Skip to content

Archives for government

See all posts in the network tagged with government

And Now, The Rest Chime In…

2 comments

Well, it was inevitable. Now we have the 53 Percenters, a conservative group who I heard featured on CNN this morning as the answer to the "We Are The 99 Percent" protest offered up during the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Philosophically, I guess I should be right in line with these folks.  I work several jobs, I pay my taxes, I think there are a number of people who should live within their means and aren't (which got them in this situation to begin with), and I am a white, God-fearing male in my late forties.  I also believe that there are those who should "suck it up and get to work".  This being the basis of the 53 Percent group, according to an article by Annie Lowrey in Slate:

The 53 percent say everyone should stop moaning, quit pointing fingers at Wall Street, and pay their damn taxes. (The name refers to the fact that only 53 percent of households pay federal income tax these days.) The brainchild of Erick Erickson of RedState.org, the 53 Tumblr features comments like: “I don’t blame Wall Street. Suck it up you whiners. I am the 53 percent subsidizing you so you can hang out on Wall Street and complain.”

But as is always the case, there is more to the story, which the ultra-conservative camp also seems to mention:

The short answer is: deductions and poverty. About half of households within that 47 percent do not end up paying federal income tax because they qualify for enough breaks to cancel their tax obligations out. Of that group, 44 percent are claiming tax benefits for the elderly, like an exemption for Social Security payments. And 30.4 percent are claiming credits for “children and the working poor,” like the child-care tax credit. The remainder get breaks for investment income, spending on education, itemized deductions, and a mish-mash of other things. When combined, it’s all enough to cancel out their income tax requirements.

I hate like hell to post a blog with so many quoted statements, after all, you can read the article yourself.  But Ms. Lowrey has done such a good job of stating the story that it would be ridiculous for me to try to re-frame it.

[This] covers about half of the households that don’t pay any federal taxes. The other half of households are just too poor to pay them. [The] pool of too-poor households has grown much bigger because of the recession and its aftermath: Average incomes have kept on declining even though the recession has officially ended, and millions of households have lost one or both of their wage-earners. Households are earning about 10 percent less than they did in 2007. About 12 percent of families live in poverty. That means a lot of folks simply aren’t eligible for income tax.

So what does this mean for any of us?  It doesn't change the fact that we are all suffering and our politicians, generally, aren't doing their jobs.  It also means that there are many in this nation who aren't contributing to the bottom line.  It ALSO means that there are those who can AFFORD to contribute and those who have NOTHING to contribute.  And likewise, those of us caught in the middle are saddled with covering the bets.

I'm not comfortable with legislating fairness.  I think that the fact we are even having this discussion, however, is an issue of justice.  Why am I even discussing this on Firehouse Zen, a blog supposed to be about leadership and change?  Because this is a classic study in leadership and power.  We can oversimplify the situation, but the realities are these:

 

 

  • We have a select group of individuals who are supposed to be leading our nation, yet are too embedded in status quo, favoritism, and big money to lead responsibly.
  • These people are heavily influenced by a number of individuals with the means and the connections to advance their personal agendas, which include enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us.
  • People who would probably make good leaders are dissuaded from doing so because they don't want to subject their lives to intense media scrutiny, negative campaigning, and having to spend more time running for office than managing our government.
  • We have an increasing number of poor as a result of a number of factors: joblessness, rising prices, unfair banking practices, living outside their means, etc.
  • We continue to sink funds into practices that continue to enrich a chosen few and fail to help the entire nation.
  • The situation is not improving.

The issue is not that someone like me desires legislation to "even the playing field".  I LIKE the idea of a meritocracy.  I LIKE capitalism.  I DEPLORE socialism; I resent that someone who would work less than I do would get rewarded for doing so, just based on the rules of that society.  But I am also something I consider more important.  I am realistic, I am skeptical of both sides of this issue, and I consider myself a leader.  

Real leaders don't let the weak get beat up by bullies, even though they have it good themselves.  It would be really easy for me to say, "You know, I meet the criteria for telling the rest of you to suck it up.  So suck it up."  But as a leader, I have to be concerned about those I lead.  And while I have a job, I can put food on my table, I have insurance, and I can afford to send my kids to a private school, I think abandoning the poor, the unemployed, the hungry, and those who really DO want to get back on their feet again is reprehensible.

Yesterday we were doing MAYDAY drills in our department.  One of the hardest things we continue to face in our job, and something we are trying to work through, is lying there on a floor with a fallen brother, whose air is running out, who is trapped and unable to be extricated, and with our air running out, saying, "I'm not going to leave you.  I will stay here and die right next to you, but I'm not leaving you."

We know what the right answer is.  Or do we?

Posted by on October 12, 2011 • Filed under: government, leadership • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Here’s Something To Be Mad About

4 comments

For all of you who scream insanely when a firefighter is missing his gloves on a Dave Statter video, why don't you get mad about this?  This is a paragraph from an AP article featured on FirefighterNation.com.

"Despite the lives at stake, the recommendation to improve radio interoperability for first responders has stalled because of a political fight over whether to allocate 10 MHz of radio spectrum … directly to public safety for a nationwide network, or auction it off to a commercial wireless bidder who would then be required to provide priority access on its network dedicated to public safety during emergencies," says the report, whose authors include 9/11 Commission chairmen Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean.

I distinctly recall the shouts of support from the American public for firefighters everywhere after the Towers fell, and how shocked people were when we let them know that one of our biggest problems is communications interoperability.  Then, in 2005, when Katrina blew through, the politicians were adamant that we needed the tools to combat this problem of communications interoperability.  And here we are, in 2011 and the politicians still will tell us one thing and do another.

Congress seems to find the time and support to help out their fat cat buddies when times are tough. Banks and corporations get bailed out and corporate big-wigs continue to get record bonuses.  In the meanwhile, public servants I work with get lacerated over getting a miniscule pay raises over the last three years, like these firefighters, cops, EMTs, teachers, and city administrators are sitting at home, counting the dough in their offshore accounts and laughing maniacally.  Really? And many other people, not just our brothers, are losing benefits, taking furloughs, or worse, losing their jobs altogether.  

It makes me sick when I see our politicians sucking up to the ones who shout the loudest on the right or the left while forgetting there are many more of us out here in the middle who are just trying to get by.  These are the same individuals with the nerve to take government pensions, government health care, and government paychecks, the whole while saying "government is bloated".

This proposal was meant to make our job safer, to improve our ability to save lives, and to combat disaster in our communities, but instead, our politicians want to continue to discuss the possibility of awarding the block to a commercial wireless company who, of course, stands to make billions off our first responders and probably still give us communications that suck.

If you really want to get mad about something, find a battle worth fighting over.  I'm throwing you the ball now, you are supposed to swing at it.  Here's one: Call your representatives today and tell them what you think of their continued stalling and their greedy tactics.  We need support.  This would be the support the politiicans continually promise us when the news cameras are on them and they're hawking their platform on the graves of firefighters, cops and EMTs.  It's the same support, of course, that is quickly forgotten when the lobbyists show up and when the big money is up for grabs.  

If you don't know who represents you, try this link: ContactingtheCongress.org.  It makes it easy for you; there are phone numbers and comment links.  Put your money where your mouth is.  Or better yet, get some balls and tell your representatives what you think.  Your representatives are supposed to be representing you.  Instead of taking a few minutes away from your valuable Facebook time posting an anonymous rant against a brother who had a lapse in judgement caught on video, try venting against the real enemies: the political hacks who tell you they support you but can't work together to fund necessary things like fire departments, fire education, and firefighters.  Here's a message you can send them: If they want that photo op with dirt on their face, shovel in hand, and helmet on their head, tell 'em they have to earn it first.  Support the brotherhood.  FTM.

Posted by on September 2, 2011 • Filed under: administration-leadership, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, Funding & Staffing, government, leadership, politics • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We Try Harder

No comments

SC-TF1 Demobilizing From Chalmette, LA after Hurricane Katrina, 2005.

I had the opportunity to be part of a test rehearsal for a web conference going on Friday. In one of the questions, we were asked, “If you had to give your department a grade, what would it be?” I was the only one who gave my department an “A”. Of course, when you see that you have made a choice like that, you immediately begin to second-guess yourself.

I was pretty self-conscious about that decision, even though nobody knew who answered each question and nobody would have known it was me that graded us so. I actually thought about it long afterward, in an attempt to understand in my absolute certainty with 10 seconds on the clock, that we deserved the highest mark on a standard grade. It was, frankly, a little presumptuous of me.

The quick answer is that we don’t deserve an “A”. We are definitely customer oriented and we are definitely aggressive firefighters who use best practices and manage our risk appropriately. We are definitely on the leading edge of EMS delivery and while we are not THE organization by which all should be measured, many would be doing pretty well to do so.

But while we are definitely making huge strides and we have many accomplishments, we aren’t where we feel we should be. That is universally agreed upon in our organization. There is just too much to do, and while we are hitting the high priority items, there are so many things we want to do, and have begun doing, but there are only 24 hours in a day and finite resources otherwise at our disposal.

It is for the same reason, perhaps, that I should instead embrace the criticism of some in the knowledge that the minute we stop reassessing our service we become complacent. Don’t believe for a second that I don’t take the criticism personally, because although I shouldn’t, I do. Just as you know all the idiosyncrasies of your own children, you’d never stand for anyone else criticizing them. And, after 29 years of being part of the core individuals who pushed, pulled and shaped what is now known as our department, I have very little patience for the particular individuals who have come along since with a lot of criticism and no substantive contributions. My personal take on it, in fact, is that we have a list of people who would be happy to take their jobs.

Our line of reasoning, however, should be to embrace the constructive criticism that can be drawn from some of the comments. We should always perform self-critique, but self-critique is not self-immolation. We should always be pulling lessons from where we are and where we want to be, and the reason why we aren’t where we want to be. But this isn’t an effort to tell us what a bad job we are doing, but ways in which we need to improve.

The minute we begin to believe we are Number One in the county, the state, the region, or the nation, and we begin to believe we are “The Best”, we (all of us) tend to believe we can’t learn from others or from ourselves. It also demeans the rest of those who do an excellent job providing service with the resources they have in the community they must serve. Of all things, though, it’s pretty presumptuous again to suggest that we are the best at anything other than delivering the emergency services on Hilton Head Island, because really, that’s all that matters.

My own personal vision for our organization is to be one of those departments that others hold up to say, “This is the gold standard. This is how we want to be”. We continue to make leaps in that direction. We are, though, our own worst critics. We need to always be looking out for better ways to improve. Daily, we must try harder.

The effort must be placed on continual improvement. “Zero defects” is a pretty lofty goal, but in our business, zero defects may be the difference between life and death, between going home in the morning or going home in the hosebed of the rig under a pair of crossed aerials.

Never get complacent. Never believe you are the best, at least not for longer than it takes to get to the desired result, then to take a breath, look around, and say, “Where to from here?” The moment we stop, we die. We should always resolve to do better each time we are presented with a new challenge and to dig out whatever lessons we can observe from our current situation. There is no time to dwell on it, though. Digest it, make the adjustment, and move on.

Posted by on April 27, 2011 • Filed under: "accident prevention", administration-leadership, change, command, Command & Leadership, customer service, education, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firefighter Safety & Health, firefighting, Firefighting Operations, Fires, Funding & Staffing, government, leadership, motivation, officership, planning, politics, professionalism, rebellion, rescue, revolution, technology, Technology & Communications, Training & Development • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Haters Need Not Apply

3 comments

Sometimes we have to make decisions in a fog. But not always. Take the time to see the whole picture.

