Archives for administration-leadership

See all posts in the network tagged with administration-leadership

The Culture of Hate

So I blundered into reading a piece about Michele Bachmann's call to arms the other day. I don't dare link anything to her name for fear I will be inundated with hate mail from her minions. As usual, however, when I began to write this post, I started off with the usual disclaimer to ward off the crazies. The it occurred to me, why am I having to write two or three paragraphs at the beginning of every post, it seems like, reminding readers that I try to remain squarely in the middle of all arguments, religious dogma, and politics? Well, it would be because while I don't really care if I offend someone by being open-minded, I really want to remind those who lean one way or another that I DO have an open mind.

The reason why? Because, as you may have heard, "It's cool to hate." (The Offspring. I'm an Offspring fan, by the way, which might offend some of you). While I say it is "cool to hate" with my tongue planted firmly in cheek, given the attitude of many on the Internetz, it sure seems so. There's nothing like an unpopular thought being thrown out there to cause an attack. I am a believer in respectful and considerate dialogue. And yes, I have tried to listen to Bachmann's ranting and there is nothing there based in fact, so I am left to try to avoid anyone who genuniely believes she has something to say. But trust me, there are others on the other side of the discussions that I'm not fond of either, but she, unfortunately, brings out the worst in every aspect of what she is trying to embrace.

Well, to shorten the trip for some of you who read me regularly (and know where I stand), I'm going to omit the disclaimers and point people to the newly constructed "Preamble" that you can find at the top of the page. When you doubt what I am saying, go there and remind yourself. Because like I told someone the other day, I like to throw grenades. Some people can't live with that, but what I like to do with my closest friends is to send them something, like an e-mail, with some sort of thought, and ask, "What if?"

I come from the school of the Socratic means of narrowing my hypotheses of the world. I ask questions to cause you to reflect on the deeper meaning, to stimulate critical thinking. I do this because these days, that doesn't happen a lot. Individuals don't have time to think; they want to be told what to think. Just sum it up in some bullet points and make sure it falls into my nice little package of philosophy, por favor.

I'm begging you all to think for yourselves. Even when it seems like you like what someone says, ask yourself, what about the opposite viewpoint? Ask yourself to challenge that thought and realize that maybe what seems to be isn't quite as simple as it seems. Any idiot with two brain cells can march in lockstep with the "cool guys". Hate comes from misunderstanding and fear.

Challenge your ability to look at the picture from different viewpoints. The maturity in those actions will cause you to be more careful with your thoughts and the things you say. You will also be surprised at how people around you begin to do the same. There is no reason in the world to be so afraid of others that you can't listen to what they say. Regardless of whether or not you think they are right, by listening to the discussion, if anything, it helps you to strengthen your own beliefs and values. But just hating someone or being a troll for the sake of trolling doesn't result in anything except conflict and intractability.

Be a thinker. Be a leader. Be a positive example to others and achieve enlightenment.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on May 20, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, courage, education, effort, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, grenade, hate, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, management, media, Michelle Bachmann, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, politics, positive, Preamble, professionalism, quote, resources, response, Socratic, South Carolina, teamwork, The Offspring, Training, Twitter, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

The Just

No comments

Who are the wise? Who are our leaders? Are they the ones who always open their mouth when a question is asked? Or is the wise one he who listens and encourages you to answer your own questions? Leaders don’t always have the answers, but a good leader knows where to get them.

Just because someone has been around a while, just because they are the “most experienced” on the shift or in the department, that does not make them a leader. If they use that experience to mentor others, or to educate, or to nurture the careers of others, those are things that make you a leader.

A true leader does the right things, all the time, even when they don’t have to. They convey goodness, they exercise restraint, they maintain their cool, they are patient, and they are fair. Being the “smartest” or the “biggest” or the “best looking” does not make you the leader. When one is magnanimous, when one is happy for the success of others, when one shares their knowledge and their experience, then they are a leader. Those are the characteristics of leadership.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on May 16, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, courage, education, effort, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, response, South Carolina, teamwork, Training, Twitter, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

America Burning – A Belated 40th Birthday Wish

No comments

As my family and friends will tell you, even being one of the most connected guys on the planet does not result in timely birthday wishes to your loved ones. I think it has more to do with the many spinning plates I have going rather than indifference or the constant pleading of alarms I set to remind me. Regardless, it happens. I like to think that it is one of my many endearing but frustrating qualities.

So my belated 40th birthday wishes to the job-changing America Burning report comes as no surprise six days later (I wrote this Saturday morning for my usual Monday posting). America Burning should be mandatory reading for all firefighters. The report painted a picture of the fire problem in the United States at that time. Some of the changes that came about as a result of its influence were the creation of the United Sates Fire Administration and the National Fire Academy and the nationwide push for smoke detectors, as well as more aggressive fire prevention efforts directed toward children.

Chief Glenn Gaines, in his Mutual Aid blog post How is America Burning 40 Years Later? reflected the other day on what this meant in our battle. We were up against increased numbers of fire fatalities and fire loss compared to other industrialized nations. In the 70's, our cities were burning. Our rural areas were burning. Fire death and injury, compounded with fire loss, was significant.

My brother and I read this book when it first came out. Understand that I was nine and he was eight then, and this is NOT light reading material. But when my father, who left it sitting around, caught us reading it, he turned to page 10 (the picture of "Susan"). Pointing at the picture, he bluntly told us, "This is what happens when you play with fire."

At the time, the fire death rate for children under five was three times that of the rest of the population. The picture on page 15, a smoky silhouette of a child who died from inhalation of smoke and toxic gases, illustrated a heart-breaking reality: our most vulnerable didn't even stand a chance unless we could warn them of the danger. The fire service leaders of that time realized we had to elevate our efforts to engage this problem.

Many of you weren't even alive when this report hit the stations (maybe even some of your parents weren't either), but it was a very graphic expose of what we faced. Another book from that time, Dennis Smith's Report From Engine Co. 82, gave an account of the job as it existed while our ghettos were burning. This book may have inspired more of us to become firefighters than America Burning, just as Emergency did via television, but the reason why is because of a lot of the same issues we face today. Fighting fire suits us; we are brave, macho, sardonic souls who see a burning building and snort "Just another job." And we take care of business like it is another day at the office. The suits and sheep see us as Gods among mere mortals. Kids see firefighters and realize they don't want to be stuck in an office when they grow up; they want to be a real-live superhero. The problem with this, however, is that things have changed and we need to evolve with those changes. Not only has the venue changed, but the mission has as well.

These are tough emotions to put aside, but put them aside we must. Building construction and fire loading is significantly different. There are more lawyers scrutinizing our every move. And of course, every year there are attempts to shut down the National Fire Academy or to minimize the USFA budget. The politicians are trying to squeeze every last penny out of our budgets so they can fund trips to Argentina or give the money to the banks. There are higher priorities than saving lives and protecting property, my brothers and sisters.

We have to fight the challenge of protecting our communities with intelligence, not with rhetoric. The way to defeat an enemy is not by engaging one on one, but by observing for opportunities and deciding when you have the best tactical advantage. Philosophically, that runs completely counter to our "mano y mano" psyche. When someone comes at a firefighter with a problem, we bow up our chests and say, bring it on. We can face down anything. Look at yourself, boys and girls, it is absolutely true. That is why we can continue to do more with less. It's like a perverse little game of "You can't beat us by cutting us." It's why we are so special. The problem is that this is a war of attrition; in asymmetrical warfare, you either need to change your rules of engagement or plan on getting picked off one by one.

We can't keep playing the game by rules that have changed. We must be smarter than they are, and the "they" in our case isn't just fire, but the forces that align to maintain life safety as an ongoing problem: lack of smoke detectors or fire sprinklers, substandard construction practices, lack of education and human nature, and always, the constant threat of staffing and budget cuts to support our mission.

If we are sincere that we want to protect our communities and serve our fellow man, the game has to be elevated. Hanging on to tradition is important from the aspect of honoring those who have sacrificed before us. But just as the military studies and discusses Napoleon, Clausewitz, and Sun Tzu, modern-day warfighting tactics are applied to those precepts to conquer enemies. We can continue to honor our predecessors' valor and heroism without engaging the enemy in the tactics of those days.

Take a moment and read through America Burning and the subsequent report, America Burning Revisited. Understand where we really must focus our efforts. And lets use the means at our disposal: scientific and technological advances, information sharing (especially through networking on the internet and through our local, state and National Fire Academies), and good old fashioned education. We are a modern fighting force and we should be embracing that, rather than running away from it.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on May 13, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, FEMA, leadership, News, Training & Development • Tagged: 1973, activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, America Burning, Argentina, banks, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, courage, Dennis Smith, education, effort, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, Fire Chief, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, Glenn Gaines, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, National Fire Academy, opportunity, politicians, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, Report From Engine Co. 82, resources, response, South Carolina, teamwork, Training, Twitter, United States Fire Administration, USFA, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

No Trash Talking – Follow Up

3 comments

When someone opposes my viewpoint, I usually take pains to understand their perspective. I value other observations on the issues, provided they are respectful of others and also consider alternative perspectives. A few weeks back, when I posted No Trash Talking, I suggested change should be embraced if the science recommending the change bears it out.

Before I go there, however, I did get feedback from others who pointed out other factors like balloon frame construction and the fact that not too many compartment fires go without void space involvement. And as these observations were respectful and pertinent, I really appreciate them. I will quickly reply to that as well: I don't believe for a minute that structural firefighting can be limited to exterior attack. But that being said, the science defends that we can effectively mount a transitional attack without fear of pushing a fire through the building, if anything, to check rapidly progressing fire conditions. In those situations, I would utilize the quick knockdown then transition to digging out fire in void spaces from inside if warranted.

I did get a comment to that post, however, that I wanted to discuss. I am going to admit that each time I went to address it, my post sounded like I was delivering a public spanking. But this was the comment and I do at least appreciate that they included a link to their own article:

Do not lump all of us who oppose this movement as being stuck in the past. Myself and others are more than open to advances in our field. Our problem is when information is cloaked in political propaganda, when the ideas presented do not make sense based on current scientific evidence, and when “new information” is really something we have all known for years. Don’t just assume that we are uneducated, stubborn naysayers who have nothing substantial to add.

No matter how I phrased it, I found anything I might say could be construed as heavy-handed. However, after taking a moment to re-read the comment, I went to the linked article from the commenter. At that site, I then read the article written by Chief Shane Ray in Fire Chief magazine that he was referring to.

The goal of this post is to clarify that I do consider that anyone who would refute scientific evidence without any substantiating counter-argument to be uneducated and stubborn. And yes, that does infer that those who oppose the movement (in the case of my post, that of the use of quantifiable and measurable data to develop fire tactics) are stuck in the past. I am not saying that contesting a finding is inappropriate; I am saying that constesting a finding without anything other than your personal observations is.

Let me repeat: I never have said interior attack was not an option. I said (paraphrasing) that given a choice between applying an exterior stream and an interior stream, if both are equally effective, we should use our head and opt for the safe one over the relatively unsafe one, especially if we can get water on the fire faster from the outside than on the inside. Regardless, the post wasn't even about tactics, it was about the reluctance of people to change when change is warranted. But since we are going here, let's do it.

Let me make it perfectly clear. Research conducted by a number of sources found the application of exterior streams on compartment fires did not “push” fire, either onto victims or throughout a building.

I have another paper due and not much time, so I’m going to cut to the chase. My immediate literature review involved going straight to the UL report Impact of Ventilation on Fire Behavior in Legacy and Contemporary Residential Construction (Kerber, 2011). There are other studies that Chief Ray cites in his article and they all provide the same observations. So for the sake of time, let's just use this one right now.

