personality profile of expressing in an unfiltered way what they thought and felt. Many of them did not have a very refined “blurt valve”: Whatever entered their brains became the raw material of what quickly came out of their mouths.
Many times, this occurred in a department setting (meetings, training, conversations), and these “blurts” produced a discussion that was so robust that the boss who was present defined the outburst as a behavioral problem rather than a personality trait. In many cases, that boss did not have the personal (relationship) skill to select a safe place to influence the blurter to better package his presentation so it might be more accepted and effective. This leadership limitation resulted in the boss’s exerting his positional power to try to control that person in an attitudinal area that is not under that boss’s direct control.
When this happens, the relationship imbalance keeps escalating and becomes institutional, and we create a special place where the outspoken are segregated from the well-behaved and verbally under control, who were probably thinking the same things as the verbal rascal but they just kept their mouth shut, smiled, and nodded. Lots of times, this occurs in a gathering designed to use a discussion to articulate, discuss, sometimes disagree (if the boss can deal with it), and then collectively use the group’s energy to produce an interactive process that will result in a synergistic plan for current action or what to do next.
When bosses regard anyone who speaks up to represent a position that might be on the edge as being disrespectful or resenting authority, they send a powerful message that now produces a room full of passive listeners all nodding their heads while they skillfully text each other, electronically dissing that boss and deciding where they are going to eat lunch after the meeting. When organizational criticism becomes a crime, we sleepwalk through such a head-nodding meeting that murders creativity, innovation, and sometimes bold new ideas. When this occurs, it produces the dim light of continuous organizational mediocrity rather than continuous operational improvement. When you leave your feelings at the door, hang on. Your brains are next.
There are definitive boundaries (rules) that are directed to very serious activities we do where noncompliance will produce serious safety and status outcomes. As examples, we typically have rules that create on-duty sobriety and celibacy. We require very straightforward adherence to on-duty standard operating procedures, particularly related to adhering to safety practices. These are rules in a category that relate to the serious stuff that effective bosses must consistently engage to promote compliance. As I operated in my new battalion, I observed that the members assigned in my new battalion were as compliant with these critical rules as my former A+ teammates. The B-3 boys were out of balance in the special place where they were assigned on the behavior scale related to “attitude.” This can be a catch-all category that is on a special scale below the rules that relate to trauma and death that are operationally and tactically serious (organic-like getting killed) and organizationally traumatic and fatal (like getting fired). I quickly noticed that they were impatient with anything they defined as organizationally dysfunctional (dumb) or anything a big boss did that was self-serving, and they were not timid in where or when or to whom they expressed their opinions. Many were very articulate and could express their opinions skillfully (a very punishable offense).
Sending the Right Message
As I settled into my new job, it became clear that it would not be very effective for the new boy wonder BC to charge into the world of my workers waving a rule book. I luckily had been involved in (and identified) by lots of street training as a company officer and a community college fire science instructor. After I figured out where all the fire stations were in my battalion and initially visiting with everyone, I developed and distributed a training schedule that involved station classes and related street drills. I had a lot of background material and extended that to the officers as a head start in developing the classes. I pretty much attended and used all those sessions to develop a conversation and discussion relative to learning, practicing, and refining how we performed our tactical job. We followed a standard format: First we talked about operational and tactical effectiveness and then closely connected standard safety practices.
After we got going, I started to get a very quiet and private question: “When are you going to lecture us on compliance with uniform rules like the last four guys did?” My response was that you all look okay to me; now let’s have a discussion and then a highly related drill on preventing flooding a hosebed when you lay a supply line (a common flub in those days), which can really wreck your day and your fast fire attack plan. As we attended and operated on the fireground, we did tailboard critiques for routine tasks and battalion meetings to review significant incidents. The longer we went, we began to connect what we had done in training with how we operated at fires.
Pretty soon, I heard very indirect response (gossip) from my troops in which I was described as an “operational training whacko.” It was interesting to me because I had never been a chief before and really had never received any specific command officer training, mostly because I was basically making up what I was doing as I was doing it. The longer we talked about operational stuff, the more they wanted to talk about other really relevant activities. In fact, the topic of uniforms emerged, and my response was that we should all wear well-maintained uniforms and be well-groomed. Then, I said, “Now, let’s get on with our discussion about structural collapse and thermal insult.”
It didn’t take long to notice that they mostly wanted me to listen to them and then engage them in what they thought and how they felt. I also became aware of the ongoing opinion/personal preference exchange (boomerang) in the relationship: The more I listened to them, the more they listened to me. The more I acknowledged and valued their opinion, the more of the same they returned to me. Today, all this is old management, motivation stuff; in 1971, it was a whole new world of being a young boss trying to figure out aeronautics while I was somehow trying to fly the plane.
A basic lesson for me was that within the dynamics of managing organizational rules, if I first emphasized the safety and competence of my workers, they would come closer to following all the other administrative and organizational directives and boundaries. I sent a continual message that I valued them personally by the priority I established. When they took control of not only their performance but also their behavior, I noticed what they did and commended them. My grandkids would read this and extend their very simple personal reaction: “Duh.”
We have rules that cover lots of critical activity that is absolutely necessary but does not directly involve life and death. The lesson for me was to establish a rule enforcement-oriented beachhead by doing the life-and-death ones first. This can be the most powerful and persuasive way a boss can send workers the message that he cares for them in their terms on the receiving end.
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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