The brotherhood of fire and rescue is but a microcosm of the greater part of society.  In turn, a visit to any un-moderated site will reveal that the general public isn’t any better about being civil, so we probably shouldn’t put a whole lot of worry into the declining civility among people who profess to be part of a brotherhood.  It’s just become a norm of our victim society that it’s okay to be self-righteous and it’s okay to go after anyone who doesn’t think like us.

You would think a group of people who profess brotherhood as a redeeming value would be a little slower to throw one of their brothers under the bus when something goes wrong, but as I mentioned in the Tuscon post, that is obviously not the case.  In the event that an individual within our ranks does something completely against the grain of our collective morals, like set fires or engage in child pornography, I am entirely understanding about the emotion involved in that rage.  It is proportionate to the offense.  But since I’m sure you all have heard of cases where the other side of the story ends up being a compelling explanation, we need to take care and exercise caution about expressing our condemnation, because, as we command officers tend to say, the truth actually lies somewhere between Points A and B.

I’m not a hypocrite by any means; I am right there with you.  I just happen to also take a little bit of time to rein in my passions a little.  If you were standing next to me at the moment I got the news of a “firefighter declining to respond to an incident”, I’m sure you’d have seen another side of me.  However, the luxury of the internet is not only real-time event coverage, but the ability to pause before re-communicating your opinion, especially since unless you were there, it is your opinion and based on conjecture, not on tangible evidence.  You might not be able to take back what you just blurted out of your mouth, but you can certainly check yourself before clicking the radio button.  Very few of the stories I hear are actual prima facie cases.  Since these stories unfold so quickly, we often find that there is more to the story that doesn’t get revealed due to the emotions choking the lines of communication.

It brings up the topic of this page, however, since some of the e-mail (I typed in “e-mal” in my draft – was that a slip?) doesn’t seem to agree with me and of course, there are those who can hide behind their pseudonyms in the comments.  While I am sure the act of someone failing to go to an emergency challenged our beliefs in what was good and right about our profession, on lesser occasions, the anger and vitriol for say, someone not wearing their gloves in a picture, is a little over the top.  And I say “a little” in my most sarcastic tone of voice.  Some of the comments from the peanut gallery are also those who, given their profiles, probably haven’t seen too many incidents more challenging than a dumpster fire, and even then, they weren’t even in charge of that.

Individuals these days, in this moment of instantness (you like that?), are quick to react instead of reflect.  They simply don’t have the patience for the whole story.  They want their news, their blogs, their everything instantly and then they act on that information accordingly.  In a time-compressed environment, there is only a moment to digest what we have heard and then to regurgitate it so that we can be the first to make a comment.  The first to comment must be the best informed, right?  The self-appointed subject matter expert?  The one on the inside, right?

For me, I see it in the type of readership I get here at FHZ.  The comments are usually thoughtful and agreeable.  I post every comment, pro or con, so long as it isn’t spam.  And although I may not agree with you, I consider your perspective on the issues as valuable and enlightening.  But I get the impression that the few individuals who have seen fit to be trolls (with one notable exception) haven’t read farther than the first paragraph anyway.  Anything over 140 characters for a lot of these individuals is a lot of wasted time reading.

We don’t do controversy here on this blog.  We are interested in a bigger picture.  If it is an event that is truly worth discussing and there are alternate points of view, we engage in another time-wasting effort: dialogue.  We ask questions.  We pose thoughts.  We engage in critical examination.  We remain open-minded. It’s a little too much for some people, I am aware, but it keeps the riff-raff out.

The readers of this blog generally have proven to be those who I could sit down and have a beer with and talk about something other than the fire service, or have a conversation about the fire service in say, the context of a retail business, or a day care, or the University of Life.  They can see things for more than what is printed on the face.  They possess deeply considered ideas or are able to see that there are advantages to listening to the opposition.  The readers of this blog are those who I consider to be the hope for emergency services to evolve out of the tar pit of whackerdom and rise to the level of professionalism.

If you know of someone who operates on a different playing field than the norm, send them here and ask them to say their piece so we know they are here.  But most importantly, we are looking for readers (and commenters) who have ideas to share and innovative ways of looking at things.  Just because the issue appears to be obvious, it isn’t often the case.  We want to talk with REAL leaders, those of you who consider enlightened leadership to be a desired trait, not a hurdle to our position.  We need engagement, not brick walls. Haters and groupthinkers need not apply.

Posted by on February 24, 2011 • Filed under: change, command, Command & Leadership, customer service, education, EMS Topics, fire, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Nation, Firefighter Safety & Health, firefighting, government, leadership, Media Relations, motivation, News, officership, politics, professionalism, rebellion, revolution, safety, technology, Technology & Communications, training-fire-rescue-topics • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuscon – There But For The Grace of God Go I

9 comments

We get facts before making knee-jerk decisions on the incident scene. Why do we fail to do this everywhere else?

I sat down to write this not to defend the man’s actions, but to reflect on the collective anger of the masses.  I actually picked up the story of the firefighter refusing to respond to the Tuscon shooting incident not off of Statter, as many of you may have, but from a news aggregator on Twitter.  I immediately went to the story and while I had to wince at what occurred, I was even more disappointed in the troll activity, which didn’t take long to build.

Before I even went to see what our beloved Fire News blogs like Statter, Fire Daily, Fire Critic, et al had to say (and what you all had to say), I felt it important to say this piece about what went on in that fire station that day.

Unless you are a Tuscon firefighter or officer who happened to be in the room at the time, YOU DON’T KNOW.  You can speculate, you can imagine, you can insinuate, and you can opinionate, but the long and short of it is that YOU DON’T KNOW.

Was the firefighter wrong for not responding?  Given what I have read so far, and in my opinion, yes, as I believe that it is important as a professional responder to put my personal feelings aside when called to duty.  But I wasn’t there.  I have no idea what was going on in the station.  I don’t know what was going through the firefighter’s head when he got the call.  I don’t know what he knew, or what he believed he knew, and I don’t profess to understand what he was going through.  But we are dealing with human beings, and not machines, and on occasion, events transpire which cause even the most hardened “hero” to individualize the situation and for whatever reason, experience emotions that we can’t assume are rational or even explainable.

There have been many documented cases where someone froze in the heat of battle because of some emotional trigger.  There is a great piece on the differences between choking and panicking that Malcolm Gladwell writes about in What The Dog Saw.  Conversely, there are those who were emotionally triggered and acted WAY out of character when faced with a traumatic event, by charging suicidally up a hill to single-handedly take on a machine gun nest, or diving on a grenade, or lifting a heavy object off of someone, when none of those actions were really planned or even considered.  The human mind is an amazing place; some of you should visit it sometime.

Those of you so quick to judge should consider walking a mile in someone else’s shoes sometime.  For all we know, the individual involved may have been short-timing it.  But you know, on the other hand, he might not have, either.  When you know for sure what was going on, feel free to share it with us.  Until then, maybe you should STFU in the hopes that if this, God forbid, happens to you someday, you won’t have your guts pulled out and spread to the four corners of the planet like some many of you are willing to do on a regular basis.

I’m willing to hear what happened and keep my opinion to myself instead of trying the guy on the World Wide Web.  Kangaroo courts went out of vogue back around the time lynching was considered to be a crime against humanity. Get the facts before making a judgment.  It’ll pay off in more ways than one.

Posted by on February 18, 2011 • Filed under: Command & Leadership, customer service, Fire Rescue Topics, fire service, government, leadership, motivation, News, professionalism • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hogs To The Trough

10 comments

I have heard a constant refrain for a few years, as you have probably heard too.  With the economy the way it is, the constant drum beat sounds from those who want to radically downsize government, and there is a certain irrational cry from those who resent firefighter pensions and salaries.

A while back, Captain Schmoe over at Report on Conditions spelled it out best (but for some reason I can’t find the specific post), illustrating that our collective hubris has signed our own death warrant. When Fred Taxpayer sees one of the brothers trucking down the road in his Gasguzzler 6000 pickup, towing a boat with three engines on it, laughing because he only works one day out of three, it doesn’t sit well. Especially when that same individual is scraping to make ends meet, can’t figure out where he’s going to get the money to feed the kids, and might not even have a retirement anymore. Do you really find their resentment unfounded?

Recent firefighter layoffs in Camden and Gary, while extraordinarily tragic, illustrate a fundamental issue: people generally aren’t lashing out at the politicians, they are blaming the Union. And while that may very well be unfounded, it is happening, and that is a tangible reality. Why should we care? Because we did it to ourselves.

It’s not a matter that we do or don’t deserve decent salaries and good benefits, it is a matter of our failure to educate the public, to work with them and include them as part of the solution. After all, it was their own elected officials that agreed to these contracts in the first place. They can argue that they did so at the point of a gun, but the reality there is actually that these benefits were often hard-fought for and given grudgingly, so whatever these individuals were able to obtain, it wasn’t exactly handed to them on a silver platter.

Furthermore, like those of us in departments that don’t enjoy the fruits of collective bargaining, we are all lumped in together with the stories like the one illustrated above as a prime example of why we don’t deserve this compensation. I, for one, live in a nice home.  But its a home my wife and I ate a lot of waffles and PBJs to save for.  We have three children to put through college, but so do a lot of people. I drive an eleven year old truck with 130,000 miles on it.  In no way should this be construed as complaining.  I don’t make a fortune, but I think it is a fair salary for what the community gets from me, and although I wish I made more, I also understand the realities of the situation. And I have friends that are firefighters who have the truck and boat and etc., but they have in one case invested wisely, in another case happened to parlay their talents into a lucrative side job. Yet another one though, has squandered his money and overextended himself. So it is, just as it is everywhere else, the same.

When we engage in bragging about how good we have it, we’d better consider the consequences. There is a backlash that still rages on against our existence, and it doesn’t stop at the career folks either. If the public percieves that your service doesn’t have value, they will cut it back to where they feel it deserves to be funded, plain and simple. The other parts of public service enjoy a certain paranoia about the public, where those emotions about losing those services are much more tangible. Lose the trash pickup? No cops? Sewer backing up?  They will choose and what they will choose is to fund that which they are the most concerned about losing.  Since you don’t have fires next door every day, nor does everyone in the neighborhood end up in the back of the ambo regularly, do you believe that when we’re lining up to get our share, that there’s a reluctance to cut our budgets? Not often.  The public may complain a little when they see on the news that the Mayor shut down the fire station on the corner, but that sentiment is usually over by the time American Idol comes on.

We can’t continue to take for granted that the public knows why we are there or what we do, or what would happen if we lost manpower, equipment, or other tools. This is the time to insure that the buyer is aware of what they are being sold, and is happy with the return they continue to make on their investment. Yes, that’s called marketing and while that might be a dirty word to some of you, it too is a reality. You can choose to ignore the need or you can get up and do what is needed.  We can’t wait until stations are being closed and people are being laid off to insure the message is shared. Anything after that is sour grapes. We can’t scream “people will die” if we didn’t do anything to reinforce it in the minds of the population ahead of that moment.

To the general population, our indifference to their situation while flaunting our current compensation packages is a lot like Marie Antoinette telling starving Parisians, “Let them eat cake”. And you know how that story ended. The backlash against government spending isn’t going away and if we don’t evolve, don’t be surprised to hear this story repeated over and over again until we do. Would you rather change under your own terms or change at the end of a pike? It’s your call.