The UL report identified the methodology: Fire was allowed to grow to approximately peak burning rate before the stream was applied. Temperatures were measured 30 seconds before stream application, during the 10 seconds of the stream being applied, and then 30 seconds after. The crews operating the streams specifically attempted to push fire and hot gases into exposure rooms while not putting water directly on the items burning in the room.

There was no evidence of the fire being pushed into the surrounding rooms. Temperatures tended to decrease and temperature increases that did occur after water application were minimal. Fire progress was checked and external water application had no observable impact on what would have been considered tenability of the building. The results of this research were pretty obvious: when water was applied from the exterior, it did not push the fire, the streams did not create an untenable situation, and it did check fire progress.

Chief Ray can defend his own article, but I didn’t see anything in his observations that were unfounded. To me, the derisive references to “spraying smoke” didn’t consider what Chief Ray had actually said, as his article actually referred to spraying smoke in the context that cooling the fuel (smoke is a fuel) might have beneficial effect, and if it didn’t hurt the situation, then it wasn’t a bad idea. Obviously the commenter has problems with the science of cooling fuel, but we have been doing that since I became a firefighter in 1980.

I began to defend all the other options and how transitional attacks seemed to work, etc. Then I realized that none of this evidence based nonsense was going to make any difference to some people. The author shared:

I have already discussed in previous articles why I do not agree with making fully prepared crews stand on the sidewalk and fight a fire from the safety of the exterior. It flies against every responsibility we shoulder as firefighters. It continues to be used as an excuse to cover up for lack of preparation and training.

So let’s talk tactics: If the research shows that a quick exterior application of a stream will check fire progress, not result in a substantial increase of interior temperatures, and improve tenability for occupants in less time than it would to deploy an interior line, find the fire room, and attack the fire, you STILL want to make the interior attack? Why?

The author states that the purpose of his article is to “expose the other side of the argument.” I am wondering then, what is the other side of the argument? He says his rebuttal “isn't packaged as nicely and doesn't include pictures of myself, but it is from the heart.”

Well, here's where my comments are going to hurt some feelings. My answer is that it is time we stopped thinking with our “heart” in regard to tactics, and started thinking with our head. We have the FDNY, the Chicago Fire Department, and Underwriters Laboratories conducting research that all agrees. His contention is that putting water on fire coming out of a window is bad, but other than his feelings as to why that is wrong (and the fact that it runs counter to verifiable, observable evidence), we have nothing.

I support differences of opinion, so long as your opinion is voiced respectfully. When you try to make me and others sound like an idiot, well, I have problems with that, but okay, I can even live with that. But when we are talking about what is a best practice for the job, will save firefighter lives and is scientifically shown to not result in adverse effects, and you say you don’t like it, well, you should probably just keep your opinion to yourself.

I had a whole bunch of other stuff to say about this, but I'm simply not going to go there. As a chief fire officer, when I give someone an order to do something, it is an order based on what is the most effective means to bring resources to bear on a problem with the most chance of success and the least amount of risk to completing the overall operational objectives. I’ll highlight it for you: It has nothing to do with what is in my heart.

My job is to save lives, protect property and the environment, and to do my best to bring everyone home in one piece. If that requires an interior attack to dig out the fire, then we'll suit up and go get it. But if there is a more effective method, well, I don’t care what tradition says about heart, responsibility, or courage, the science trumps it. I could care less if that sucks the fun out of anyone's day. We're not doing kumbaya here. People's lives are on the line. Let's act like it and do the right thing.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on May 6, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, change, Chief Shane Ray, Command & Leadership, compartment fire study, conflict, consensus, courage, education, effective, effort, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, exterior streams, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, NIST, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, research, resources, response, South Carolina, teamwork, Training, Twitter, UL, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

We Can’t Know What We Don’t Know

No comments

Recently I read an article written by a yoga instructor-trainer as they reflected on the state of instruction as they knew it. He made an interesting comment about how he and his team had been involved in a great number of instructor certifications, but how he felt like the certification training failed in one major area: in “teaching teachers to teach yoga”.

His observation was that in certifying these instructors, the methods resulted in a great amount of fear; fear of getting it wrong, and the course delivery, as a result, became flat, formulaic, scripted. Their methods so caused their instructor candidates lose the creativity and energy found in experimentation, in learning from their students, or focusing so hard on the product that they botched the delivery. They were focusing more on not embarrassing themselves than on passing along knowledge.

I see a number of fire and EMS instructors who are the same way. As an instructor-trainer myself, it has always been a source of frustration for me when I am faced with candidates who don’t KNOW the material they are supposed to be passing along. They read the book, they took the course, they checked off the check-offs, and now they were supposed to understand the nuances of a subject they were barely intimate with and communicate it to someone else.

To me, it is no wonder we have some of the issues we face in today’s emergency services; in many cases, the people doing the teaching are learning from those who weren’t inspired themselves. They might have the desire to teach, but what they are sharing wasn’t shared correctly to begin with.

I recall a discussion with a Captain once about a new Lieutenant who, in his first few shifts, had proven to be a megalomaniac. Well, maybe not that bad, but it was pretty bad. I said to that Captain that I wasn’t surprised the Lieutenant led his crews like a tyrant. He learned to lead from his own supervisor, who was themselves a tyrant.

How can we expect anything less when it is the only existence they know?

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on May 2, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, courage, education, effort, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, response, South Carolina, teamwork, Training, Twitter, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

Expectations and Stereotypes

2 comments

I was driving along and a car passed me, stereo booming away. The license plate was surrounded by a chain and the windows were all blacked out. A sticker on the rear window: the silhouette of a pit bull with the words, “A civilized society does not regulate by race”.

Stereotyping an entire group because of the actions of a few runs counter to what we define as civilized. But society accepts individuals by way of common values, mores, and an understanding that those are the boundaries. People bump up against those boundaries all the time and when they do, that is when conflict occurs, and when the judging begins. There is a big difference between listening to a very loud stereo and embracing the thug life. However, there are those who claim innocence and can't understand that when they push against those values, there will often be pushback.

For example, in the animal kingdom, there are many members of the cat (feline) family. There is, however, a significant difference between a house cat and a tiger. It isn't being stereotypical to expect different behavior between the domesticated feline and a large striped one living in the Burmese jungle. But these are different animals; its not an issue of culture or race, it is a difference of species. We, however, are all one, brothers. We may worship at different churches, live in different communities, listen to different music, or even have different skin color, but we are all members of homo sapiens.

We in emergency services create our own divisions that we should be careful to avoid “regulating” by. We have, as I have mentioned ad nauseam, our career vs. volunteer, our union vs. non-union, our urban vs. our rural, our fire/EMS vs. our many other versions, and in all of these cases, it begins the discussion of, “Are we not all brothers?”

In the spirit of my analogy, when you advertise your membership in the greater society of firefighters, and we have taken an oath to protect the public and carry out our sworn duties faithfully, if you fail to carry out those duties by being ineffective, stealing from the till, setting fires, you are not part of our society. We seem to have some real mutts in our ranks these days. I'm sure some of it is just perception, having better access to arrest records and the media's willingness to pump up the anger when someone given public trust is found doing something outside the norm.

We shouldn't judge others as a group, but in some cases, we have to maintain some objectivity when it comes to high percentages of people proving the perception to be more of a reality than otherwise. These are not easy questions to answer, despite the shouting from the cheap seats by the trolls who just react to anything that hits the Interwebz.

Just as in religion, every fire department has more commonalities than differences. We speak pretty much a universal language, no matter where we are on the globe. A grab is a celebrated occasion in any firehouse. And holding a worker where we found it when we got there is recognized it for what it is and we will even catch ourselves saying it under our breath- “Nice stop…” But we are very diverse as well. We have different cultures and different values when it comes to some parts of our lives. Regardless of those differences, though, I think we can all agree on one big idea, that there is no room on the job for mutts.

How these people manage to thrive in our ranks is beyond me. I mean, doesn’t anyone question how some of these issues come about? Is there simply no fear of repercussion? Do we honestly continue to tolerate this kind of behavior until it is exposed by the next Geraldo wanna-be? Well, the news is that we have plenty in our ranks who do actually tolerate it, and enable it, and turn the other way when someone is doing wrong. And frankly, I have pointed out some of these individuals in my career and heard, “Oh, that’s just how ___ is.” And then life just goes on.

If an individual is willing to use poor judgment to fulfill their own needs first, what makes you think they are going to develop a whole bunch of integrity when things really get bad? If an individual is willing to take shortcuts in patient care to avoid extra work, what kinds of decisions do you think they’ll make in regard to putting their own life on the line when you need the help most? It all comes down to trust. If people can’t be trusted to do the little things, how can we trust them to make good choices when it is absolutely necessary? You may think you can trust them, but really, think hard about it…do you?

If you have people in your organization who have constant challenges of judgment, you can’t afford to keep them. If they don’t cause a civil or criminal investigation at some point, chances are, they will find some other means to let everyone down. The fire service isn’t a club, it is a calling. There is no room in the brotherhood for people without integrity. If you really believe that being a firefighter is more than a job or a hobby, then it is incumbent on you to enforce the values we expect from someone when you pin on the badge.

Don’t let the mutts ruin a good thing. Being a firefighter is still an honorable and noble thing to be. Kids still grow up wanting to be firefighters. People do still look up to firefighters. But as we continue to see more and more of the lapses in our expectations and beliefs, we continue to slide against what we all swore to protect back in the beginning. Don’t let your brothers down.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on April 29, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership

Who Really Is The Face of Terrorism?

2 comments

In a little research prior to a possible paper on terrorism, I was looking at the history of terror in the United States. Technically, it goes all the way back to our beginnings, when "radicals" belonging to the Sons of Liberty tossed 45 tons of tea into the harbor. As you can quickly see in that one single case, "terrorism" is defined differently. I guess it just depends on whose point of view you happen to take.

I doubt anyone, however, equates terrorism as we know it today with an act of throwing goods into the harbor. Things have escalated considerably in 200+ years and now in 21st century Boston we have this reprehensible act of violence. We don't know the specific issue that sparked this act, but this defines "terror". Terror, in that these bombs were not just intended to get someone's attention about the unfairness of a point of view. No, this act included what were certainly anti-personnel devices, placed in a concentrated area of non-combatants, and positioned for maximum effect. This act was a cowardly act, striking at defenseless civilians in order to make some kind of a point.

I believe in peace and I believe in perspectives, but I'm afraid I'm not a pacifist. I personally believe we should seek who it is who chooses to harm the innocent and root them out. Suffice it to say, if someone were to hurt my loved ones, I would pursue them to the ends of the earth. While I earnestly strive to maintain peace and open-mindedness, and I profess an extraordinary amount of tolerance for other people's viewpoints, that all ends when you choose to escalate with force against me.

I struggle with my innermost being when I advocate for a return to civility and understanding, then see zealots deciding that whatever it is they stand for is more important than peaceful co-existence. I, like most Americans, stand for justice. We believe in equality. And we may have our own closed-minded radicals, but the majority of Americans abhor those extremes. When a certain group of individuals decides to plant a bomb among us, they have declared war against us and everything we stand for.

As I mentioned my research, I find that there is evidence of violent or extreme action being taken by almost every faction and belief. As I mentioned the actions taken in defense of independence, there are also many cases of "terrorism" documented for all kinds of causes. To the Left, before you talk about right-wing extremism, let's discuss the 1920 Wall Street bombing or the Black Panthers or the SLA. On the Right, don't leave the discussion without consideration of the white supremacy movement and of course, Oklahoma City and abortion clinic shootings. But I wanted to address a differently handled case of civil disobedience.