Posted by on February 8, 2011 • Filed under: change, customer service, education, fire, fire service, funding, Funding & Staffing, government, leadership, Media Relations, motivation, News, officership, planning, politics, professionalism, rebellion, revolution, Training & Development • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Sword

2 comments

As I quoted Musashi recently, a warrior must “have a taste for both pen and sword”. And while there is a frequent need for statesmanship, the soft skills are sometimes not fully appreciated unless you can bring some smackdown to the table when pushed.  There is a very good reason why I don’t discuss the other aspect of leadership as much. The reason is because too many of us are familiar with that side of the house and frankly, too willing to lay it out there when things go wrong. There is a much more stringent call to educate disciples of enlightened leadership on the discipline of using the stick only when and where it is needed.

Clausewitz suggests famously, that prior to waging war, we must fully understand how we intend to wage war and to what extent we will go to achieve victory. A scorched earth mentality is fine for truly epic battles of wrong vs. right but you will eventually have to live with the outcome. If you choose to lay waste to someone’s career because they got on your wrong side, you must realize the consequences of that decision and as said before, use the power you have to help others, not to hurt them.

I would like to believe that extraordinary leadership will help you retain whatever role you have in your world, but the realities don’t always favor that outcome. Therefore, you must always consider that leadership is dangerous ground. Someone, someplace, is going to perceive that your victory is their loss, and they are going to want to defend their territory. You must be prepared to not lose, or know when not to engage so that you can live on for another fight.  Leading is not for the faint of heart.

A non-combatant leader must have some sort of a “sword” in order to be truly effective.  The prospect of dealing with adversaries can be likened to dealing with any other belligerent and while physical conflict isn’t an option, the strategies needed to survive even these kinds of battle require similar tactics.  Therefore, to succeed, you too must also cultivate your “weapons of war”.

In the business of leading others, that sword is often your reputation and your ability to make things happen, which is often the outward manifestation of political clout.  While the politics could be those of the community or your internal organizational politics, if you have none at all, let’s see how things fare for you the first time you do something unpopular and your adversaries decide they’re going after your head.  You’d better start off by having ground to fight for.

You can achieve political power in a number of different ways, but the one that is most utilized by ethical leaders and especially by those who are seeking to develop power (in the absence of having legitimate power) can be through networking.  The more allies you have in your corner, the less likely that someone with a beef is going to pick a fight. And when they do, it’s nice to know you have backup. Where can you obtain these kinds of friends? You can get involved in local nonprofits, you can volunteer to take on less than desirable projects that will help the organization along, you can teach, or you can get involved in public outreach for ypur organization. In all of these cases, you get out and get seen as a face for the organization and people begin to recognize you as a doer.

When you lead, you are often alone at the front of the pack.  Being alone and in front means you are a visible target as well.  And when things meet resistance, or trouble is found along the way, the leader is the one who has to deal with it first.  But knowing there is a pack behind you gives you strength and courage.  It makes you realize there are people to fight for.  And most of all, it is those individuals, who are in your corner, who cheer you on and remind you that you are indeed fighting the good fight.

Enlightened leadership requires open-mindedness.  But while you can be receptive to others, others will only be receptive to you if you have something they want.  The power you have is in your sword, the power of your team and the others who know you and support you.  It is up to you to use it wisely.

Posted by on January 24, 2011 • Filed under: change, Command & Leadership, Fire Rescue Topics, government, leadership, motivation, officership, politics, professionalism • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Residential Fire Sprinkler Comparison

2 comments

Post-fire picture of a room with a single residential sprinkler head activation. Nice save.

We conducted a comparison burn today at Hilton Head Island Fire & Rescue to demonstrate the effectiveness of residential sprinklers in the control of incipient fire. Since I was off, I was able to video it as your ordinary citizen and the crowd, which was pretty nicely sized for the Island on a Saturday morning, was very impressed.

I posted it to my personal Facebook page, but felt like this was important enough of a video to share it with all of you Firehouse Zen readers. Feel free to pass it on. (UPDATE: These are now posted to YouTube also).

The teamwork involved in putting this presentation was very encouraging: all three shifts participated in one way or another, led by Chief Fire Marshal Joheida Fister.  It’s another reason the people I work with at HHIFR are individuals I consider to be the best in the business and make me proud to be associated with them.  The funds for creating the demonstration were provided through a grant. The building of the props were done by HHIFR personnel and local businesses (including my personal favorite, KPM Flooring) contributed elements of each room, lumber, the sprinkler system, and the installation.

The first burn is of an unsprinklered furninshed room of frame construction.  The inner walls are sheetrock.  In addition to an ordinary fire load in a bedroom, a small Christmas tree was at the front of each room (which surprisingly did not significantly contribute to the fire load in either case until well into the fire spread, as you will see).  The detector activated in the first room in 9 seconds, the room was untenable and very shortly after flashed over in under a minute.

The second burn is an identically sized and furnished room, the only exception being the presence of a residential sprinkler head.

As I have said on my FB page, if this doesn’t illustrate the live-saving capability of residential sprinklers, I don’t know what else to tell you. You can dry things off after they get wet. You can’t unburn your family or your home. But I am obviously preaching to the choir. Therefore, it is important that you all share these videos to many, especially the non-firefighters you know. This is important information and these two videos pretty graphically demonstrate the difference.

While there is a significant amount of undeserved controversy regarding residential sprinklers, especially the myths of inordinate cost, the whole “Hollywood all-the-sprinklers-going-off-at-once” myth, and a number of other things, the reality is that with smoke detectors and sprinkler installation, more lives will be saved and fire loss will decrease.  It’s a no-brainer.  But it IS a tremendous cultural shift and most homeowners, not being accustomed to this type of protection device, are on the fence.  They will continue to be on the fence so long as we are pushing systems and others argue against them.  This is the time when we need to be the driving force to push harder.

Share the video.  This is a game-changer and we need to be behind it, at least if we really do ascribe to the notion that our first responsibility is the protection of life and property.

Posted by on December 4, 2010 • Filed under: change, customer service, education, Fire Rescue Topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firefighting Operations, Fires, government, leadership, Media Relations, motivation, News, professionalism, technology, Training & Development • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Credibility

4 comments

One of the biggest problems the fire service has is its credibility.  I received multiple e-mails over the past few weeks about a confined space training near-miss that in reading the information, I found to be pretty troubling.  Once again, it appears (at least from the published report) that training can get pretty hairy, especially when there is a certain amount of complacency among students and instructors.  But it goes to a deeper question: When training, at what point do we raise our hand and say, “Hey, something doesn’t seem right here”?

When we engage in fire, EMS, and rescue activities, we are participating in what is considered to be an extraordinarily dangerous setting.  In training, we have the ability to create scenarios that test our students, but we as course designers must consider the alternative outcome to successful completion of a task, and by that, I am referring to failure.  When someone is unable to complete a task, or the environment becomes too daunting, or unforeseen events occur, there has the be the ability to directly swing into normalcy (read: safety).

In burn buildings we provide extra exits and in high-line rescue training we continually monitor redundant belays.  Whatever the topic, we intentionally build our scenarios to consider the “what if?” events that might occur.  While crawling through an active 18-inch pipe might provide a “confidence building” exercise, what is the plan if someone gets stuck?  Or in the case at hand, weather creates a very real scenario?  Thankfully a greater disaster didn’t occur.  But while in confined space situations we must “train in representative spaces”, and nothing provides more realism than using the spaces themselves, we are also obligated to monitor those spaces and aggressively manage safety concerns for personnel.

When an instructor is telling you to do something that doesn’t seem right, there is also an obligation on the part of students to respectfully raise a hand and question the scenario.  Unfortunately, not every instructor out there is experienced or dedicated enough to insure that the proper learning environment is provided and adequately managed.  As real professionals, we need to not only do risk management on the emergency scene, but in training as well.  There are plenty of instructors from whom I have taken a class, only to walk away shaking my head.  If I am responsible for hiring instructors, I at least qualify them myself or seek the advice of colleagues who have worked with those people before.  Our business, however, is too dangerous to leave the teaching to amateurs.  Look for credible instructors with a history of work when you are trusting someone with the lives of your personnel.  We kill and injure enough of our people in real situations.  There’s no reason to do the same when the urgency doesn’t exist.

Posted by on December 1, 2010 • Filed under: change, customer service, education, EMS Topics, FEMA, Fire Prevention & Education, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Nation, government, leadership, motivation, National Fire Academy, planning, politics, professionalism, Training & Development • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Be Proud, But Humble

2 comments

I work for a pretty damn good fire and rescue department. Take this link shared with you all from SCONFIRE. You like that? That’s us. And by us, I mean my department, the one I’ve worked with for the last twenty-eight years.  And in two other links, you’ll see that this is us too, “Going Green“, and here, where we are going “High Tech“.  Props, as always, to Grant at SCONFIRE for sharing these stories.

There’s a lot more.  But I’m not here to brag.  I’m here to tell you that while “pride goeth before a fall”, pride is also necessary to motivate your personnel, and a little pride can go a long way.  If you are going to implement change in your organizational culture, there should be a reluctance to be where you were and a desire to go where you are going.  You can quote me on that.  But pride has to be tempered by a few things, reality being one.  Knowing that even the best are fallible is another.

It isn’t easy.  We have had our bad days just like everyone else, and we continue to have bad days just like everyone else. We too have people in our department who, given a million dollars in a briefcase, would be upset that it wasn’t on a silver tray.  I certainly don’t view everything with rose-colored glasses, although some people might believe that to be the case because I’m not talking about the negatives, but discussing the positives.  We have challenges and I have personal challenges.  But instead of seeing these as roadblocks, I see them as opportunities.

If you know me well, you know that I am actually a deep-seated cynic.  But I have been places where I have found such turmoil and trouble that I know I have absolutely no right to complain.  Unfortunately, I have been in a lot of these places.  Conversely, I have been in places where they have got it right.  They may not have every resource they ask for, but they make the best of what they’ve got and they remain hopeful and optimistic, knowing that each day brings them another little piece of the puzzle they can work toward completion.

There’s a fire department in a neighboring community where the Fire Chief used to be my chauffeur, a long time ago.  This guy gets “IT” and he has done everything he can do to infuse “IT” into his people.  When I ask his personnel how things are going with “Big Daddy”, I have never heard a single one of them complain.  They are upbeat and positive about their department, about where they are going, and about the leadership.  They make things work and they have fun doing their jobs.  And that Chief isn’t just letting people come to work and play checkers either.  They train often, they do all the jobs we do short of ALS transport, and all kinds of other things.  These people have a lot of pride in their organization and it shows.

I am extraordinarily proud of my department and most of all, of the people we work with, and the people we work for.  The community here is generally pretty proud of their department also.  We get a lot of letters of thanks and praise.  We get awards.  Our Town Manager pretty much says we stay off his radar, and that’s a good thing.  But it’s not all sunshine and roses and it’s important you know that.

There is being proud and there is being delusional.  While we are very honored to have our team and the resources entrusted to us, we also realize that at any time, at any instant, things can go wrong.  We realize that one saved building isn’t a far stretch, maybe nine or ten minutes from being a total loss.  While our community relies on the entire system to be good at what we do (through education, prevention, protection, service delivery, and customer care), one slip in the well-oiled chain can wreak havoc on the entire machine.

Not that this is a good time to be paraphrasing Brian Kelly (the head football coach at Notre Dame), but he tells his players that when they are on the field, they are 1/11th of the team. If everyone does their part, things will work according to plan.  When someone doesn’t, someone else has to do MORE than their job to take up the slack.  We can be as proud as we want, but if one person lets us down, we are all toast.  For those reasons alone, a little humility will go a long way when things don’t go as expected.