When I was learning to drive years ago, I practiced in the parking lot of the General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, PA, so this event is very near to me. Those of you who are my age may remember that this is where the "Plowshares Eight" took non-violent action, broke into the facility, damaged missile nose cones, and poured blood onto documents and files. This is an act these days probably considered terrorism.

The big difference here, and something maybe people should understand, is that these individuals had a tremendous passion for what they considered to be a crime against humanity. But instead of bombing something or shooting at someone, they took action against inanimate objects. They made a point without hurting people, at least not physically.

For those who proclaim they are indeed "peaceful", this is a lesson in real peaceful protest. Likewise, there are many cases in history. Gandhi staged sit-down strikes. Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. Lech Walesa led the Solidarity movement. These were all effective means of protest without killing others. Strapping a bomb to your body and walking into a marketplace doesn't say "peaceful" religion to me. It says intolerance. It says the ends justify the means. It says that you aren't interested in living respectfully of one another.

Let's look at the Amish, for an example. The most traditional of their beliefs maintain community with a separation from secular society, yet they maintain a peaceful coexistence with others. If one participates at its most fundamental teachings, they have very strict rules but function (relatively) without interference from the rest of us. I would bet that there is a certain amount of frustration on certain aspects of the interface between their "world" and "ours", but while that may be so, I could be wrong, but I don't recall any outbreaks of terrorism on their behalf. They genuinely believe in peace and non-resistance.

I don't believe for a moment that Islam in and of itself is a violent religion. I read The Koran and I don't find it any more violent than The Bible. But I don't hold up The Bible and proclaim literal interpretation anymore than the parts of The Koran that extremists say defend their actions. I'm not a religious scholar, and I might even come across as slightly heretical, but I believe on a planet as small as this one, in order to survive, we have to learn to live together.

I don't feel like you have to agree with me, but I ask you to respect my beliefs, just as I may not agree with you, but I respect yours. As I said before, if you choose to ramp up your insistence that I listen to you at the point of a gun, I insist that I have the right to defend myself. And if you screw with me, don't expect that I'm going to take it lying down. If you choose to engage in warfare against me, you have to understand that your choice has consequences. In the United States of America, we proudly allow anyone to live within their beliefs and that we have the right to express ourselves in a manner of our choosing. If you want to live like a radical, then go somewhere where you can live like that and let the rest of us live our own lives. But while I choose to be respectful of your choices, and am happy to leave you alone, I will be civil with you. And yet, if you shove me, I WILL shove back.

If people really believe they belong to a peaceful gathering of individuals, then they need to be prepared to defend that with their actions. Failing to do that doesn't, in my opinion, buy you any credibility. Any religious institution that fails to push their extremists into the street and expose them when they preach annihilation of "non-believers" is, as far as I am concerned, culpable. That goes for any religion, any cult, any group. Silence is not an acceptable means of solving this problem. Exposing the intolerant and the extreme to the rest of the world is.

As Gandhi said, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." If you believe in peace, then let's see it. Put your money where your mouth is. If you are in an institution that advocates violence against non-combatants, then you have a responsibility to notify the authorities. And don't cry persecution when, avoiding that responsibility, we have to come looking in order to protect our way of life.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on April 25, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, Command & Leadership, Fire Rescue Topics, leadership, News • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, Boston, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, courage, education, effort, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, General Electric, government, guilt, Hilton Head Island, integrity, Islam, just culture, just leadership, King of Prussia, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, Mount St. Mary, opportunity, pacifist, Plowshares Eight, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, response, South Carolina, teamwork, terrorism, Training, Twitter, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

The Measuring Contest

2 comments

In the fire service, when we ask someone about their department, one of the first places we go with the conversation is call volume. Of course, “How many calls do you get a year?” is only the feeder line for what we really want to hear: “How many FIRES do you get in a year?” How do we measure the worth of our department? In how many working fires we happen to fight in a year, that’s how. It’s kind of the same as asking a soldier how many battles he has fought, or a ball player how many games he has won. How do I know you know your job? By how often you happen to do it, I guess.

There are some firefighters who, asking these questions, tell me stories that would only mean to me that very soon they won’t be telling the same stories, because it won’t be long before they run out of fuel in their district. But worse is the citizen who, agenda apparent, asks how many fires we have a year and infers that there is a correlation: x (number of fires) = y (quality of equipment).

Not beating around the bush, what I should have said was: “So what you are wondering is, if we were a REAL fire department, we’d be burning down a lot more homes, right?” Or if we were a really good organization, we’d have many more dead people. Or more HAZMAT calls. Or perhaps more rescues. As someone who really believes in what it is I do for a living, my problem with that idea is that the volume of serious calls doesn’t measure departmental success, it measures community failure.

Let’s go back to the beginning of our careers, either as paid or volunteer firefighters, and what was it you were told? We were told that our primary mission was to PREVENT fires, to PREVENT injury and mortality, and to PREVENT disasters. What? You didn’t take that conversation very seriously? That seems to really be the gist of it: We know what we were told, we understand it makes sense, but it’s not the reason we became firefighters. We became firefighters because it looked cool in the movies, or because we have some kind of belief in the heroism of the job. We never really bought that prevention nonsense. We like to bust shit up and go where everyone is running out from. You can’t do that when you are preventing fires.

Perhaps, though, we should actually be measuring how bad your department regularly burns down room and contents fires because it is indicative of poor skill, or by burning down so many taxpaying businesses it indicates your resources aren't sufficient for the job, or by having so many alarms it indicates lousy codes or enforcement. Maybe we should be looking at how many people don’t actually walk away from an encounter with your emergency medical care. Or how many HAZMAT calls you have that evolve into county-wide disasters.

I have said before that we should start hitting up the insurance companies for funds. After al, they have a huge stake in this. When we save a building or a life, we are saving them money. Wasn't that the premise behind the early 18th Century fire brigades? Instead of municipal taxes exclusively supporting fire suppression, the insurance companies should maybe back off some of those exorbitant bonuses for their executives and invest in fire protection to a better degree.

There are many reasons why buildings burn that we have no hand in, like the condition of the buildings, the amount of fuel loading, and the intelligence of the occupants who put a pot of oil on the range then go down to the store for cigarettes. But ultimately, if we want to measure something, maybe we should be comparing what it is we save compared to what it is we protect. If we want to see how good it is we are doing, I think that the number of times our community doesn't suffer loss should be a better goal. It is, after all, what we signed on for.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on April 22, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, courage, education, effort, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, Hilton Head Island, insurance, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, response, save, South Carolina, teamwork, Training, Twitter, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

Unsafe Until Proven Otherwise

No comments

I look back at my years as a firefighter and paramedic and recall once being held at gunpoint by an irate patient. This was back in the early 80's and things were a little different then. While I feared for my life, it was more out of the belief that the gun she was brandishing could go off rather than the prospect of us being held hostage. She was upset at her husband and she was (looking back on it) more angry at him than frustrated with us. Fortunately, an alert dispatcher was on the other end of the radio and asked "10-61?" to which the only acceptable answer was "Affirmative". My officer at the time keyed up and said, "10-4, ma'am, everything is 10-4 here!"

Law enforcement was quick to arrive on scene and like I said, back then, hostage negotiation was more along the lines of one of the officers telling her to put the damn gun away before someone got hurt. She did, she went to jail, and we lived to tell about it.

I went forward from that night being a lot more aware of my situation. While later I became a commissioned law enforcement officer (for a while) and learned even more, after that night, at least, I paid more attention to not permitting anyone to get between my crew and the exit, watching people's faces and hands, and lighting up every space I was working in.

These days, incidents like those would have gone much differently. But these days, the evil is a lot more intense.

While I happen to be a gun owner and I believe in my Constitutional rights, I am concerned about how adding another gun to a situation is going to play out if I were permitted to start carrying a sidearm on duty. I don't honestly know if that's a good situation. And while I am a peace-loving and open-minded individual, I am also aware that I have been in positions where I felt threatened and yet was able to negotiate a less-than-violent outcome, whereas had I been armed at the time, the situation might not have ended up so well for the person I was dealing with.

Maybe this is an opportunity to look at a number of things, like the availability of body armor, or equipping personnel with less-lethal means of dealing with violence. I'm not saying I have the answer. But what I am saying is that until we can prove a scene otherwise, we need to approach with greater caution these days. Simply walking up to the front door, standing in front of it and knocking loudly is not what I consider good technique. Ignoring the presence of weapons in a room is not acceptable. And these are all things I have seen seasoned personnel do in my career, and when pointed out, got this "Are you kidding me?" look.

The point is that if you can PREVENT an incident from getting bad, you need to. Being observant, keeping a low profile, and taking in the surrounding clues can go a long way toward never letting things go south to begin with.

While this latest incident in Gwinnett County, GA will be dissected and we will learn lessons from it, I don't know how we could have ever prepared for a situation like that faced in West Webster, NY. But while those incidents are extraordinarily tragic, they happen less so than the violence to providers faced daily around the nation. And while these very newsworthy incidents illustrate very deranged individuals exist out there, they only scratch the surface of what we have to deal with every shift when we interact with people who are intoxicated, angry, high, delusional, or just have a chip on their shoulder. And these days, there are a lot of those people out there.

If you don't know how to protect yourself, seek assistance from your local law enforcement agency for tips on approaching subjects. Be careful going into places where you can't get out of and never let anyone get between you and the way out. And establish a procedure in case things do go bad and the individual can figure out that pushing that little red button isn't going to be good for them. Be proactive and hopefully, you never will have to deal with situations like these.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on April 11, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, Fire Rescue Topics, News • Tagged: #FRED, activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, blame, breaking news, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, education, effort, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, Georgia, government, Gwinnett County, Hilton Head Island, hostage, integrity, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, New York, politics, positive, professionalism, resources, South Carolina, Suwanee, SWAT, teamwork, technical solutions, thought, Training, Twitter, values, vision, warfare, West Webster, zen zone

Circle of Personal Transformation

2 comments

Going for a paddle is my work. While the IRS may not agree, my logic is if I get paid for it somehow, it is, and when I am out in the kayak, I am experiencing, I am taking in new ideas, and I am observing my surroundings. Since Firehouse Zen is a continuous story of asking questions and my “business” is also to ask questions, it must be. And while I occasionally get paid in the coin of the realm when I generate content, it is more important to me that I am getting paid in finding truth about myself and the people who surround me. It is a constant effort of take and give, give and take.

When I was a young officer, I believed my role was to have the answers. As a chief officer nearing the end of my career, I realize that my role is actually to ask questions. Paradoxically, when I was a young officer, I fought continuously to take in as much as I could. Now I find myself giving it all away. And while I sometimes wonder if I should be out at all the fire and emergency service expos, conferences, trade shows, and etcetera, I find that the experiences I continue to have outside of the usual places seem to be growing my library of knowledge. But that isn't sharing, that's taking, so I have to keep finding ways to get that message out while maximizing my opportunities to learn more.

As you probably already know, lightning follows the most direct path to ground. But to use this analogy in the context of being able to draw and channel that energy, there are factors that must be met. You have to be present when the energy is accumulating; then there has to be a lack of resistance; there has to be a conduction of the energy and permission for it to flow. If the energy slows, if it encounters resistance, it creates heat, it creates damage. It might even stop and find a new way to go to ground, destroying what can’t contain it. As a "student of the game". you have to be present in thought, willing to listen, and willing to understand.

Lightning isn’t a thinking thing, a living being. It is simply energy, generated somehow when there is friction, and seeking a means to go to the earth. Learning isn't a thing we can touch, but it is "energy" in that challenges are identified, "friction" is generated, and we have to find a way to solve the problems. Being open to new experience creates growth.

These parallels exist in our everyday being and provide us a way to relate to what is going on around us. Just like a funny story, when we both laugh, we have a shared connection and we can relate easier, we can begin to speak the truth. And like the world around us, there are ways to illustrate what we are experiencing that are graphic, that are relatively tangible, but these stories actually open up our minds to other questions. And that’s the way it should be.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on March 18, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: #FRED, activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, blame, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, education, effort, ego, Emmitsburg, EMS, EMS Topics, energy, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, Grotto, Hilton Head Island, integrity, Jesus Christ, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, lightning, management, Maryland, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, picture, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, Shrine, South Carolina, teamwork, technical solutions, thought, Training, transformation, Twitter, values, vision, world, zen zone

No Trash Talking

3 comments

Cicero said it best: "We do not destroy religion by destroying superstition." In fighting fire, however, if you suggest at all that doing things differently because the science indicates a better way, you'd think we were saying that the Earth was actually round.

Oh, yeah, that's right, the Earth IS round. Really, it is. Think back to those boring days of middle school, where we learned that the world being round was suggested by individuals who were then persecuted for suggesting such a thing. And in the fire service, it is true, that if you suggest doing things differently because the science says so, you too, are considered a heretic and burned at the figurative stake on the internet. Just read the comments and you shall see, it is true.

My father had a pretty serious heart attack this week and fortunately, was seen, evaluated, and sustained intervention for his potentially lethal LAD obstruction. He is snoozing peacefully at his own home in his own bed as I write this, courtesy of the modern miracle of medicine, for something that in my own lifetime, pretty much would have been a death sentence. The side benefit of these little disasters, however, is the chance to have side talks with my brother, who is on the cutting edge of the fire service in his own right, only he doesn't choose to have a nifty little blog like I do to talk about it.

We were talking about some studies in regard to the application of exterior streams to rapidly moving interior fire conditions, something that is seen to some in our business as being, let's see, "cowardly". As I said, however, as much as I too like to roll around in the heat and byproducts of combustion, from a purely scientific standpoint, it makes better sense to apply streams to the fire from the outside to control the fire quickly, rather than try to engage it automatically from inside. Rolling around on the inside of a burning building is not only hazardous, but in some moments, unnecessary, to achieve what it is we need to do.

Now this is certainly an oversimplification of the scenario, because there are other factors, but my point is that regardless of the science, there are those who profess to be immersed in the state of the firefighting art who think that just because they too like to get in and be "one with the Red Devil", that it actually makes sense to do so. And I am not saying (in this post) that it is right or wrong.

What I AM saying is, that we have many who resist the suggestion that change is warranted, not because of any other reason than their desire to do things the way we have always been doing things, and more often than not, because the changes being suggested happen to conflict with their mental image of the dashing, courageous firefighters of old, leaping into the flames and carrying out young damsels in distress and anything else that happens to make good headlines, like Fluffy, or a case of really good wine.

I guess that in the opinion of some, my father's heart attack might have been better off addressed by the liberal application of leeches, or bed rest and opium. But then, people died pretty often from things in years gone by that they don't die from today. You know: that science thing.

We can continue to keep our heads in the sand about advances in research, but like I have said, simply addressing the art of fighting fire from a fiscal aspect (and not an emotional one), each of my firefighters represents not only a living human being, but an expensive investment. And while throwing bodies into a battle without regard for how many lives are lost might have been the way you win wars in the pre-Napoleonic days, we realized that wars of attrition were more practically won through strategy and prudent use of resources, being that the losses were faced by the other side, not our own.

I have been batting around some ideas for the "vision" of fire, rescue, emergency medical service, and emergency management on the FHZ Twitter feed lately and getting some interesting comments via hashtag "FRED" (#FRED) and maybe its time to have some more open dialogue over what we should or should not be doing in our quest to save lives, property and the environment. At any means, I see this as opening up conversations that will be uncomfortable to some of you, simply due to the reactions I see when someone suggests doing things differently. But perspective is a funny thing and unless you open your mind up to a different alternative, you are doomed to only see one way of doing things. That one way isn't an issue if things are going perfectly, but every time I see an LODD that could be prevented, I'm thinking that isn't currently the case.

What do you have to say about this? Are you interested in a new reality? Are you interested in doing things better with less of a chance of losing more brothers in unnecessary and inefficient charges against an unwinnable situation? Or are you okay with the world being flat?

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on March 11, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, Fire Rescue Topics, leadership, safety • Tagged: #FRED, activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, blame, change, Cicero, clausewitz, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, Earth, education, effort, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, flat, forward, government, heart attack, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, LODD, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, NIST, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, safety, South Carolina, teamwork, technical solutions, thought, Training, Twitter, values, vision, warfare, world, zen zone

Je Ne Sais Pas

No comments

Of the words in the English language, "I don't know" are three of the least helpful. When I took three years of French, the first sentence I memorized was "Je ne sais pas" and for good reason I could remember it, because I still, to this day, can't speak or understand the language (however, I understand "No sé" just fine, although I do speak a little Espanol).

When I am asked a question for which I don't know the answer, I learned a long time ago to not pretend to know. Someone with a huge ego might be troubled by admitting they don't know the answer, but in reality, I think most people would rather find out you don't know something when you tell them so than finding out when you tell them something they think to be true and find out you are clueless later.

We have all had these kinds of "knowledgable" people as our supervisors before. We usually just say they are full of shit. And the sad part is, everyone on the floor knows them and thinks the same thing, that they are full of shit. This deluded individual keeps walking around the station, thinking everyone respects them, and in truth, everyone thinks he is a total dumbass. Personally, I'd rather know you think I'm a dumbass than be walking around thinking everyone thinks I'm a God, but really thinks I'm a dumbass. I don't know.

I get asked questions about how to deal with these types a lot. It's one of my most popular questions, next to "How can I create positive change in a negative culture that doesn't want to change?" And can you guess what my answer to both of these questions is? Yes, I do not know.

And I say I don't know not because I haven't been able to deal successfully with these types in my career, but because in every case there are differences in context that are hard to understand. I can offer all kinds of helpful advice, but the reality is that I don't, in fact, know. How can I know if I am not in your shoes? I can be empathetic, but every individual brings a different dynamic to it.

There is a passage by the martial master Zhuge Liang in his commentaries on The Art of War that says, "To overcome the intelligent by folly is against the natural order of things; to overcome the foolish with intelligence is in accord with the natural order." To me, if you are interested in creating change and have good reasons for doing so, there should be an easy way to make things happen. But this doesn't always work, and for no good reason sometimes.

I take the approach that I can control what I can control in this world and anything outside of that little realm, I can't worry about. I can try and make positive change happen, but while I can drag the horse to the water, I can't make it drink. Unfortunately, some people can not find it in their heart to change. So that brings us back to what we asked to begin with.

There are, unfortunately, situations in our lives that don't seem fair. Sometimes these situations are completely out of our control and some of them can be opportunities for change. But that doesn't always pan out the way we'd like. I can think back on times when my choice was to wait things out and in doing so I missed opportunities for growth and conversely, I can remember times where I chose to move on and found that things improved when I left.

These are personal choices and we have to make the best of our current status and try to make good decisions based on realistic observation, assessment, and consideration of the options. I believe that it does because it has for me more often than not. Assessing our next step works well if we can maintain objectivity and if we don't, and make decisions purely on emotion, they tend not to work out so well.

I wish I had all the answers, but I do not. I have many questions I want to ask myself and know that nobody else has the answers either. All we can do is continue to strive to be good, fair, and seek continual improvement and when we don't know something, simply say, "I don't know." Then together try to find a solution.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on March 4, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, blame, change, clausewitz, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, education, effort, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, Je Ne Sais Pas, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, South Carolina, Sun Tzu, teamwork, technical solutions, thought, Training, values, vision, warfare, zen zone, Zhuge Liang

I Am A Bully

No comments

Curt Varone wrote an excellent post on the Fire Law blog today on the concept of cyberbullying, this after a firefighter posted photos that could be construed as unflattering and might even go on to be considered hateful. He even presented this poignant question: “How do we, as members of the Internet community, draw our own lines about what is and is not fair game when it comes to humor, satire and parody?”

So, after reading the post, I replied about how much I enjoyed the article and how it seems, to me, to be an issue of maturity and self-control, which we will talk about in a second. After hitting the send button, I watched the extraordinarily funny video on the “People of Walmart” that he used as an example, and thinking it to be a good illustration of why I prefer not to shop at Walmart, I shared that video on my Facebook page.

I then sat and sipped on my triple espresso and began to write a sanctimonious post on how bullies were ruining the internet, blah, blah, blah…

The funny part about being introspective is that when you begin to practice it, you see yourself in a whole different light, and each time, you begin to see it more quickly (as in, before regretting it, sometimes). As I began to write and speak about how people are different and we needed to be a little more appreciative of differences in individuals, it occurred to me that by sharing the Walmart video, I wasn’t any better than anyone else. Not only that, I was a hypocrite, which is precisely the one thing I don’t ever want to be.

Curt asked this of us:

“Can we protect Jayden [the subject of the post] and still have our funny Walmart photos? Is there a line that can be drawn that makes one OK and the other not?”

In my comment to Curt, I stated: “I think that a lot of problems [in what could be considered cyberbullying] could be traced back to maturity and some personal self-control [sic].” Not a very well written sentence with the redundancy, but you get it, I hope. My point, however was that there have been plenty of times where an inappropriate comment or reply has crossed my mind, something that in context might have been funny, even between me and the subject, but then I thought better of it.

I believe, of course, that there is nothing wrong with sarcasm, cynicism, or even good ol’ fashioned sophomoric humor. But the bigger question has always been: Do I want this attributed to me?” Or do I want it to be seen by people who see me as being above that? Or is this how I want to represent Firehouse Zen? Or the greater emergency services culture?

I said in that comment that it “almost” seems to me to be the equivalent of handing a child a weapon. Given the outcomes of some of the more publicized events (suicide or retaliatory homicide), maybe that isn’t so far of a reach. The child doesn’t necessarily understand the power they are holding. They don’t have a grasp on the gravity of the situation. With the pull of a trigger, they can launch down an irrevocable path with unbelievable repercussions. The child may mean absolutely nothing in doing so. The action might even be the result of mishandling the weapon. But regardless of intention, it still does damage.

The pro-gun folks could have a field day with this discussion, but it is completely relevant: How do we regulate something with so much power to change lives, so that those who don’t understand or can’t appreciate the outcomes don’t end up with the ability to hurt others? Do we take it away? Do we restrict access? Or is this truly an adaptive issue we need to address not through a technical fix, but through a change in culture? I don't believe an across-the-board ban on internet speech is any more useful than an across-the-board ban on weapons. But the million dollar question is how do we manage to protect the vulnerable from those who mean them harm, regardless of the context?

I have no doubts that there are plenty of malicious individuals on the internet. I see them every day, cowering behind their keyboards, making references, creating innuendo, spouting about subjects of which they have no knowledge, and doing so without repercussion. There are comments I read that frankly, make me think to myself that I’d love to meet that individual and push their f***ing teeth in.