We tell people in our organization all the time, if you screw up, own the situation.  Raise your hand and say, “My bad” and we’ll do what we can to fix the problem together.  None of us, most of all, me, is perfect.  We’d better be ready and willing to say, “I’m wrong, I’m sorry” when it is warranted.  Our informal motto is, “Do the right thing”.  When you have that kind of an outlook at all times, it can solve many equations.

If your own organization is reaching and it seems frustrating, know that everyone, including the Phoenixes and the FDNYs and the Metro-Dades and the Fairfaxes all have their days.  Just like our department has, and I’m sure your department has.  The element of success, however, is to ride out those days as an intact team, absorb the problems, fix what is necessary, and move forward.  Don’t dwell on the problems, learn from them and move on.

Even the best have their moments, but if you take the time to reflect on what you have accomplished, realize how far you have gotten, and look forward to the trip ahead, the pride in that journey is a significant motivator to keep the team together.  Pride acts as one of many force multipliers.  Like any other tool, use it carefully.

Posted by on November 9, 2010 • Filed under: change, Command & Leadership, customer service, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Nation, government, leadership, Media Relations, motivation, officership, planning, politics, professionalism, Training & Development, US&R • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Perception

5 comments

We all have a job to do.

When it comes down to it, we don’t really know what’s in the hearts of anyone else, do we?  All we can do is read what people write and listen to what they say and watch their face to see if we are getting anywhere. The internet provides a place where anyone can feel brave and say what they want to say behind the anonymity of a computer terminal without fear of reprisal.

It’s those who feel the need to draw lines in the sand wherever they go that are probably the most disturbing.  Is it fire vs. EMS?  Career vs. volunteer?  East Coast vs. West Coast?  Rural vs. Urban?  European vs. North American? We all have a job to do and the job has different elements depending on where we are, what we are dealing with, and how we perceive the issues at hand.  Why fight about it?

If we were all the same, I could see being able to say who is better, but it’s the equivalent of comparing apples to elephants.  There are similarities in certain facets of the business, but really, as we have said on here a hundred times, emergency service delivery is a very specialized business in your unique community.  There aren’t too many tenders wandering the streets of Manhattan, and conversely, there aren’t many six-man truck companies in rural Arkansas.  Saying one is better than the other is ridiculous; they don’t compare.

Anymore it seems like the nameless and faceless just want to stir up controversy for the sake of stirring up controversy.  Of course, it’s easy to stir up controversy if you have no fear of reprisal.  There used to be a certain argument that the controversy was there to open up minds and to inject fresh ideas, and given some recent posts I have been watching, I am inclined to say that I saw no new ideas or the championing of best practices.  I didn’t see people fighting injustice with their secret identity.  Instead I saw bullies and provocateurs making illogical statements and specifically baiting others, just to get a rise out of someone.

It’s a product of our society, I guess.  We can all be intimately connected yet have enough distance between each other to feel safe.  People bemoan how uncivil society has become, but forget that when we were all cooped up in our little neighborhoods, if someone acted in a manner contrary to the social mores, they became quickly ostracized.  Living in a community with others you had to get along with meant that associating with provocateurs wasn’t safe.  Now we can align with people who espouse all kinds of wild ideas and don’t fear anyone, because really, how will anyone know?

Firefighting and other public safety personnel were always respected because honestly, these people were part of our community too.  We didn’t do things that hurt others because we felt a certain connection to them.  We went to school and church with them.  We were likely related in some form or fashion.  Our parents knew one another.  These days, there’s enough distance that you can be the bully you always wanted to be and hide your 95-pound weakling body behind the monitor.  If you treated people like that in your old neighborhood, you’d likely have the crap beaten out of you.

I believe there is a certain amount of merit to having a pseudonym, if it is used for good, and especially if you know that saying the right thing will have detrimental consequences.  But I don’t see so much of that these days as the other, the troll who just wants to make spurious statements and not have to back them up.  There’s nothing I love more than reading through a thread of meaningless diatribe to find out the idiot on one end is some Junior with the wacker-pack and a keyboard.

If you really want our industry to be recognized as professionals, it requires conduct that is professional.  It requires discussion and exposition of ideas, but it doesn’t have any room for intolerance or illogical thought.  We must remain open to the perspective of others, regardless of whether they are the aforementioned Junior or the saltiest jake on the truck.  But being respective and considerate of other ideas doesn’t mean that we have to lay down and sing Kumbaya if someone is being a troll.  Maybe we need to call some of these people out, or even better yet, ignore them, and perhaps they will go away.  We all have a responsibility to project what we desire in our society as a good example, and to guide the poor examples either toward enlightenment or toward the exit.  In either case, it requires action, not ignorance.

Posted by on November 3, 2010 • Filed under: change, command, Command & Leadership, customer service, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Nation, Fires, government, leadership, motivation, politics, professionalism, rebellion, rescue, revolution • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Disincentive for Responsible Reporting (Tax and Spend Socialists)

7 comments

Take a deep breath. There, that's better, isn't it?

I don’t even know where to begin with this discussion except to offer my apologies for using a derogatory term to describe one side of the issue and failing to come up with a sufficiently derogatory term for the other side. When I decide to offend, I think I’m an equal opportunity offender, because like I stated, I’m not a proponent of either camp. I think for myself.  And for the comment from one individual who suggested, “This and the many attempts to drag the tea party into the mud show how desperate you guys are”.  I am not “you guys“, because I certainly don’t believe in the alternatives either side has presented me as being responsible or for the good of the people.  Given the rhetoric on both sides, I’d be embarrassed to be in either camp.

Likewise, it appears I have been the subject of misinformation. While I am well-versed (and abhor) the quid pro quo tax-and-spend mentality of the liberals and bureaucrats in government, the extreme in the other direction, given discussion I have had with friends and colleagues who have expressed to me their support of their ultra-conservative views (and defending the Tea Party Movement) has been one of scorched-earth budget management and widespread privatization of almost every aspect of governmental service. However, as has been expressed in comments regarding my last post, that is not the platform of the Tea Party Movement. Of course, this is pretty difficult for me to embrace, because there doesn’t seem to be anyone who can consistently state anything to me about the Tea Party Movement other than their anger at the status quo. So other than, “Vote the bums out” and “Obamacare is going to cost us jobs and decent healthcare”, both statements of which I think are pretty extreme in themselves, I haven’t heard anything that causes me to get warm and fuzzy when I think about these individuals taking office.

So since I now have your rapt attention and expect to get plenty of hate mail from the OTHER side of the fence, maybe the two poles will come together to listen to what I have to say without finding it necessary to accuse me of unprofessional or crass behavior.

When I speak of “lock-step” marching to the party line on EITHER side, it is the mindless reliance on sound-bites and partial information because I think many people have become too lazy to think for themselves.  Thus, this article.  Because like I said, the fault I had in the last article was 1) not coming up with an equally sensitive descriptor of another point of view and 2) not having an accurate view of the platform of the other side I chose to illustrate my case.  Because really, there are many more than two points of view and to suggest that these extremes were the only extremes would be grossly oversimplifying the issue.

Believe me or not, I had no intention of pushing anyone’s buttons and I’m sorry for doing that.  It did, however, reveal to me the obvious.  There is a disincentive for responsible reporting and you all have unpleasantly illustrated my argument with a gold frame.

I have been writing on the internet since before there were blogs.  I am not, however, a reporter.  Much of what I speak of on the internet is anecdotal or observational.  I do, however, write technical articles and papers independent of FHZ, and my expertise is in research and strategic planning.  So while one of you chose to express your feelings about my “lame” article, I’d say that I’m not hurt, in fact, I’m smiling a little to myself because the only comments I ever hear about how lame something is happens to be when I’ve tweaked someone.

Since I can view the number of “hits” on my page, I take a particular interest in my “outlier” posts: those which show me wild spikes in readership.  I take great pains to present both sides of many issues.  Anyone who actually KNOWS me knows that I am very concerned in getting multiple points of view and understanding the entire issue.  I am not an “emotional poster”, or one of these clowns that has a conspiracy theory about anything coming down the pike.  Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you see it), I have a pretty stable and respectful readership that makes rational and sound comments based on their own experiences.

With the exception of the “Roto-Ray” article several months ago, those outlier posts have consistently occurred when the headlines or lead paragraphs have involved controversy.  It is clear: rational and reasonable discussion is not what people want to read.  With few exceptions, people want sensationalism and anger.  It’s no wonder the internet isn’t safe anymore.  People are willing to post damn-near fiction in order to get traffic.  What does THAT say about society?

I don’t have any interest in writing titillating articles and reveling in a flock of readers who are only coming by to see what awful thing I have to say about someone or something.  I don’t rant.  And this is neither MSNBC nor Fox.  When I talk about balance, I mean it.  But I would like to have more readers, if anything, because what I have to say, I think, should be said.  I would like to think that when I write, instead of creating hate, readers say, “Wow, that’s something to think about”.

I don’t apologize at all for suggesting that both extremes are wrong.  There are many more of us in the middle than on the fringes.  We are not all zealots and we certainly don’t all believe in the vast right or left wing conspiracies.  Those of you who do are often just unhappy people itching for a fight.  Those of us in the middle lean to the left or the right because we do see some values in one or the other direction of thought, but most sensible individuals realize there’s a certain value in compromise and consensus.  Let’s go back to the sandbox, shall we?

Any of you who have ever played in a sandbox know that there are sandboxes where personalities dominate.  In some cases, a bully has taken over the whole sandbox.  In some cases there are two opposing forces.  In many cases there is one force, the force of sharing and collaboration.  If you had three sandboxes side-by-side and you were choosing which sandbox to put your children in, I’d be willing to bet that none of you would choose to put your children in sandbox one or two.  So why would you choose to live in a society that encourages those behaviors and a grander scale?

Firehouse Zen is not for the weak-minded.  I am calling my readers to be responsible and ethical and balanced.  I ask you to take other points of view into account, if for any reason, it may reinforce your own beliefs.  I’m not asking you to embrace opposition, I’m asking you understand it.  In doing so, is where we grow.

Since I have the attention of those who just want sound-bites, let me tell you, there is a wealth of information on the internet that will make you a better person.  We don’t all have to flock to these negative sites and we don’t all have to be at war with each other.  Just as in the situation in South Fulton, there are other sides to the argument that never came out when the ADD bloggers began blasting out accusations and rhetoric.  Don’t fall into the trap of the unenlightened.

If you read the first article and still hate me, I’m okay with that.  But I ask you to re-read it and see that it wasn’t directed one way or another, and admit that to yourself.  If you don’t care to come back, I’m okay with that too.  And if you think I’m unprofessional or crass, I ask you to read my other articles and see if you still believe that to be true.   But I’m not about to apologize for telling you all, it’s not always about winning or losing, sometimes it’s about surviving the game.  Instead of fighting with each other, we should be pulling together to solve our most pressing challenges.  There are too many awful things going on out there that we could solve together and maybe we’d feel just a little better about one another.  Of course, if you choose to stay, I’d like that too.

Let’s reward insightful and responsible discussion and avoid the lunatic fringe.  Let’s work together rather than apart, and let’s step away from the negativity.  I’d just as soon do that myself and it’s my hope that you would too.

Posted by on October 9, 2010 • Filed under: change, Command & Leadership, customer service, education, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Nation, Funding & Staffing, government, leadership, Media Relations, motivation, officership, planning, politics, professionalism, rebellion, revolution • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Subscription Emergency Services – Your Classic Tea Bag Scenario

11 comments

These aren't free.