But while the internet is not for the weak of heart, it provides us the ability to share information that we couldn’t do before. With the “send” button firmly pushed, I can converse with people in foreign lands, people who I would never have met, or may not ever meet, just because of the issues of time and place. The thing I can see as being a precious tool that has changed my life can, honestly, also be used against me if someone so chooses, and with my being able to do nothing about it. So just as we don’t go walking into saloons with revolvers strapped to both hips without expecting a fight, there are places and people and conversations to avoid on the internet as not to cause yourself to be the focus of someone’s “weapon”. But honestly, I also don’t want to be a cyberbully either, so I must resolve to be what I say I am and not contribute to the distribution of the same material.

In reference to the Walmart video; it IS funny. It is accurate in that these people have gone into a Walmart and been photographed in public. And I concede that if you do these things, perhaps you open yourself up to a certain amount of criticism or ridicule. But on the other hand, I found it pretty tragic as well. Really, who knows if some of these people aren’t suffering from an emotional disturbance or simply are clueless about how they look or what it is they are doing. Like I have heard said, “They obviously don’t have friends or a mirror.” You know, really, we should be instead grateful that we aren't ourselves suffering the same fate.

One person may not be able to change the world overnight, but we can at least give it our best shot. Being human, I realize that I can’t control everything, but I can control myself and be a responsible individual and a good example for my family, friends and colleagues. And while I may laugh, I need to do so in a way that isn’t mean or hurtful to others, despite how viral the laughing might be.

Watch where you are pointing, because tomorrow, the pointing could very well be in your direction.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on February 25, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership, News, Technology & Communications • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, blame, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, Curt Varone, education, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, Fire Law, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse, Firehouse Zen, forward, friend, government, gun, gun control, Hilton Head Island, homicide, integrity, internet, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, responsibility, South Carolina, suicide, teamwork, technical solutions, thought, Training, troll, values, vision, warfare, weapon, zen, zen zone

The FNG

No comments

I was someplace the other day and ran into this guy who I remembered from my very young days as a rookie firefighter. I was in my Class A, which has a few shiny things on it, as well as 32 years worth of Maltese crosses on the sleeve. So I guess I looked moderately important, I don't know. But the guy Introduced himself and asked me if I knew who he was and I responded that I did. And he proceeded to act like I was his new best friend, because he cornered me to chat for a while.

Unfortunately, the reason I remember him is because when I was a rookie firefighter, he wouldn't give me the time of day. Fortunately, I am well past the point in my life where I would have held that against him. In a way, even, I feel sorry for him. When I retire, I would hope people spoke of me fondly and reverently, but in this case, I'd bet not many of my colleagues knew who this individual was, nor did they care. He was pretty important in his time, but I also remember the wedges he drove between people in order to further his agenda.

As a brand new member, I remember that I had time and energy to contribute and I wanted to be involved, yet my help was unwelcome. I know now that it had more about my being a firefighter than about me personally (this was in a third-party EMS setting), but it still stung at the time. This brings me to the question of how we treat our new personnel. While it is one thing to accord a certain amount of ambivalence to the new guys until they can earn your attention, it is a whole different issue to just be disrespectful and dismissive. Remember those guys who had a little power and exerted it on you just because they could? The ones who were big fish in a small puddle and the way they got their power fix was to take it out on you? That, my friends, defines bullying behavior. That, my friends also defines a hostile workplace. These days, not only is it boorish behavior, it is against the law.

I am not saying you need to have a group hug and a round of Kumbaya. A good leader should simply be fair, understanding, and even objectively detached, while being there to guide and mentor. You don't need to be the FNG's new best buddy, and in fact, that would be a huge mistake. You need to be the designated adult supervision, which means you need to act professional and display behavior you would like to see emulated by your new member.

So while my ego may have suffered a bruise over the years, I lived to tell about it. I can even laugh about it now. The good thing I took from it though, was that I wouldn't treat other people like that and if anything, like any other bad situation, instead of dwelling on it I learned to grow through it. Be open-minded and receptive to lessons learned in adversity, and it will make you a stronger leader.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on February 25, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership, professionalism • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, blame, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, education, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse, Firehouse Zen, FNG, forward, friend, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, Kumbaya, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, South Carolina, teamwork, technical solutions, thought, Training, values, vision, warfare, zen, zen zone

It Can’t Happen Here

2 comments

Our prayers need, right now, to be with our brothers at Bryan (TX) Fire Department in their loss of two valiant men, both of whom perished in the line of duty. We need to also support the two firefighters who were also part of the Rapid Intervention Team that went in and they too, were injured in this fire.

I am not well-versed in the operations of the Bryan Fire Department or their reputation. I can say that I have read some articles on their operation and have been impressed with what I saw; I have been to their website and they look like a progressive and forward-thinking organization. They do a lot of the same things my department does and are roughly the same size department as the one I work for. We run about the same number of calls, if my department were to have a "consistent" population (we have an "off-season" that causes a slight dip in response numbers). I would bet their people are a lot like the people I work with, and I'd bet their chief officers are a lot like me and my colleagues as well.

My department uses accountability and incident management practices that are considered to be the best in our business, and our culture is such that we use them daily, routinely, and intuitively, from the newest firefighter to the Chief of Department. We have modern equipment and we have high standards for our personnel. We are not "safety nazis"; we foster an aggressive approach to fighting fire and dealing with emergency situations, but there is a difference between "aggressive" and "arrogant". Safety is important, and we believe good situational awareness and good practices will keep us out of trouble, even when operating in harm's way. From what I can tell, the Bryan Fire Department is one of these types of departments as well.

We don't shoot from the hip at our department. For the most part, we try to take an unemotional approach to solving the problems we face on scenes. We get facts, we do the job, and we are proud to say that combined with our codes enforcement and fire prevention activities, we stop fires where we find them. When someone has a heart attack, between community involvement and everything else that makes up our team approach, we save them. We have more good days than bad ones, and that is always a force multiplier. I'd bet Bryan Fire Department is the same way.

As you can tell, I can identify with these guys and I have a lot of respect for their organization. They are, like a number of departments out there, just like the one I work for. But while I would like to think it can't happen here at my department, the difference between things going well and things going catastrophically, sometimes, is a crapshoot. You can do all the right things sometimes and it just takes one element to spin out of control, and tragedy ensues. I don't know all the facts about this situation, but I know this: we must try to give our people all the chances at success as possible in order for them to have any chance at all. No raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood, and you wouldn't think a tiny bird could bring down a jet airliner, but small things happen and result in big consequences. Everytime a brother goes down in the line of duty, it is imperative that we learn from it, so we don't have the same thing happen again.

If you really want to honor the brotherhood, you will walk away from all this with the idea that we must hone our art, we must pay attention to the details, and we must embrace changes that give us the opportunity to go home to our families at the end of the shift. While we have those among us who would climb into a dumpster fire to put it out, those of us with a respect for the conditions present at any emergency understand that we risk our lives to an extent just by responding to calls and there isn't a reason sometimes to increase that ratio of risk to reward. But when we do, we do so with a skeptical eye and we always remember we are sending our brothers in to do a job where they are already, often or not, outmatched.

God Bless our fallen brothers, Lt. Eric Wallace and Lt. Greg Pickard, be with Firefighters Mantey and Moran in their recovery, and especially watch over the Bryan Fire Department and their families during this time. Whatever you do, never say "it can't happen here". Learn the lessons from this and many other incidents, and resolve that while these situations might very well happen outside of our control, we at least won't go down without a fight.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on February 18, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, Command & Leadership, leadership, Line of Duty, LODD, News, safety • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, Bryan, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, education, EMS, EMS Topics, Eric Wallace, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, Greg Pickard, Hilton Head Island, integrity, leadership, learning, LODD, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, positive, professionalism, resources, safety, South Carolina, teamwork, technical solutions, Texas, thought, Training, values, vision

Change Your Mind

No comments

When I was very young and was grappling with the nuances of the language, I used the word "loathe" to express my "dislike" of something. I'm pretty sure I didn't use it to describe my feelings for my siblings, but my memory isn't that good. My mother, who I think I got the writing gene from, explained to me the difference between "loathe" and "don't like", and with that, I understood the subtleties of one more word in our language.

In this spirit, I'm trying to be helpful. When you express your disagreement with a fellow human being, it is not the same as saying you don't like Brussels sprouts. The growers of Brussels sprouts may not agree with me, but Brussels sprouts don't have feelings, or at least none that we are aware of yet. They don't have children that look up to them. They don't have colleagues and friends with whom they have to maintain some mutual relationships with. So saying you "hate" Brussels sprouts doesn't have immediate impact. Expressing your opinion of the worthlessness of Brussels sprouts, unless you are the President of the United States, doesn't create a change in the popularity of them.

When speaking of others, when you say that someone is different than you, that is an observation of fact in many cases. When you say they are stupid or backwards or simply wrong, you are basing that observation on your own perspective, and while you may feel strongly about that emotion, you also may very well be wrong. And then who is the stupid one?

The debates we entertain in society these days don't seem to be anything other than shouting matches for the intolerant. There is a lot of merit to the understanding that in a lot of cases, when one opens their mouth, very often they expose their ignorance. As these arguments are hashed out not over reasoned discussion but inflammatory sound bites, one must really look at the way we choose to talk to one another and the damage it is doing to us all as a society.

I think it is very important to hear the thoughts of others. This would be great if those thoughts were framed in the context that they are your thoughts and you are interested in trying to educate others. A statement that you understand that and you are interested in hearing alternate viewpoints is valuable when you are engaging others. But unfortunately, where the discussion is left open and unfettered, where people fail to remain on point, they use not only poor reasoning, but in some cases, slanderous, unfounded, and utterly ignorant rhetoric. While this may be acceptable to some, and maybe even in a perverse sort of way, to them, amusing (a la Jackass, where we watch individuals making stupid decisions and laugh at the consequences) in my observation it is simply permitting the type of attitude that evolves toward less than desirable outcomes.

There is nothing healthy about poking at something with a stick to see what it will do. I'd bet the Romans probably wished they hadn't been lording their power over the world when the barbarians finally figured out how to cross the Rhine. If you are sitting around, smug in your belief that you are in a position of power, or righteousness, or whatever ego-inflating situation you happen to see yourself in, think again. Conditions change, other vantage points become apparent, and additional factors come into play. Just because you think yourself right today, tomorrow can bring an entirely new way of thought.

Today I went out in my kayak to clear my head and to get ready for the upcoming week, a meditation of sorts. I am by myself, I am paying attention to everything going on around me, and I don't have the backscatter going on that distracts me from one task or another. In these cases, I am constantly listening. I relax and listen to what is going on around me. It is something I began to develop more in watching some of the people I respect greatly, in that they listen and take in what is being said, and then reflect it back, with maybe their ideas on the subject. But they aren't talking, they are listening. They aren't judging, they aren't criticizing, they aren't telling you how to do something, or why they are right. They listen, they relate, and they suggest.

Instead of telling people what you think, maybe you should take a moment and listen to others. While doing so might educate you on these points of view, I would bet that you will also find yourself in a position where people are willing to look toward you as a voice of reason and enlightened when that kind of viewpoint is most valuable.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on February 11, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, blame, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, education, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, South Carolina, teamwork, technical solutions; brussels sprouts, thought, Training, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

Loser

No comments

In our business, unfortunately, we don't always get to pick when and where we have our battles. I don't mean this in the context of leading, but in the context of response and operations.

Simply said, our overarching goal as an incident commander should be to dictate the conditions, not to permit the conditions to dictate to us. But no matter what, we are on the defense on every call, despite our terminology; we didn't choose to engage in battle at the time, it was chosen for us, so offensive, defensive, or transitionally, we are really always starting on the idea that we defend, even if that defense is an aggressive offense.