In one corner, the people who think that what the South Fulton Fire Department did was reprehensible.  In the other, those who think that you need to “pay to spray“.  In the classic Firehouse Zen outlook, let’s go to the root of the problem.  Here we are in a brand new age of doing more with less. It’s our creed in emergency services.

The beauty of this all is that while there are those who want to limit the “reach” of government, we have to remember that the point of having government involvement in the first place is to protect us in our vulnerable moments.  I am neither a tax-and-spender nor a teabagger.  I don’t march in lockstep to anyone’s platform.  I have an open mind and I evaluate where things are beneficial to my community and things detrimental, and balance the risk vs. a reasonable cost.  It doesn’t seem to me that either of the extremes are acceptable answers.

This is a complicated issue and it can’t be solved by just glossing over the sound-bite material.  There are departments who have been doing the subscription thing for years.  Personally, I suggested to some funding-challenged departments a number of years ago that perhaps you could do a “soft-landing” subscription: you pay (in advance) for spray, but if you don’t pay (in advance), you REALLY pay.  Like 500% of the subscription rate, charged to the insurance company.  Something tells me the insurance companies would be insisting you pay or you don’t get insurance.  Something also tells me that if you fail to pay in this scenario, they WON’T be paying anyway.  But subscription service, while it seems like a logical solution, is fraught with peril.  There are just too many “what-ifs” to make it a workable solution to the whole.

We do have a responsibility to the community to protect life, property and the environment.  But we are painted into a corner when we can’t raise revenue to sustain our operations, be it a fairly low cost solution or the full-on urban response solution.  Thus we return to the risk vs. benefit assessment each community must undertake before deciding, “Okay, we don’t want paid providers” or “We are going to shut down companies”, or “Our risk is low enough that we can make it with an all-volunteer force”.  This is something that has to be decided locally, but by responsible individuals who aren’t just looking at the bottom line.   There is nothing wrong with any of these scenarios if they can be applied effectively.  The problem is that when they are not, and the decision is made to do this anyway, it is often done with catastrophic results.  You know, of course, who gets left holding the bag in that case, don’t you? (That would be us, in case you didn’t get that hint.)

The elected officials of your community are charged with more than just appearing ad nauseum on your TV screen for several months leading up to November, although for some, it’s the only time I ever see them.  They are charged with making decisions that benefit the community and uphold societal standards.  I know of no society who thinks it’s okay to screw the vulnerable at the benefit of the privileged.  Well, I take that back- I know of no RESPONSIBLE society who thinks that’s okay.  For any “leader” of a community to say, we’re going to go with a subscription fee for service and it’s okay to opt out of it at the risk of losing everything you have, it seems to me like you are taking a chance that this could go terribly wrong.  Sending someone a letter to confirm they are “not in” doesn’t sound too cool either (I have had too many personal experiences with undelivered registered mail to have confidence in that solution).  I think if everyone was paying the fee and suddenly, someone wasn’t, I’d have someone give them a call and make a face-to-face confirmation to find out what the problem was.  Can you not afford it now?  Are you saying you are okay if we don’t respond?  I really think some follow-up is required here before saying, you are now on your own.

What may have seemed like a good solution has become national news, but it didn’t have to be.  Kirschenbaum in Chaos Organization and Disaster Management suggests that the whole social aspect of disaster response was overtaken by a bureaucracy concerned with job protection and cost reimbursement years ago anyway and this whole event pretty much emphasizes his point.  But when the community insists on having service but is unwilling to pay for it, other solutions must be found for funding.  In this context, “helping neighbors” for purely altruistic reasons has been trumped with who is paying for service and who is not.  This takes the whole emergency services as a business concept to a very predictable level.  But there really is balance to be achieved in every situation.  The challenges facing us in communities like Oak Park, IL and Xenia, OH illustrate there is such a thing as when the “fiscally conservative” become unreasonable, but compelling.  When we insist on the gold standard and our community can only afford the aluminum version, we expose ourselves to this kind of rhetoric.  I’m not saying that’s the case in these communities, but the situations making national headlines there only encourage community activists elsewhere who already think a scorched-earth approach to cutting the municipal budget is appropriate.  Our job as leaders is to foster innovative and efficient organizations while maintaining a responsible budget.  Again, balance is in order.

While we use the words “customer service” as a way to describe our efforts, it again goes back to doing what’s right for our neighbors and people who visit and work in our community.  While there are those of us who are paid to do this, we have to remember that it is a service we are paid to do often because the volume and type of emergencies we are called to solve exceed the community’s readily available resources.  Or maybe it’s because we don’t care enough about our neighbors anymore because we’re so wrapped up in “me”.  Regardless, until people begin to give away fire apparatus, permit us to operate without insurance, and clothe us in turnouts out of the kindness of their hearts, we have to pay for this stuff.  Therefore, every community, like it or not, has to endure funding these endeavors, through taxes, donations or subscriptions.  It’s up to you how you do it.  But it’s a requirement that it be done.

Posted by on October 8, 2010 • Filed under: change, customer service, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, fire service, Funding & Staffing, government, insurance, leadership, Media Relations, motivation, News, officership, planning, politics, professionalism, rebellion, revolution • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How Far Outside Your Box? Frontiers Around You

5 comments

When this was new, do you think they were saying, "It can't get more modern than this!"

I hate to borrow a line from a commercial, but it got my attention the other day: “People say there aren’t any more frontiers; but there are frontiers all around you.”  The challenge to “think outside the box” was a unique way to describe innovative thinking in the ’80′s, and it was so overdone that everyone cringes when you say that phrase now.  But when you are considering paradigm shifts and defining stretch goals, what better way to say that you are reaching out of the walls that confine your thought?

I was driving down the road the other day and thinking to myself, if there were a way to simply will ourselves from Point A to Point B, like the “Transporter” does on Star Trek, what need for roads?  We wouldn’t need a car.  We wouldn’t need sidewalks, or bridges, or doors for that matter.  Think about being in the road construction business or the bridge building business, or in the auto industry, and one day, there were no need for your service.  Your skill set, once valuable, was useless.  What then?

There are a certain amount of people who advocate EMS as a method to save firefighter jobs when fires cease to happen.  Conversely, there are those who say there will always be a need for firefighters, because fire will always be a problem.  Perhaps instead of limiting our vision to these options, consideration must be made for what will we do to reinvent our industry wholesale.  What if robots could be trained to do our jobs?  I’d bet that as late as ten or twenty years ago there were people in the auto industry who thought that there was no way a robot could produce a decent automobile: Now we have robot-assisted surgery.  How much father off do you think it will be before they are making interior attacks?

Anyone who demonstrates an obsession for the status quo and fails to think about the future with an open mind is only setting the table for their eventual obsolescence. Even what might sound like a stupid idea isn’t always too far-fetched.  If you fail to consider the opportunities, you are missing a piece of the puzzle.

From the technical aspect, you might be able to guess at any number of possible eventualities.  I’m interested in the nuances of leadership and command and what changes are in store for us there.  While many think about the possibility of fighting fire without water or providing radical prehospital medical interventions, perhaps you should consider what would happen if we turned the way we lead upside down.  Or if we were MORE of a military-style agency, like if we were brought into a branch of federal government.  Or if everyone was paid.  Or if everyone was volunteer.  There’s no end to “what if…” because while the first few answers might not be plausible ones, they may lead to a prize-winning innovation.

Instead of making statements, every day you should be asking questions.  And while not all change is good, if you don’t consider the effects of certain factors on your organization as they might occur, you might be surprised when they change despite all your best efforts.  As leaders, if we fail to keep an open mind and reconsider every approach to what it is we do, while we may not fail today, we do a disservice to our organization.  Doing things the same way day after day may seem “good enough”, but if you are caught flatfooted when things change overnight, don’t be surprised if you are left standing in your box while everyone else is running around outside it.  Where are the new frontiers?  They surround you, if you reach far enough.

Posted by on September 14, 2010 • Filed under: change, command, Command & Leadership, education, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, firefighting, Funding & Staffing, government, leadership, motivation, officership, Patient Management, planning, politics, professionalism, rebellion, revolution, Technology & Communications, Training & Development, US&R • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Customer Service: A Bad Concept?

10 comments

I was thinking about customer service in our profession and considering recent conversations by some of our colleagues recently who reject the term.  A bit of enlightenment came to me while listening to a reading to a segment of the radio program This I Believe.

The subject was Ruth Cranston, author of World Faith: The Story of the Religions of the United Nations. She spoke of achieving the insight that all of the world’s religions, despite their differences, were united in very similar tenets of how to live with our fellow man.  Even when there is constant disagreement with how we go about our daily lives, she posited this about the commonalities of religious belief:

They [the world’s religions] taught the unity of all life; the interdependence of all men; love and service to fellow man; help, not exploitation, of the weak and backward. They taught nonviolence and non-injury. They all taught purity of life and of motive, simplicity of life too, and that true riches are within. They taught the worth of individual man and the ability of every man to rise to higher states of development than we are now experiencing. They taught the immortality of the soul and the building of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.

Her suggestion was that despite the worship or belief in which we practice, we experience several common denominators that should bring us closer together rather than farther apart.  While a lot can be taken from that paragraph, it seems that like I say constantly in my forum here is that we as emergency service providers have more commonalities than differences.  In fact, those of us who are true believers in what we do as a profession probably understand that the phrase “customer service” is just a name we put on a concept in order to define it.

Of course, the belief of a higher calling to serve is about those who are truly in this and believe in this as a profession of service and enjoying the benefits of the occasional adrenaline rush, in contrast to those who are in this for the adrenaline rush and enjoy the occasional effort to serve, and even then, if that subject comes up at all.  I say that because it is my observation that a majority (if not all) of the problems we have in emergency service can be traced back to those who fail to see this career, whether you are paid or volunteer, as one in which we should serve rather than to be served.  It is this entitled mindset, that we are automatically due respect because we wear the badge, which causes problems.

The term customer service is probably pretty cynical, when you think about it, because it might suggest to the casual reader that the ideal we seek is all about making sure our profession enjoys the financial benefit of such service.  In fact, as emergency response personnel, the term “customer service” embraces the concept of all that is considered good in mankind, in that we realize the worth of others and we seek to serve those in need of help, despite their social status.  While we can quantitatively point out that having a customer service attitude benefits us in public support, there should be a much more altruistic reason for our embracing that belief.

There are two schools of thought in the “anti-customer service” camp.  One, of course, is that the public doesn’t have a choice, therefore they are not customers.  The second goes along with my statement that what we do is so much more than a client relationship.  I have argued that the public does have a choice, as Chief Alan Brunacini did much more so before I have here.  But the latter discussion bears some serious consideration.  Is the concept of customer service too simplistic? Customer service could be construed as providing a real effort only when we stand to gain from that interaction.  It might be perceived that the service we provide is done only because we expect a return on investment.

While remembering conversations with Chief Brunacini as he advocated the benefits of customer service mentality as a method for obtaining taxpayer support, I also recall that he never said that the concept was exclusive to that expectation.  If you remember, the overarching mission was to “Be Nice”.  While that’s good for marketing, it’s not something you can force down people’s throats and expect it to happen magically.  He advocated a cultural shift in his leadership that was summed up in two simple words, therefore easy to remember and easy to implement.  The customer service mentality, likewise, was easy to relate to.