Sun Tzu's warnings are clear that a good general doesn't go into battle unprepared. Zhuge Liang's commentaries on leadership suggest the need for picking the place of engagement to obtain maximum effect. Clausewitz cautions that we have to cut through the "fog of war" to get to the real essence of situational awareness. But these classics all are predicated on the general's ability to maneuver out of a situation where they are put into conflict without adequate preparation. We don't have that luxury.

When we are called out after midnight to respond to a structure fire, we are already on our heels. When we are alerted to a cardiac arrest on a fine spring afternoon, we didn't necessarily expect it to happen. We prepare for these events through training, but what we can't prepare for are the contributing factors that led to this disaster occurring at that moment, at that place, and in that context. The fight may already be lost by the time we arrive to the battlefield and we have to keep that idea tucked away in the back of our heads and prepare for the proper reaction to those events. Adding to disaster by refusing to admit our need to defend is the downfall of many a general, and many a fire chief.

On a recent call, my crews were unable, despite extraordinary and valiant efforts, to reverse the outcome. In the past, perhaps they would be more accepting, but in light of recent changes to our strategies, these guys have been enjoying the fruits of their labor and they have been pulling off some amazing work. Today, however, all of that effort was notable, but not able to change what was already writ. I could see the expressions on their faces as they questioned what else they could have done. I spoke with them and encouraged them, but it was obvious, they had gotten so used to winning that losing was just not an option.

Despite our best efforts, we lose from time to time. There are parking lots out there that were predestined, rather than created by failure on the part of the incident commander. People die sometimes catastrophically, with the only possible saving intervention being bright lights and cold steel. Rather than dwell on the loss, it is imperative that we review our actions, determine the things we did right, analyze the things we could improve on, and prepare for the next battle. The greatest sports teams, the most powerful armies, and the most skilled negotiators lose on occasion. The difference between their continued success and sliding into the pit of failure is their ability to look creatively and insightfully to what occurred and to create means of learning from the issues they were presented. If anything, simply maintaining status quo might be a save if the only other alternative was lost ground.

Good leaders find value even in a loss. They may not like it and in fact, should not. But they can look at the loss and see the opportunity to educate and to reset things, if that is necessary. We should never "accept" a loss, but use it for what it is; a chance to grow.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on February 4, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, blame, change, clausewitz, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, education, effort, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, loser, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, parking lot, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, South Carolina, status quo, Sun Tzu, teamwork, technical solutions, thought, Training, values, vision, warfare, zen zone, Zhuge Liang

Your Altruism Is Hereby Noted

No comments

I was reading the never-ending stream of discussion on Dave Statter's site about the AZ fire department refusing respond to a structure fire three miles away from their station because the home was in an area that was not paying for fire service. And we have had this discussion many times before, here on Firehouse Zen, a la South Fulton County and others. And I am constantly surprised at the discussions that go on regarding the "pay to spray" concept, since, by now, I would have thought most communities in our nation would have gotten a clue and done something about it, one way or another, or would stop acting so surprised when it happens again. And it keeps happening again. And again.

When I was a very young firefighter, I remember this very same kind of event occurring with a subscription fire department. I also remember being outraged that something Ike this could occur. Really, we are altruists, we firefighters, and we do this stuff not for the pay but for the love of our fellow man. Right? But, some thirty years later and more jaded and cynical, I wade into this conversation with a dose of reality for you. While it is great that we are all so willing to serve and to lay down our lives for others, there comes a serious discussion that is higher on the food chain than we happen to be. This discussion lies at the feet of those who make these policy decisions, at the jurisdictional level, and with those who claim the fire service is gutting their wallet for all they can get, then act stupid when we tell them all this stuff costs money.

This situation is heartbreaking and I can certainly empathize with the homeowner, my own family having lost everything we had to fire when I was young. But I also know from the perspective of a community activist: if a necessary service or facility is needed in my neighborhood, I work to fix it, or build it, or develop it. I don't sit around and wait for someone else to do it. If I were in a situation like this, I'd work with my local fire department to get them funding. I would help with fund raising. I would be a total pain in the ass to my elected officials and agitate to resolve the problem. But I wouldn't just stick my head in the sand and hope nothing happened.

Please don't take my tone as being disparaging to those of you who feel the urge to help regardless of whether the person pays or not. I certainly believe in selfless service to my neighbor. I am happy to be there in their time of need and regardless of their ability to pay. But I have a question for those of you who are getting emotional: "How many times does it have to happen before the elected officials in these communities get a clue and ensure that sustained funding is provided for fire protection?"

I feel stupid just repeating it, because the subject has been covered SO MANY TIMES; these trucks cost money. The fuel to send them costs money. The equipment on them costs money. The insurance costs money. The protective gear we wear costs money. The station we respond out of costs money. It's not even an issue of paying salaries and benefits; just the most elemental of operations at least requires the means to put out the fire and that requires funding. Do the citizens in these neighborhoods just assume the fire department will pay for these needs and they can get by without paying for the service?

You take a gamble when you decide to go uninsured, or in this case, live in a community who won't pay the bills. While I agree that there are likely some contributing factors, it is as simple as this: If I lived in a community and there wasn't police protection, I'd find out why. If the community leaders refused to help, I would do something about it. Or perhaps (which will make the pro-gun advocates jump with joy) I would arm to protect myself. But I wouldn't keep quiet and accept that I would be without help in the event I needed it.

The real tragedy is that over the history of our nation, when "real" leaders realized fire protection was substandard, or too far away, or wouldn't be available to them, they organized their own fire protection. In this day and age, one could even add sprinklers to one's home, you could be fire safe and maintain your home and property correctly, and if you absolutely had to, you could even provide your own fire apparatus (people still do this). But even if one can't afford to pay a subscription, there should be some alternative solutions, like a community grant to pay for those who haven't the means, or maybe even some work equity to pay the subscription off.

This leads into discussion on the situation in these communities in regard to "service". Volunteerism is a highly commendable and altruistic calling, not just in the fire service, but in many community services who lack the resources afforded to other projects. I volunteer as an advocate for those with Down syndrome; I volunteer to help the homeless and hungry; I served for years with a camp for children who have vision challenges; and I support a whole range of other causes. I would never withhold assistance to someone who needed help. In fact, that is why we are there, to help. But if the people who need the help can't fund the service, it is incumbent upon us, as leaders of these projects, to find out where to get those funds. I may seek corporate funding, or community funding, or tax funding, or pay for things out of my pocket. But the money has to come from somewhere, and if we were in the situation of helping someone who could afford help, I would certainly expect them to have some equity in the solution.

"Pay For Spray" is a pretty derogatory descriptor of the situation. I would bet that the firefighters in these communities are challenged between doing what is right to help their neighbors and the elected officials who chose to abandon their responsibility for ensuring public safety needs are adequate. This is not an enviable position to be in. But frankly, those of you who are so aggrieved by this situation should really consider moving to these areas and offering your services free of charge, putting diesel in using your credit card, and paying the light bill, because it sounds like they would love to have you pay for it all out of your pocket.

Instead of bashing the department's chief for having to make a tough decision, perhaps we should focus the blame squarely on those who created the problem: The taxpayers and politicians who knew they had coverage issues and elected to abandon their neighbors out of convenience. If you have a subscription service, as I said before, you'd better have an alternative plan in the event someone doesn't pay and you have to go into action. And if the answer from the town fathers is, "Too bad", that should be widely known in the community, in the media, and everyone involved, and there should be no shock when it actually occurs, because trust me, it will.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on January 28, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, Fire Rescue Topics, Funding & Staffing, leadership, News • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, altruism, Arizona, blame, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, Dave Statter, education, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, firearm, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, gun, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, South Carolina, South Fulton County, teamwork, technical solutions, thought, Training, values, vision, volunteer, warfare, zen zone

Next Man Up

No comments

I was catching up on my reading and came upon an interesting tidbit. While I have heard it said before, I never really ascribed to the concept that when a leader is cut down, the enemy is unable to function. This was apparently a widely held belief in World War II which led to some surprise when, after cutting down an officer, confusion did not necessarily occur.

On teams where a leader takes a very regimented stance and fails to entrust his or her subordinates with the "keys to the ship", there may very well be some disarray when something happens to that leader. Believing that to be true disregards the power of initiative when the leader falls, which has historically been the very opportunity seized by those who are now considered to be our most treasured heroes. Think of all of the Congressional Medal of Valor winners who have stepped up in the wake of a lost officer. Think about the forces of the FDNY who charged forward when they lost so many of their commanders on 9-11-2001. And you can trace back throughout the story of mankind where this has happened again and again.

It is necessary for not only officers to show leadership, but everyone, all the way to the probie on their first shift. It is important to know that being a leader is contextual. You may not be the ranking officer on your department, but when something goes wrong, you may very well be the one who has to step forward and take action. You may need to be the one who says, "Follow me" and charges ahead. Or you may be the one to coax someone to go be seen by a physician even though it's three in the morning and you don't feel like transporting, but because this individual needs your leadership at that moment, you do it, and it's because it's the right thing to do.

Leading implies by its very nature that you are "in front". And being in front places you in a very vulnerable position. But the vulnerability keeps us honest and causes us, if we really are leaders, to act with diligence and to be restrained when it becomes advantageous, especially for those whom we lead. Leading is mostly give and sometimes take, but mostly give again and again. Leading is serving others.

We have to foster leadership tendencies in our followers and this is best done by our example. Being a "just" leader shows everyone that doing the right things for others has merit, and it hopefully breeds a culture of everyone on the team doing these same things and stepping in if something happens to you, and then even with the same results.

Share your vision with others, especially those on your team, and bring them up to your level. They will in turn lighten your load and someday, hopefully, cause you an enormous amount of pride.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on January 21, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership • Tagged: activism, advice, advocacy, blame, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, Dave Statter, education, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, EMS12Lead.com, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, Phil LaDuke, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, South Carolina, Statter911.com, teamwork, thought, Tom Bouthillet, Training, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

“What You Need” Continues

Comments Off

I originally wrote this on Christmas Day. I was at my place, eating chicken and rice soup. While I would have liked to be doing other things, I had some sort of head cold. Knowing that what I really needed to do was to rest, it's certainly not what I would rather have been doing. This isn't a desire for sympathy; I am making a point. This action was not an act of selflessness but an act of necessity.

My oldest daughter is sick today, however. I told her last week we would go geocaching today, and she has been talking about it ever since. But yesterday she came down with a temperature and today, knowing she's going to have to go to school tomorrow, I'm not so sure we will be out looking for goodies. This isn't making me very popular, but this isn't a popularity contest. I'm the dad, the designated adult supervision, just like in my regular job as a Battalion Chief.

While in both situations this local crud is the topic d'jour, the whole point in even bringing this up is that I have a decision to make. In one case it is for my benefit, in another, for someone else's. A conscious decision has been made on what must be done, the effects of the actions on others must be considered, and tough choices must be made. I agree its a miserable way to spend your Christmas or a weekend, but its part of the situation I have to deal with. I approached the problem using logic, not my emotions. Hopefully I will be right.

This brings us back to the issue of what we want versus what we need. It's the age-old debate of resisting temptation to do what we are supposed to be doing. You know, the difference between doing what feels good at the time and doing what is going to be best for everyone in the end. And you are going to have to bear with me, as I too am under the influence of cough medicine and other antihistamines, so I'm going to do something stupid. I am going to wade into the issue of the frat house culture in many fire stations and why it is a bad thing.