Our job as leaders is to communicate our mission.  That communication requires not only our shouting it out there, but the return acknowledgment that understanding has been achieved.  The mindset of “customer service” is palpable.  We understand it and we know what is good customer service and what is bad.  We can easily empathize with a customer who is frustrated with a certain way in which their matter is being handled or appreciate the sincere gratitude experienced by a customer who is receiving excellent service.  For the purposes of defining an accepted approach to interaction with the community, it helps to be able to frame those interactions in a manner in which we are familiar.  So while, yes, our delivery of service is much more than the interaction of a salesperson and a client, it provides us with concrete objectives by which we can measure our outputs.  It is pretty easy to say, “Fire Went Out” and check the “Good” box.  It is much more difficult to say, “Obtained Confidence of Taxpayer”.

Our job can be seen from a purely pragmatic standpoint, one in which we have been tasked to provide a service and we must efficiently produce results.  Or we can say that our job is that of serving humankind with compassionate and ethical assistance when they are most vulnerable.  In either case, the ultimate measurement is the same; as Cranston implied, reinforcing “the interdependence of all men”; loving and serving fellow man; and helping, not exploiting, the weak and needy.  It is our charge to insure whichever path we choose, we do so with the understanding that we are there to serve.

Posted by on August 30, 2010 • Filed under: change, Command & Leadership, customer service, education, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, funding, Funding & Staffing, government, leadership, Media Relations, motivation, officership, planning, politics, professionalism, Training & Development • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Stuck In The Past

5 comments

The definition of something “world-class” years ago led me to consider what we mean in the fire service when we say “world-class” in the same breath as “progressive” and “professional”.  The use of these terms is truly in the eye of the beholder.  Given the evidence that continues to mount in the Charleston incident, many people in that community are struggling through the nightmare of believing their fire department was the definition of excellence only to find that the leadership mentality was still operating in the past.

I guess its all in how you frame your reference as to what is acceptable versus what is “excellent”.  It certainly sounds as if that culture is evolving into a better place with Chief Carr at the helm.  But across the entire fire service, while exposed to so many ideas, we continue visit the same problems within our own organizations that other organizations have been experiencing for years.

Professionalism or progressiveness isn’t defined by experiencing the same problems over and over again. Being effective doesn’t include repeating mistakes that others have made, got the t-shirt for, and moved on from. If learning isn’t occurring from all of the rhetoric, then what use is it?  When your organization is experiencing such dysfunction that it is obvious even to the newest recruit, then how clueless are you to insist that everything is coming up roses?

The sad part is that this lesson has to come on the backs of dedicated firefighters and the deaths of our brothers.  While it appears our friends in Charleston are moving forward, we continue to read story after story around the rest of the nation of lessons that continue to be learned the hard way.  After all, how many unbelted firefighter LODDs need we read about before deciding once and for all that using our seatbelt is a smart idea?

Instead of reading the news and saying, “Wow, that’s incredible”, perhaps we should be saying, “Wow, how do I make sure that doesn’t happen here?”  Be an agent of productive and progressive change.  Set the positive example and show others what the real definition of progressive and professional is and be a real leader.

Posted by on August 3, 2010 • Filed under: "accident prevention", change, command, Command & Leadership, education, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Nation, Fires, government, leadership, LODD, Mass Casualty Incident, motivation, News, planning, professionalism, rebellion, revolution, safety, Training & Development • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s The Minimum

5 comments

If you didn't have standards, this might be your first out engine. Swan River, Queensland, Australia 2002

If you didn't have standards, this might be your first out engine. Swan Creek/Emu Creek Bushfire Brigade, Queensland, Australia 2002

Authentic Neapolitan pizzas are typically made with tomatoes and Mozzarella cheese.  Genuine Neapolitan pizza dough consists of high-protein wheat flour (type 0 or 00, or a mixture of both), natural Neapolitan yeast or brewer’s yeast, salt and water. The dough must be kneaded by hand or with a low-speed mixer. After the rising process, the dough must be formed by hand without the help of a rolling pin or other machine, and may be no more than 3 mm (⅛ in) thick. The pizza must be baked for 60–90 seconds in a 485 °C (905 °F) stone oven with an oak-wood fire.[4] When cooked, it should be crispy, tender and fragrant.

Those were just a few of the standards for an authentic Neapolitan pizza (published on Wikipedia), as recognized and protected by the Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana.  Likewise, most of the things you take for granted in the world, with the exception of things like knock-off Rolexes, are constructed from materials meeting standards, are built to certain standards, and if they carry any kind of guarantee of quality or workmanship, must meet performance standards.

Unless your organization is living in a 1950’s time warp, the people in your community, when they call the fire department for help, expect help for many things that exceed the scope of “firefighting”.  Regardless of whether your community is staffed with a career or a volunteer department, there are increased expectations on the level of service being provided.  I can rationally argue the need for standards on a number of different levels.  I will, however, only provide you with this one today; it’s the minimum.

If you want to call yourself a firefighter, there are certain things you should be able to do.  If you cannot do these things, you run the risk of hurting yourself, not to mention others.  You also run the risk of making an emergency greater than it was when you arrived.  As a reasonable and prudent individual with a duty to act, you agree that your “job” (as a firefighter) entails certain knowledge, skills, and abilities to allow your organization the ability to advertise a product. What that product is in your jurisdiction could be limited to fighting fire or could be all-hazards, or anywhere in between.

Your community, in supporting the “fire department”, does so with the understanding that you are what you say you are.  The community defines that expectation; if their only expectation is that a group of bubbas show up to put out a fire when it occurs, then maybe you don’t need to meet a standard.  If that’s the case though, when insurance companies decide the risk is too great in your community, don’t be surprised when the citizenry can’t get coverage and they hang you (or your chief) in effigy at the town square.  And that may be getting off light.

Minimum standards, among other things, define.  Since a group of individuals representing different aspects of the world affected by a certain thing decided and agreed on a definition, and that group is recognized by the others affected by that thing, the definition becomes a standard.  I could write a standard on constructing nuclear plants and declare it the minimum standard, but since I have no authority or expertise in doing so, my standard would likely be considered meaningless and useless.

For those who aren’t in favor of standards, I’d suggest that it’s not that you aren’t in favor of standards, but what is in those standards and how they came to be.  If that’s the case, I’d say that before you make any proclamations on a standard being a “bad” standard, you seek to understand how that definition came to be and how it happens to be the minimum.  In many cases, I’d bet that you’d find that others wanted a much stricter or more restricting definition and the end result was what everyone on that committee agreed was acceptable for use or was prudent.

Like I tell the people who work with me, don’t complain about anything unless you tried to do something about it.  If you don’t like a standard, feel free to get involved.  But the long and short of it is this: standards exist for at least one primary reason, and that reason is to define what something is.  In the absence of any other meaningful definition, if something close fills that void, that standard will be the one that defines the subject matter.  You can be angry about it if you like, but if you don’t like it, change it.

In the meanwhile, if it’s an accepted standard, you can assume you’ll have to meet it.  You can say all day that you choose not to meet certain standards, but if you are like me, you will understand that to not do so will leave you open to a number of things, including liability.  The only way to escape it is to lay that decision on the people who are at that payscale: the politicians. But that’s a blog post for another day.

Stay safe and do the best you can with what you have.  But remember, the standard is what defines you.  If you have no standard, you have no definition, and in that case, a monkey can do your job.  Even pizzas are made to standards.  If having no standard is what your community believes to be okay, then know that you ultimately get what you pay for, and if your community doesn’t support a department with minimum expectations of members, they shouldn’t be surprised when everything within the city limits are a smoking ruin some weekend.

Posted by on July 28, 2010 • Filed under: change, Command & Leadership, credentialing, education, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Nation, Firefighter Safety & Health, Firefighting Operations, Funding & Staffing, government, leadership, motivation, NIMS, officership, planning, politics, professionalism, safety, Training & Development, US&R • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What Does It Take To Be A Firefighter Anyway?

4 comments

Being a firefighter is real work and not for the faint of heart. If dirt bothers you, go get another job.

We should make getting into the fire service at least as hard as trying to get into the NFL. If everyone wanted to be a firefighter when they were growing up, most of us also probably wanted to play football. The NFL has all kinds of hurdles to cross to get a job there: the Wonderlick, the combine, scouting, etc. In some fire departments, all you have to do is fog a mirror, and even then, I wonder if that is even a requirement.

When all hell has broke loose in our lives, who better to see than the fire department?  If the people we are recruiting can’t even solve the simplest of daily problems, what makes us think that at 0200 with the roof falling in on us that there will be sudden improvement in judgement and reasoning?  It again goes to my post of the other day about being cognizant of what we do and don’t know.  Some of these folks are so sure of what they think they know, that it makes them dangerous to those of us who know that we can’t possibly know everything.

Thus the survival instinct of the crustiest among us: situational awareness.  We know that with Murphy lurking around every corner and maintaining a skeptical eye on most every situation, we aren’t entirely surprised when things go wrong, because we figured that they would anyway.  It’s like some of the newer guys I talk to think that just because they studied it at the Fire Academy, it is going to go like the plan at every incident.  I don’t know how you teach someone to be a little less optimistic, but if we can figure out how to do that, we might get some of the problem licked.

But that isn’t all; there’s something to be said about the mentality of “heavy lifting” that escapes some of our new hires around the nation.  They seem to think that the problem is solved when we arrive and that it’s all going to be blood and glory.  Then they become disenchanted when they’re mopping up vomit off of Mrs. Smith’s kitchen floor after the rig has taken her to the hospital.  Our job requires us to tough it up and do what is necessary, whether we like it or not.

A little less bitching and a little more effort would go a long way.  Your truck isn’t running perfectly?  Well, sorry: For years I held apparatus together with duct tape and superglue.  Suck it up and do your job.  If something doesn’t work, roll with it.  I took a lot of pride in knowing that I could do whatever job necessary with whatever I had with me, or at least knowing where I could make something work in the meanwhile.  Nowadays it seems like if the least little thing goes wrong, people are throwing their hands in the air and giving up.

So here’s what it comes down to: We must figure out a way to test individuals for resiliency and determination, while also measuring their ability to understand that if they want the glory job, they should have probably worked harder for that baseball scholarship. There is no glory in our job.  Put away the wacker lights and the Bad-Ass Firefighter t-shirt and know your role.  If you aren’t out running calls, be grateful that you get to have a night of sleep and that no one became homeless last night because their house burned.  And if glory and fame is what you want, go form a posse and hang out with Lindsey Lohan or something.  We’ve got a job to do.

Posted by on July 26, 2010 • Filed under: change, command, Command & Leadership, customer service, education, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, firefighting, Firefighting Operations, Funding & Staffing, government, leadership, motivation, professionalism, Training & Development • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dedication to Customer Service

7 comments

How dedicated to serving your public are you? We seem to pay a certain amount of lip service to “serving the public, 24/7, 365″ in our mission statements. I always hear how proud we are to “serve”, but do we draw the line at putting out fires? Carting them to a medical facility? Or are you in an organization who will put someone back in bed or stop a leak until a plumber can get there?

I hear about all-hazards response all the time, but do we draw the line at “hazards”, or do we raise the bar a little? While I don’t advocate anyone in our jurisdiction calling 9-1-1 because they need help completing their tax return, if a situation really does affect our customer that they had to dial that number, aren’t we charged with understanding how this is perceived as an emergency before saying we won’t help?

My wife owns a flooring company. While a floor product delivery may not constitute an emergency issue to you, to her company, when a customer needs a product someplace at sometime, if it isn’t there, it creates issues that may effectively stop the completion of the project, be it a remodel or new construction.  This week, a delivery had to go from the manufacturer directly to the project location in another state.  To the trucking company, excellent customer service was a non-issue: After neglecting to send the materials in a truck with a lift gate, they decided, “Oh well, you’ll just have to wait until we can get a truck to do that later.”  Later being three days later.