Thus, I happen to have grown up in the fire service in a time where the horseplay and the antics were acceptable, so I have my share of "funny" stories. Lately, none seem to be coming to mind, because frankly, I take a very dim view of that kind of nonsense going on in any of the stations I am responsible for these days, and with good reason.

We can use the business analogy and realize that again, our citizen taxpayer funding base these days also takes a dim view of a bunch of guys pulling jokes on each other while they are being paid good money to be productive. I think the rationale is that "If I have to be miserable when I am working, so do you." I don't think being miserable at work is absolutely necessary, but I'm sure it chaps the asses of a few in the community when they think you are more preoccupied in saran-wrapping a toilet than in protecting their loved ones during that 24 hour shift.

Even worse, though, is the negative implications these antics have in the community when they are seen by the public in regard to their trust in your ability to do the job. And now more than ever, we need the public to trust us: trust us when we tell them they need to evacuate a building, trust us when we tell them we need better equipment, or are defending our budget, and to trust us when we are holding their lives in our hands.

So as hard as it is for some of you to rein in your inner advocate for either side of the issue, let's look at the REAL problem. The issue is that our culture should be one of quiet professionalism rather than juvenile behavior. In the fire service, one of the issues we need to deal with is recruitment. Do we want to attract individuals who exhibit questionable judgment and poor self-restraint? Or those who will serve as pillars of the community? If we act like we have a frat house mentality, we will attract those very same individuals.

But this post is not meant to suggest a solution to the problem of this behavior directly. What I want you to do, rather, is to step back from the debate a second and view this situation, as Heifetz and Linsky so eloquently described, from the balcony.

At some point, I would bet both sides could have agreed that this problem is one we agree on. We would all like to keep those who can not be trusted to act responsibly off our engines and out of our medics. This population would include "juveniles", the emotionally fragile, and those who have egotistical reasons for being in the fire and emergency services (because of the "power" they attain). Each of those scenarios has their own factors we must deal with.

The real issue is that the solutions we seek are not technical in nature; they are very much adaptive issues. And people with attitudes like those are incapable of utilizing adaptive strategies in handling problems. The business of public safety requires individuals who can exercise independent decision-making in high-stress situations where their ethics are often put to the test. And that's just in the station. It is very easy for the new leader to want to make poor decisions or even just abandon the hard decisions altogether just because they want to remain "part of the gang". We don't need more of those personalities; we need people who are capable of being grownups and being responsible. We need real leaders.

The future of this industry requires a better approach to how we do the job. It requires more than stomping our feet and saying that if we don't get our way, we'll hold our breath until we turn blue. Trust me, there's more coming on the subject. And like I told Emma when I gave her a dose of medicine this morning, it's gonna get worse before it gets better. But yes, I omitted from telling her, you can get so sick by avoiding the medicine that you could, in fact, die. If we really care about what it is we want to preserve, we need to make some hard choices and be the designated grownups.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on January 7, 2013 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: activism, adaptive leadership, advice, advocacy, AOL, Aurora, blame, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, education, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, firearm, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, gun, Heifetz, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, Linsky, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, Newtown, NRA, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, Second Amendment, South Carolina, teamwork, technical solutions, thought, Training, values, vision, warfare, Webster, zen zone

Superstition

No comments

I am not what most people would call superstitious. If a black cat crosses my path, I don't really care; I carefully walk under ladders not because I believe in some unseen hex but because something may fall on my head.

So on Christmas Eve, of all days, I happened to be at a funeral for the three-year-old child of a brother firefighter. Between this tragedy and all the other events of this year, it certainly seems as if 2012 has not been very good to many of us. I was walking along and looked down to see a bright, shiny penny, heads up, on the ground. I bent down to pick it up.

Right now, we need all the luck we can get.

We are all seeking answers to our personal questions as to how bad things can happen to good people. We all have our own battles to deal with, in our statuses, our relationships, our beliefs and our values. The source of the answers can only come from within and it takes some really tough moments of introspection to reflect on the bad and what good may have come from it to understand that there may be lessons for us all in these events.

Don't let it all get to you. If you need a friend, find a friend. Reach out to others. Take part in your community and give back to those who need help. Challenge yourself. But in the words of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy piety or wit,

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

We can't change the past, but we can learn from it. Have a better year in 2013 and look forward, looking back only to understand where we are today came from the things that happened to us yesterday. Instead of dwelling on it, move forward from it.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on December 27, 2012 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: 2012, 2013, activism, advice, advocacy, Aurora, blame, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, education, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, fiscal cliff, forward, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, luck, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, New Year, Newtown, opportunity, penny, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, South Carolina, superstition, teamwork, thought, Training, values, vision, warfare, Webster, zen zone

What You Want vs. What You Need

6 comments

So, continuing on my theme of pissing off the vast majority of the fire service with the intention of waking you up, I am going to go ahead and tell you that there is a huge difference between what you all believe to be our jobs and the reality of our jobs. This is a recurring theme in our "business", because you know what, it IS a business. It is a business because we have to, like it or not, adopt good fiduciary management; we have to market our organization; we have to "sell" our product. In short, we as a fire service, at the national, state, regional, and local levels, do all the things we have to do to survive, because if you hadn't noticed, we are at war.

War sounds a little dramatic, but I'm really trying to awaken you to what is occurring, and being nicey-nice about it doesn't seem to be working. As an unscientific gauge to why it isn't working, I took a little look around the internet.

Let me begin by pointing out that I have no issues with the sites I am speaking of; their authors have done an extraordinary job of finding their market niche and giving the people what they want. That is rule number one in business. So using that business logic, the demographic I am going after here, no exclusions intended, are 25-34 year old white males (Sorry, but those are the numbers). Why those numbers, you ask? Good question; the people I am trying to reach are those who overwhelmingly prefer the sugary snack of scantily clad women in fire apparel, lots of fire pictures, and tough, adrenaline filled talk.

I already have a readership of enlightened men and women who think outside of their positions and who prefer reading about concepts that will help them lead others. The demographic that is affecting the change in the fire service, however, are those 25-34 year old white males who refuse to put down the toys, stop bitching, and realize that this job isn't day care for teenagers anymore. That demographic I speak of is the demographic of the American Fire Service, and coincidentally, the one that everyone dances around when they are trying to elevate our traditions above being endless cannon fodder for the fires we fight.

Yes, there are many of you reading this who might take exception to this and frankly, I am you, so stop whining. I have been and in a way, still am one of those people. But above that, however, I took the stance that I would be visionary and forward-thinking in my approach to this blog, and I would seek ways to lead and improve our industry so that we could continue on into the future. And being honest, the approaches that many of you/us are taking will doom our tradition if we don't wake up and evolve.

The short-sighted approach that many firefighters seem to take is that we are a necessary evil. "If you don't like it, tough, because there will always be fires and you will always need us." "We are the only show in town." "We don't need to be nice because if we aren't, who are you going to call?" If we behave like a bunch of frat boys, we are saying, the community will look past our antics and realize we are providing a service that they can't afford to replace with a new model.

Well, I have news for you all. That new model is being trotted out everywhere. Communities across this country are overwhelmingly sick and tired of the liability of having juveniles running things at the company levels. The chiefs they hire are people with education, people with a business acumen, people who are aware that they have to make hard decisions to rein in spending. They will do it regardless of whether you agree with them or not; remember how "wildly popular" Iacocca and Welch were at their companies when they came in, cut the fat, and fired people? If you don't, it's because most of you in that 25-34 year old demographic were infants then. But what YOU know of these guys is that they turned around companies who were near failure and brought them back into power. Well, if you think your fire chiefs haven't read anything on these guys, then you are delusional.

I hear tales from my friends who aren't chief officers about what the "chiefs" are doing to the fire service all the time. I tell them that it isn't what the chiefs are doing to the fire service, but what the economy, education, technology and the political will of the elected is doing to the fire service. We are simply managing the changes, and if you don't like it, well, there's not much we can do about it, is there? We can agree to resist change that will affect safety and efficiency, but the arguments thrown up by the unions and the firefighters are widely unconvincing: "People will die if we close this station." Well, they might and they might not. "Firefighters will die if this staffing isn't maintained." Well, again, they might and they might not. The reality is that to counter these proposals, you need facts. Provable, verifiable, scientific facts. Some people are striving to provide those facts. Overwhelmingly, however, YOU are not, everytime you scoff at the need for documenting, researching, or validating as being "desk jockey" material. And that's a whole blog post in itself.

Why don't you chew on this for a few days and tell me what you think? Trust me, there is much more I plan to say, but I'll probably have to break it down a little. If you are truly the apathetic individuals I speak of, I'm pretty sure there will just be stunned silence. Or you may just tune me out after seeing there's more than one paragraph and go back to the titty blogs. Either way, it's not what I do to make things continue on, it's what YOU do. I'm nearing the end of MY career and I have lots of great memories. But whether you have memories like those or not depends on what you are willing to do to change things.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on December 22, 2012 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: activism, advice, advocacy, blame, change, Chrysler, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, economy, education, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, GE, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, Jack Welch, jobs, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, Lee Iacocca, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, South Carolina, teamwork, thought, Training, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

Going To The Source – A Manifesto

No comments

I am struggling with my faith, not specifically in my church, my community, or even in society per se. In the context of this blog, I am struggling with those who administer, those who interpret the needs of others, and those who teach what is supposed to be the infallible word of how to provide our service from its lecterns, regardless of career or volunteer, urban or rural, American or anyone else, among other things.

While I am not questioning the principles of how we provide emergency service, or rather any service to those we are charged with protecting, any effort to ask the hard questions instead of simply criticizing more often than not labels one as a troublemaker, a rebel, or worse (at least in our nation), unpatriotic. In many circles my desire for enlightenment would label me as a heretic, I suppose, which is a big reason why I’d just as soon do this at arm’s length from the people I am close to, including those in my own circles, who are blameless in these observations. So I guess this becomes a manifesto, of sorts.

Speaking in regard to the fire service, I have been a leader for longer than I care to be, sometimes, because frankly, it says that I am part of the problem. I am not, however, what I consider to be even a passing expert in anything regarding the psychology of those I lead. This blog site, called Firehouse Zen, actually describes my “religion”; I seek enlightenment, I ask questions, I challenge “authority” to do a better job, I seek positive change, and I am healthily cynical. I want to know how and why something works so I can better apply it myself, and I am absolutely NOT a sheep, driving along in the fast lane below the speed limit, mouth agape, oblivious to the line of traffic behind them.

To those of you who would label me a cheerleader by way of the positivity I espouse, I say to you that you completely miss the mark. I am a cheerleader of best practices. I am a cheerleader of just leadership. I am a cheerleader of strong values and ethical decision-making. I embrace positivity because it is the right way to be. But as usual, I give to you my disclaimer: While there are those who are optimists and are constantly dismayed by the selfishness of society, I maintain my skepticism and thus am pleasantly surprised on the infrequent occasion someone rises to greatness. Or just does something for the right reasons.

My struggle is actually in the willingness of society to ignore the bigger issues of our world as a whole. I think our leaders at all levels of government are more engrained in meeting their own personal enrichment and extravagant egos rather than leading the people who sincerely need their guidance in these times. I see this ego-driven leadership from the top to the bottom; from those who govern our superpowers down to the lowest firefighter, cop, or EMT. But since we are charged with serving others, and our missions in every single one of the organizations you are affiliated with involve serving others, I find it hypocritical that many of the "leaders" we seem to have turned to for the answer on how to do this are more concerned with protecting the status quo.