They had a pretty blase attitude about the whole thing, despite the fact that they were contracted to deliver something, they had an obligation to deliver it at a certain time and place, and being the subject matter experts on shipping, should have probably realized that they weren’t going to just hand-carry 3900 pounds of product off the truck (especially since they had to use a fork-lift to get it on there). Then to compound the issue, they weren’t very careful about how the product was loaded and they damaged some of the pieces. Again, “Oh, well…”

Dedication to customer service requires a “can do” attitude; it might seem to be outside your scope of practice, but depending on what your marketing strategy happens to be – and make no mistake about it, your mission statement and vision is your marketing strategy when you are fighting for ever-dwindling tax funds or donations – your organization will be faced with very specific situations in which you will have to stretch your resources to “make it happen”.  In our case, we rented a truck, picked up the material from the trucking company and delivered it ourselves.  The customer was completely thrilled.

In my wife’s company, we hope our efforts will be recognized in customer loyalty and a willingness to pass the word on. In emergency services, we hope that the care we take with each challenge is shared loudly when budget time or the annual fundraiser comes around.  You can draw the line where you choose, but in these times of limited funds, can you afford to ignore the added value of extraordinary customer service? It is extra effort that will distance you from the rest of the pack.  When a decision must be made between funding an analysis of the migratory path of earthworms in your community and cutting firefighters, that’s ammo you can’t afford to ignore. The next time you are drooling over your wish list and realizing you can’t afford things, remember the choices you made as to where you drew that customer service line.

Posted by on July 18, 2010 • Filed under: change, Command & Leadership, customer service, education, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, Firefighting Operations, Funding & Staffing, General, government, leadership, Media Relations, motivation, Patient Management, planning, politics, professionalism, revolution • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Here’s To Freethinkers

1 comment

A long time ago, a bunch of guys weren’t happy with the status quo.  They felt like the current situation was unfair, they didn’t have any say in the way things were going, and the ultimate authority was some guy who was appointed to his position and wasn’t necessarily the most qualified individual.

So, since there really wasn’t an existing model for what they desired, they developed a vision.  They committed the vision to paper, they sent it around for buy-in and enough people found their option to be better than the current one, so they chose to follow that dream.

After that, enough of them were so committed to that vision that they literally laid their lives down to move the cause forward.  When all was said and done, they prevailed, then had the chance to stop, look around, and then say, “Now what?”  We still ask that question today, 234 years later.  It’s a long running experiment, and its come a long way, but we have a long way still to go.  God Bless the United States of America.  Happy Birthday, Feliz Compleanos, and all that other stuff.  We love you and we’re glad we could be here to celebrate it with you.  Sometimes we’re a mess, but when the day is done, we’re still Americans and damn proud of it.  God Bless you, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Posted by on July 4, 2010 • Filed under: change, government, rebellion, revolution • Tagged: , , , , ,

FHZ Does “Sharing The Wealth” – First Due Blog Carnival

1 comment

Chief Harry DiezelI can’t begin to name all the people who have shared their knowledge with me over the years.  I have probably mentioned a time or two that I was fortunate to have been given an early education in the “family business”.  While I have never fought a fire with my father nor my grandfather, I have heard the stories, and in fact, a few of the firefighters who have fought fire for both of them actually moved to Hilton Head Island and fought fire for me.  I joked with one of our family friends who fit this description that he had the “honor of being a subordinate to three generations of the Mayers family”.  If you can’t take that kind of love in a firehouse, you are doomed.

At every opportunity, I formalized my training by attending as many fire schools as possible with some of the finest firefighters in the nation.  I have had the chance to talk HAZMAT over beers with Greg Noll, and likewise talk Rescue with the late, great Chief Ray Downey.  As a young officer I got to hang out with Chief Brunacini for the day when he was teaching on the Island.  And later in my career, I have had the amazing honor of working side by side as a committee officer with Carl Goodson, one of the finest leaders I have ever met.  I have had many other, lesser known, but quite inspirational and educated instructors and mentors along the line.  I have also worked directly for and with chiefs of local departments who continue to share their immense knowledge and insight with me.

Of all of these, however, until I met Chief Harry Diezel, who at the time was the Chief of the Virginia Beach Fire Department, I didn’t really have a vision of what my future in the fire service would be. What’s funny about it is that he was able to inspire a young officer candidate in sixteen hours of a seminar, by exposing to him to the potential of emergency services from an entirely different model than ever envisioned.

I have always had a strong work ethic and I thought I was a decent officer.  While was insistent on my crew being well prepared and well trained, in my early years as a company officer, my battles with management were often visible, bloody, and engaged head-on with no regard to the bigger picture.  Think “irresistible force meets immovable object”.  I knew I was good, I had swagger, and I had total confidence.  I was moving up the food chain rapidly because I was a John Wayne, no-nonsense, this-is-the-way-to-do-it kind of officer and in the ‘80’s, this was the personification of the model company officer.

As you also might have suspected, in the ‘80’s the notion of taxpayers as “customers” in the fire service was not widely accepted.  In fact, it was meeting pretty serious resistance, as it still does in certain areas.  I was no exception to the norm.  When it came to dealing with the public, I enjoyed delivering the emergency service, but as far as I was concerned, if you weren’t with us, you were against us.  After all, as taxpayers, you don’t have a choice in how emergency services are provided, do you?  If an issue came up in regard to providing fire protection, our take was, “Just listen to us, we know what we are doing, and we’ll tell you how to do it correctly”.

So when I had a chance to sit in a room over two days with Chief Diezel and learn about “paradigms” (BEFORE they became a cheap buzzword) and to learn about thinking with new perspective (again, before “outside the box” became clichéd), it was revolutionary.  When we talked about political strategy, it was fresh air and realization of a whole new approach toward selling service delivery.  When he suggested we read (and understand) “The Art of War”, not as a study in warcraft but as a guide for strategic living, it was before anyone else was suggesting any of these options.

Looking back on it, the things we talked about that weekend were shown to us as being “fresh” ideas ten and even twenty years later.  In some communities, when I come in and discuss a “vision for emergency services”, sometimes I get blank stares.  When I ask an officer candidate in another department what he or she sees in the future of emergency services, and they answer, “New trucks” or “more people”, I’m wondering why someone hasn’t tried to get them to see that our industry is affected globally, not just at city hall.

Harry got at least this one officer to embrace change, to accept that there might be alternatives to what we perceived as being the sole answer, and gave me the spark to explore and understand.  When I had the veil of ignorance lifted, it was like an entirely new beginning to my career.  I took classes on psychology and sociology to better understand the people both in the organization and in the community that I would have to motivate.  I enrolled in programs that were sponsored by the chamber of commerce and attended seminars offered to private businesses, and began to serve on boards and panels.  I realized in the ‘80’s that networking was a key element in political survival and marketing your organization wasn’t a bad thing.

Of all things, Chief Diezel got me to see that people do have a choice.  They may not have the ability to decide what agency comes when they call for help, but they have a choice in who is employed in that agency.  They also have a say in whether or not you get the apparatus and tools for the job, the fire stations to put the apparatus and tools in, and whether or not you get people to put on those resources.  These people also have the ability to put people in office who support you, and they can put people in office who will make your life miserable.

I have resolved to share this wealth with others through Firehouse Zen.  I have a vision of emergency services reborn, of revolutionary change in the way we operate and in the way that we engage the public to minimize injury and loss.  There are so many “leaders” out there who still have that veil over their eyes and have never understood the potential of a fully engaged organization.  Until they do, their department is condemned to being ordinary and marginal.  If there’s anything in this world I don’t want to be, it’s ordinary and marginal.

Learn to really be at the front of the pack and learn how to guide and push toward a goal of really effective service delivery.  More importantly, though, find someone who needs guidance, some young officer, and mentor them.  Give them the gift of vision and foresight and help them to prepare for all of the changes that will surely come in next generations.  Nothing you have gained is worth a cent if you don’t share it with others.

Thanks, Chief Diezel, for unwittingly inspiring me.  It was a great weekend.

Posted by on May 26, 2010 • Filed under: change, Command & Leadership, customer service, education, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Nation, government, leadership, motivation, officership, politics, professionalism, Training & Development • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Conflict

1 comment

web reddrive download 411Conflict is inevitable. Conflict will come regardless of how much you try to avoid it. Because it is inevitable, as a leader, you need to know how to deal with it. There are resources out there to point you in a direction, but really, experience is an excellent teacher as well, provided you work hard at understanding the underlying cause of conflict, how each of the parties involved in conflict create escalation, and how conflict can be effectively be used to direct issues.

I was listening today to a reflection on Lena Horne’s life today on NPR Radio; an author of a recent biography (James Gavin) spoke of her difficulties in having a mixed marriage in the Civil Rights Era.  While I don’t know if it was live or not, when someone like Dr. Maya Angelou calls in (and she did), it’s pretty interesting, especially when she calls to dispute the biographer’s take on the situation. I listened to her dissect most of what Gavin was saying about Lena’s struggles at that time. Judging from the silence, I could sense that Gavin was either humiliated, or coiling for a fight. After the commercial break, Gavin came back at the esteemed Dr. Angelou with a point-by-point rebuttal of her criticism of his own research. Did I see that coming? Certainly. When someone has just written a book on a subject and professes to have some  expertise on Lena Horne’s life is contradicted on National Radio, even by someone as reputable as Maya Angelou, you know he’s not going to let it stand. Have you ever experienced this same type of situation, either on the giving or the receiving end?

We can all sense tension when conflict is present. Some of us are more perceptive of the tension than others. The ability to be perceptive is an excellent asset to have. When another party is uncomfortable with a given situation, if you are in a position of negotiating with that individual, knowing how to defuse their anxieties can win them over. And as a leader, your job, like it or not, is a never-ending series of negotiations; getting people to do this, to not do that, inspiring people to create, talking people out of bad decisions, and any number of interactions. Thus, it is significantly valuable to be able to not only plan and direct actions, but to be able to read and interpret subtleties that translate into whether or not you are going to achieve success with those plans and directions.

Teaching someone how to intuitively perceive tension is like trying to explain that air has mass to a three-year old; we can feel it, but you can’t see it and it certainly defies explanation, so how do you explain that to them? We all know what it feels like in a tense situation, we can all agree on what it looks like when people are acting under conflict, but to be able to describe it to the uninitiated, well, it’s tough.

Likewise, when you are explaining to someone that they are obviously acting in a manner that is creating tension and conflict is nearly impossible. They may not feel like they are doing this and in fact, your suggesting it might just make the situation that much more untenable. I have found that when working with people like this, I even get defensive and sometimes say things that aren’t exactly contributing toward meaningful dialogue (actually, more often than not).

It sounds pretty cynical to suggest that you treat every exchange and interaction as a negotiation, but in reality, it is. I’m not suggesting that everyone you encounter is simply out for their own agenda, but realistically, you have no idea what the motivation is of the individual you are having an interaction with. I don’t care if it is your spouse, their motive may be entirely altruistic, but you have no way of knowing that for sure, unless you happen to be a mind-reader (which I am definitely not). Therefore, any interchange you approach must not just include what you expect to occur, but unless the return is apparent, explaining what they will get out of the situation will minimize the conflict as well, because in some cases, it leads toward more discussion of the benefits of the desired action and lends toward open communication.

Half of the problem, in fact, is determining what motivates the other party. Again, it may be obvious, and again, maybe not. Treating people with respect and understanding goes a long way toward finding out the needs of the people involved.

Another big factor in the equation is knowing conflict typology and by understanding how various types of conflicts evolve, using specific techniques to direct the argument toward a positive outcome for everyone involved. A great tool I have used is the University of Colorado Peace Study Center’s website “Beyond Intractability”, which gives you many resources to study conflict management and resolution.

Designed to aid students in studying conflict management, I have found the links to literature on the site extremely valuable. By understanding how misunderstandings occur, you can head off certain problems at the pass. Likewise, any texts you can find on strategic living, like The Art of War, The Book of Five Rings, or The Seven Characteristics of Successful People, are popular because they direct readers on methods to solve conflict. In reading The Art of War, you really have to get farther into the meaning of each interaction between adversaries, but in each situation, if you were to treat the “armies” in the context of opposing forces, you’ll find that there are a lot of lessons to be learned, as well as shared with your subordinates.

If you could come to work and engage others the entire day without conflict, there wouldn’t be any need for supervisors. Our job is to make sure that we further the mission and vision of the organization and that the resources allocated to make that happen are utilized to the most advantageous and efficacious means. Since the presence of more than two individuals means that at some point there will be a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation, or a disagreement on how to achieve those means, someone needs to be the deciding party. And even if you work alone, you are likely going to encounter friction and conflict with customers, suppliers, regulators, or others at some point. If you don’t take the time to understand what strategies solve problems in the most effective manner, you can go about finding these answers the hard way: by experimentation. All of these battles have been fought before, they are just framed differently. Don’t continually reinvent the wheel; learn about the classic conflicts, understand personality and motivation, and use the experience of many to leverage an advantage. By doing so you can develop excellent relationships, cause others to see you as a “uniter” rather than a “divider”, and impress everyone with your ability to solve problems.

Posted by on May 11, 2010 • Filed under: change, Command & Leadership, customer service, fire service, Firefighter Nation, government, leadership, motivation, officership, politics, professionalism • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

International Influence

1 comment
Understanding other cultures sometimes involves local customs. I like any local custom that involves drinking. Me with the Australia GSE 2002.

Understanding other cultures sometimes involves local customs. I like any local custom that involves drinking. Me with the Australia GSE 2002.

We’re getting ready to leave the Sunshine State and return to the sunshine Island, but I’m reflecting on some moments from our psuedo-vacation. While Orlando has always impressed me as a fun place to go, I continue to be impressed with the number of opportunities I have while I am here to engage with people from all around the world.

I know that to many of us, the nightmares of traveling through “It’s A Small World” end up with our humming the tune for weeks, unable to get it out of our head, but this time around, I actually took the cotton out of my ears and tried to get some inspiration from the surroundings. I probably should have done that a long time ago, because it seems that with the political fight going on over immigration law right now, along with some of the less-than-cooperative international feelings toward one another, we seem to have lost sight of the fact that we are all human, we all endure many of the same hardships, and we also enjoy many of the same things. We really should try to spend a little more time thinking about our similarities rather than dwelling on what divides us.

I have said this many times about our interaction with each other in the emergency service community, but it seems that our little problems are just a small slice of a bigger societal issue, and that is, the reluctance of so many to observe some tolerance and willingness to appreciate other cultures, as well as concern for the things we hold valuable to us: our language and our own culture, our religious beliefs, our security as a nation, and our jobs, to name a few.

Over the years, I have learned that to know someone better is to understand their point of view better, and subsequently, for them to know us better also lends toward improved relations.  I have quoted this article before, but I continue to encourage it so you see what I am talking about; I really recommend that you read the article The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture, by Montgomery McFate, as published in Joint Forces Quarterly.  Being open minded doesn’t mean you have to have a big campfire and sing Kumbaya (I’m not a Kumbaya, group-hug kind of guy).  It means that you maintain an open mind to how others think so that you can avoid misunderstandings and yes, this leads to improved relations, but also yes, it leads to improved ability to achieve your vision.

Lt. Tom over at the 12-Lead Prehospital EKG Blogspot and I were having a conversation the other day about Myers-Briggs personality profiles.  If you only know me from reading certain excerpts from Firehouse Zen, you might think I’m a crunchy granola kind of guy.  I’m not.  I test routinely as a Extroverted Intuitive Thinking Judger, an “ENTJ“.  I was joking about the “group hug” thing one time with someone and I think I said, “I’ll do one, but it’s only me sizing you up to see what I’ll have to do to kill you later”.  Okay, so that’s a little overboard, but the truth of the matter is, I have to resist my urge to tell people how and what to do all the time and allow people to find themselves.

My point is that not only do we have cultural differences that we can’t count on stereotypically, we can’t count on personality differences based on our perception either.  We have to seek to understand deeper before we can determine and judge.  In the process, we might also gain more information on subject matter that we didn’t have the answers to before.  As leaders, we need to listen more and talk less.  We need to use tools like the qualitative interview to get better understanding, to find out what motivates others to do or to act, and employ those motivators toward furthering our vision and the organizational goals.

Everyone brings something to the table, regardless of their ethnicity, their religion, their sex, or any other characteristic that makes them different from us.  Once you can peel back the differences and get to the heart of the issues, you can better find out how to solve our challenges and to employ the gifts others have toward making those challenges into opportunities.  If we can see what others see, it is one more set of eyes on the problem and will lend toward resolving conflict by showing people that if they win, we win.  Let’s all do a better job of working together to lighten our universal load.  As someone famous once said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world” (that would be Gandhi, if you didn’t know).  Have a safe day.

Posted by on April 28, 2010 • Filed under: change, customer service, fire service, Firefighter Nation, government, leadership, motivation, officership, politics, professionalism • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tolerance

2 comments
Take the time to understand others' points of view.

Take the time to understand others' points of view.

There is a great deal of controversy on the internet at any given time, but the postings between people we should be working with are getting to the point where they are troubling.  Heated rhetoric, personal attacks, and just out and out anger are more commonplace now then ever.

I posted this on my Firefighter Nation profile the other day in response to some of the discussions I have seen on other blogs lately.  If there’s anything I learned from doing research, is that even the military has come to understand that if combatants don’t appreciate adversary culture, they are likely to make assumptions that could jeopardize their mission. As a result, enlightened commanders take the time to immerse themselves in cultural education and counterintelligence to fully comprehend the aspect in which an adversary may approach a problem.  As a born cynic, my first viewpoint was that the understanding could be utilized to manipulate weakness or strength to be used against one’s adversary, but as I have grown older (and hopefully, wiser), I have found that in conflict management, many arguments could be simply defused by just toning down the language and accepting others’ viewpoints for what they are: opposing viewpoints.

This text was shared with me by a friend some time ago, but I wanted share it with you all in the hopes that maybe it could provide some perspective:

(Paraphrased from Dhammavadaka):

Remember always that you are just a visitor here, a traveler passing through. Your stay is but short and the moment of your departure unknown.

Speak quietly and kindly and be not forward with either opinions or advice. If you talk much, this will make you deaf to what others say, and you should know that there are few so wise that they cannot learn from others.

Be near when help is needed, but far when praise and thanks are being offered.

Take small account of might, wealth and fame, for they soon pass and are forgotten. Instead, nurture love within you and and strive to be a friend to all. Truly, compassion is a balm for many wounds.

Treasure silence when you find it, and while being mindful of your duties, set time aside, to be alone with yourself.

Cast off pretense and self-deception and see yourself as you really are.

Despite all appearances, no one is really evil. They are led astray by ignorance. If you ponder this truth always you will offer more light, rather then blame and condemnation.

Maybe some of you will take this for what it is worth and be a little less likely to fight with one another. Maybe you will continue to disregard any advice toward making peace with your brother firefighters and EMTs. But maybe if some of us kept our mouths shut and listened more, we might learn something. And further, maybe we need to be tolerant with some of the newbies and try to encourage their learning.

There is always a place for understanding the culture and approach of others, because you can then frame your discussion in terms which they can understand.  Be more open to ideas and accepting of others, and in the end, you will reach them because you can appreciate where they are coming from and they will appreciate that you took their sides under consideration.

Posted by on April 13, 2010 • Filed under: change, Command & Leadership, customer service, education, EMS Topics, fire, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Nation, government, leadership, motivation, News, officership, politics, professionalism, Training & Development • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mixing EMS and The Fire Service

16 comments
Two of Hilton Head Island Fire & Rescue's ten advanced life support medic units.

Two of Hilton Head Island Fire & Rescue's ten advanced life support medic units.

When I hear anyone suggest that the merger of fire and EMS is a mistake because “firefighters lack the skills to provide paramedic care”, I am highly insulted.

When I hear the ex-chief of a metropolitan department regretting decisions to bring medical providers and fire services together, I wonder aloud how he can continue to stomach the fact that it isn’t the inmiscible nature of these professions that caused the problem but the culture that the “leaders” of these organizations permitted to continue and encourage.

I admit that I know people with what could be termed the “fire” mentality and those with the “EMS” mentality.  But these individuals seem to be the minority now, rather than the majority.  Fortunately, I work with a lot of people who have the “Fire & EMS” mentality; people who are open to the belief we can do both well, we can exceed at the skills, we can meet our customers’ needs, and we can enjoy the diversity that having two “jobs” rolled into one provides on a daily basis.

I happen to work in an organization that merged fire and EMS together in 1993.  Prior to that, the two fire departments provided first responder service to our community to supplement the response of our local rescue squad.  Ultimately, with the merger, we took all three of these agencies and combined them into an outstanding example of emergency medical service delivery.  EVERY line employee is required to be at the MINIMUM a nationally registered EMT-Basic and of those personnel, over 40 of them are National Registry Paramedics as well.  This doesn’t count each of our chief and administrative officers who were all certified EMTs as well, and also doesn’t count our Training Division officers, who are both NREMT Paramedics as well.  Our organization provides a highly-recognized service to this world-class resort community and has incorporated 12-lead ECG monitoring and interpretation along with telemetry to reinforce our STEMI recognition program, among other programs like Island-wide AED promotion and education, public CPR and First Aid programs, car seat installation, and many, many other efforts.  I honestly work with some of the most outstanding EMS personnel in the nation and I’d be honored to let them work on anyone in my family, which is good, because I live in this community as well.

I have had it with anyone who suggests that EMS should be the exclusive domain of the third-party providers, especially since, with rare exception, a good number of these “non-fire service” providers don’t seem to provide any better of a service than the fire department EMS providers.  In fact, I know that our agency is an excellent EMS provider and is right now striving to be more than just excellent, but to be “state-of-the-art”.  With leaders like Lt. Tom over at the EMS 12-Lead ECG Blog, and Pete at the Star of Life EMS legal blog, we have a very good chance of putting ourselves in the position of being innovators and setters of the gold standard.

I would never suggest that fire-based EMS is the ONLY solution, but there are a few dinosaurs out there who continue to insist that EMS can only be effectively provided by non-fire department providers.  Apparently, stuffing themselves in their too-tight BDUs and hanging out at the local donut shop has occluded some sort of cerebral perfusion.  I hope they are watching carefully as the rest of us, the people who desire to have community-based EMS delivered by competent and caring providers, regardless of agency affiliation, kick them to the curb.

Your agency can only be as good as the personnel you retain; if you continue to recruit people who can’t do the job, the community shouldn’t be surprised if the situation won’t work.  Volunteer or career, you get what you pay for, and if the community doesn’t invest in good training, good equipment, good leadership, and good methods of keeping personnel, they shouldn’t be surprised if all they get is a crappy EMS system.

Posted by on March 20, 2010 • Filed under: change, Command & Leadership, customer service, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, fire service, Firefighter Nation, government, leadership, Media Relations, motivation, News, officership, Patient Management, politics, professionalism, revolution • Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,