Lest you think this is some grand indictment of everyone on the planet who provides the service we do, it is not. I see daily the efforts of those who rise above the pettiness and the hurdles placed in front of them to do the right things. I try to let them know whenever I see these actions that these are right and just actions they are taking. I encourage their efforts. But they are in many cases the exception to the rule. In fact, if you have read this far, I think one of the most important things you can do as a brother firefighter, law enforcement officer, or EMT is to actively encourage those who you see as making right and just decisions, making efforts to alleviate the suffering of others, and those who use their legitimate power to make things better for others. If we at least take the time to recognize these examples, maybe it will cause others to emulate those qualities.

So this actually begins a little change in the discussion about my issues with the delivery of service to our communities and all its history, tradition, and strongly held beliefs. Since I have over thirty years in the business, I guess that enables me to speak to the subject, since I have seen the wide scope of how we have "done the job" and I can certainly say things that will quickly become controversial. But again, my purpose isn't to say these things are anything other than values we need to question, because in questioning, we either better understand them for their accuracy, or we expose them to be fallacies.

This should be an interesting ride, so I would say to spread the word and invite everyone to watch (and participate), and let's have a healthy discussion about what makes our industry tick. Who knows? You might be the one who convinces me of something I otherwise held to be true.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on December 9, 2012 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: activism, advice, advocacy, blame, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, education, ego, EMS, EMS Topics, facts, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, just culture, just leadership, leadership, learning, management, media, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, opportunity, politics, positive, professionalism, quote, resources, South Carolina, teamwork, thought, Training, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

Time To Clean Up

1 comment

I was reading Curt Varone's latest at Fire Law the other day and while his post was right on track, a quote he repeated struck me as timely: "We need to keep our own house clean or somebody's going to come and clean it for us…and we're probably not going to like the way they clean it." I have heard variations of that before, but with all the goings-on these days regarding unethical (and simply nonsensical) behavior in our ranks, it seems like a message worth repeating.

Daily, it seems, we see some story that defies logic, something that a firefighter has done that we all just shake our heads at. But a good question would be, where are the ethical examples being set in that person's department? Is the culture in that department such that these behanviors are tolerated, or simply passed off as being, "That's how so-and-so is"? Our conduct is examined daily by many- that scrutinizing comes as a result of being held in high esteem by some, and by virtue of some just looking for a reason to hate us. The jealousy that comes from those who aren't held so highly in the public regard is painfully obvious right now, as the fire service and other public servants are being thrust out as "greedy", "lazy", "corrupt" and using other contemptible adjectives. As leaders, we need to provide guidance to our troops that will help them move into the future with more credibility, more respect, and more personal strength than they currently are subjected to. That is our role as the mentor and we need to be diligent about making this shift.

The jointly released Firefighter Code of Ethics is an important document to provide such guidance, yet I would bet that not many of the individuals who work with us have actually read it. Well, here's the short form, in case you don't have time to read the whole two page document:

Always conduct myself, on and off duty, in a manner that reflects positively on myself, my department and the fire service in general.
Accept responsibility for my actions and for the consequences of my actions.
Support the concept of fairness and the value of diverse thoughts and opinions.
Avoid situations that would adversely affect the credibility or public perception of the fire service profession.
Be truthful and honest at all times and report instances of cheating or other dishonest acts that compromise the integrity of the fire service.
Conduct my personal affairs in a manner that does not improperly influence the performance of my duties, or bring discredit to my organization.
Be respectful and conscious of each member’s safety and welfare.
Recognize that I serve in a position of public trust that requires stewardship in the honest and efficient use of publicly owned resources, including uniforms, facilities, vehicles and equipment and that these are protected from misuse and theft.
Exercise professionalism, competence, respect and loyalty in the performance of my duties and use information, confidential or otherwise, gained by virtue of my position, only to benefit those I am entrusted to serve.
Avoid financial investments, outside employment, outside business interests or activities that conflict with or are enhanced by my official position or have the potential to create the perception of impropriety.
Never propose or accept personal rewards, special privileges, benefits, advancement, honors or gifts that may create a conflict of interest, or the appearance thereof.
Never engage in activities involving alcohol or other substance use or abuse that can impair my mental state or the performance of my duties and compromise safety.
Never discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, creed, age, marital status, national origin, ancestry, gender, sexual preference, medical condition or handicap.
Never harass, intimidate or threaten fellow members of the service or the public and stop or report the actions of other firefighters who engage in such behaviors.
Responsibly use social networking, electronic communications, or other media technology opportunities in a manner that does not discredit, dishonor or embarrass my organization, the fire service and the public. I also understand that failure to resolve or report inappropriate use of this media equates to condoning this behavior.

I'm sure that at one time or another in our careers, volunteer or paid, we have touched on one or more of these issues. I'm certainly not hypocritical, so don't take this as preaching. But as Curt's quote came about in regard to poor judgement being exercised by individuals, that same poor judgement taints the general impression the public has of us all, regardless of where you are or how your organization is considered.

We may be the most professional individuals in our departments, but tolerating unethical behavior is, as the Code of Ethics points out, tantamount to endorsing it as acceptable. Jst as the Good Ol' Boys Club is no longer tolerated in boardrooms, offices, or even in the barracks any longer, we are called upon to act as mature, responsible members of the community, even when it sounds like fun to act in a sophmoric fashion. Nothing good will come from the continued bad behavior and if we don't clean it up, you can rest assured the cleaning will come.

Take my advice: the business of delivering emergency service is evolving. The winds of change affect us all, regardless of where we happen to be doing this job. Over the course of time, the survivors of change weren't the strongest or most powerful, they were the ones who were able to adapt and ride the tides. If you haven't yet read the whole document, I suggest you do so and even if your organization won't commit, I strongly suggest that you do. It is time to clean up our house.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on August 10, 2012 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: activism, advice, advocacy, America, article, change, Code of Ethics, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, Curt Varone, education, EMS, EMS Topics, ethical, ethics, FHZ, Fire Law, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, leadership, learning, magnanimity, management, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, nation, National, NFA, opportunity, politics, poor, positive, pride, professionalism, resources, sacrifice, South Carolina, teamwork, thought, Training, USA, USFA, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

Magnanimity

No comments

The Women's Gold Medalist in Judo this year was also the first American to do so, Kayla Harrison. She has been incredibly candid about the abuse she suffered at the hands of a coach while in her adolescence and for her to reach beyond that, then to rise to the epitome of the sport, is beyond amazing. She said in an interview, there were plenty of reasons she could quit, and each time, her coach and others helped keep her looking forward.

I will also admit my bias, but her dream to return home and to pursue a career as a firefighter elevates her even higher in my regard. And after her win, she didn't bump chests or high-five others, she hugged her opponent, her coach, and then leapt into the crowd to hug her fiance. There was no taunting. There was no puffing up and proclaiming that she was the greatest in the history of Judo.

I watched Oscar Pistorius, the South African double amputee, compete for a trip to the semi-finals in the 400m while running on carbon-fiber prosthetics. Controversy aside, this man could have packed it in, could have easily said it couldn't be done, and could have without dispute lived a life of feeling sorry for himself, of mediocrity. When he completed his run, he simply expressed his appreciation for being given a chance and shared that the whole experience of being able to compete was "surreal".

These individuals exemplify magnanimity. Magnanimity literally means "greatly generous"; it describes the virtue of being great of mind and heart. It was discussed by Aristotle as the "crowning virtue" and infers actions for noble purposes. Forms of magnanimity include refusing to be petty, of not "rubbing in" a victory, and in being benevolent. The USA Men's Basketball team? No, not so much.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, "Magnanimity makes a man deem himself worthy of great things in consideration of the gifts he holds from God." Yesterday I used the statement, "Of those with much, much is expected", which was shared by President John F. Kennedy and actually relates to The Parable of the Talents found in the Gospel (Matthew, Chapter 22). It should go without saying that if you really are the best at what you do, whatever it may be, you have a responsibility to share that "wealth" with others. This is being magnanimous. If you are so good at something that you are flawless, you don't have the right to shove that in the face of others. It likely wasn't the same way in which you received that knowledge or skill. Someone had to share that information with you, or barring that, at least show you how to find knowledge, such as how to experiment until you got it right.

Magnanimous individuals are not content with being good. They constantly strive for quiet greatness. Again, Aquinas poses that God chooses for us to aspire to greatness and the flaw in those who fail to strive for excellence is that they doubt in the talents God has given us. To have faith in ourselves is to have faith in the ability God has gifted us with. Kayla Harrison and Oscar Pistorius, in my opinion, define the term.

God, I'm assuming, would not be pleased with anyone taking advantage of someone who lacks talent, much less rubbing it in their faces. But just for a second, let's understand that if we give you everything you need to succeed, we expect you to succeed. It's not a cause for celebration when you win a fight with the most powerful weapons in any modern arsenal. I can appreciate celebration of a win over a worthy adversary. I was wondering why there weren't any spinning dunks and laughing it up as the Lithuanians took it to the 2012 "Dream" Team. I'm hoping their near miss will cause them to be a little bit more humble.

While I have been a football coach and I have spent the majority of my life participating in organized sports, I can use combat as a frame of reference when determining strategy without believing for a second that it equates with real warfare. Likewise, I can use sports analogies to express concepts in battle as well as in command and control of emergency scenes without deluding myself that it is a game. But just as people around the world celebrate their nationalism through the Olympic games, they are just games.

And while I understand the USA Men's Basketball Team beating up on Nigeria is the figurative equivalent of a supercarrier task force taking on a flotilla of jon-boats, I also know that if the U.S. Navy vaporized that flotilla, they would not be running around and high-fiving. The reason I know this is because our servicemen and women, they understand magnanimity. They understand that you don't celebrate being able to kick the shit out of someone who can barely defend themselves. You do it if you must, but you keep it strictly business. And people who do that are high class individuals, they do the job and say thanks for recognizing them, but it's "just doing the job". It's a lot like we like our firefighters to be.

Being the strongest nation in the world bears the responsibility of using our power judiciously. Being the strongest sports team on the court requires us to respect our opponent- not mail it in- but certainly not to rejoice in their destruction either. Being leaders, it is our responsibility to be great, but humble. It is our responsibility to be quietly professional. It is our responsibility to be magnanimous.

Posted by Michael "Mick" Mayers on August 5, 2012 • Filed under: administration-leadership, change, Command & Leadership, leadership • Tagged: activism, advice, advocacy, America, Aquinas, article, basketball, change, Command & Leadership, conflict, consensus, education, EMS, EMS Topics, FHZ, fire rescue topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firehouse Zen, forward, gold, government, Hilton Head Island, integrity, judo, Kayla Harrison, kennedy, leadership, learning, magnanimity, management, Matthew, Mick Mayers, mission, motivation, nation, Olympic, opportunity, politics, poor, positive, pride, professionalism, resources, sacrifice, South Carolina, talent, teamwork, thought, Training, USA, values, vision, warfare, zen zone

Although I am affiliated or employed by certain entities, I in no way speak in this forum or others on behalf of those entities unless I have specifically stated such. Any implication otherwise is doing so contrary to my agreements with those entities. The result is that the observations and opinions by myself or on behalf of Firehouse Zen are not sanctioned by any other entity other than Graffiti Train Sherpa Publications and are protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America.

Archives for administration-leadership

Follow Firehouse Zen on Twitter!

Follow Firehouse Zen on Facebook

Firehouse Zen - Brain food for Mongo.

About

Connect With Mick

Fire & EMS Blogroll

Fire & EMS Destinations

Recent Posts

DISCLAIMER

Previous Rantings

Recent Comments

Tags Across FireEMSBlogs.com

FireEMSBlogs.com Community

Featured from across Fire/EMS