BY RONALD E. KANTERMAN
We’ve all had bosses who appeared to have been good leaders but were terrible at being managers, and vice versa. Both disciplines take hard work. Management entails lots of work in planning, organizing, staffing, delegating, budgeting, and all the other managerial aspects. Can you be a good leader and a good manager at the same time? I say yes. Can you be good at one and not the other? I say yes again. Can you be unsatisfactory at both? Of course!
I knew a chief of a small combination fire department. He was a great manager and administrator. He could justify a delivery of ice to the firehouse on a 5° day in February and get the funding for it from City Hall. However, he couldn’t lead his personnel to the breakfast table. He had no “people skills” or leadership qualities and had a tendency to mess with the troops regularly. I once asked him why he did that. His answer was, “Because I can.” He’s gone.
Leadership isn’t necessarily what’s on your collar. Respect for rank comes with that rank, but respect for you as a person comes with having the right stuff. Think about the best leaders, officers, and firefighters you ever worked with. What made them who they were? I’ll guess they were trustworthy, dedicated, well-read people with great integrity who respected others at the highest levels. Now think about the worst leaders you’ve come across. You can learn from the bad ones, too, because you also know what NOT to do!
HAVING A VISION AND A COMMON BOND
Consider the great leaders of all time. Let’s go to Ron’s Leadership Hall of Fame. You may not like some of the names, but think about their ability to lead the masses and bring them to the place they wanted their people to end up. These names come from fire service people who have sat for my seminars. It’s a mixture of folks you probably would never put together and is only a partial list: Dwight Eisenhower, Abraham Lincoln, Norman Schwarzkopf, Ronald Reagan, Harry Truman, Al Gore, John Kennedy, and Fiorello LaGuardia. The list goes on. All of these leaders had one thing in common: They had a vision.
If you are going to be a leader in your organization or the leader of your organization, you must have a vision. Don’t confuse your vision statement with a mission statement. Most fire and emergency services organizations have a mission statement. I’ll guess that most have these key words: service, dedication, best, customer, quick, efficient, effective, and ability.
A vision statement is much different. Here’s your opportunity to dream a little and really look into the old crystal ball. Shape your vision of what you believe the organization should and could look like. Put budget and all the other current obstacles aside for the moment and come up with a vision for your organization. Once you develop your vision, share it with your staff. A chief might want to discuss it with his assistant chiefs or deputy chiefs. It may become a group vision at this point and then start to filter down to the line.
“Our firehouses are 100 years old. We need new quarters. My vision is to build new firehouses.” Sound impossible? If you don’t believe in your own vision to start with, it will never ever come to light. You must believe in it yourself for you to make others believe that it’s possible. If in fact a vision just came to you and you said, “That will never happen,” either change it or go read another article in this fine magazine.
Going back to the Hall of Famers, what really made them the leaders they became was one common bondthey were great communicators. We know President Reagan was labeled “The Great Communicator,’’ but he was just the lucky one. They were all great communicators. They had a vision they believed in and were able to share and communicate that vision to the masses and were able to change the lives of others. If you are to be an effective leader within your organization or beyond, you must have a vision, the passion to make it work, and the ability to communicate that vision at all times and at all costs. Most importantly, you must first believe in it yourself.
VALUES
We all have values, and they’re all different. In a leadership role, you have to attempt to strike a balance with all the members in the house, bureau, or department. I asked my students numerous times, “Where do we get our values?” Most answer, “From home” or “Our parents.” It seems we are a product of our environment. How does this affect you in your leadership role? Every member of the organization brings his own set of values to the table. Your job is not only to deal with them but also to understand them. Your job is to sort through the pile of values on the table and bring everyone to a common ground. Boy, that sounds easy. It’s not! It’s hard work and takes perseverance; as a leader, you need to rise to the occasion and get the job done.
BEING PROACTIVE
Create the environment, and lead by example. Chief Peter Lamb from Massachusetts says, “What you allow to happen without intervention becomes your standard.” Is he ever right! If you continually let the tail wag the dog and the day comes when the dog must wag the tail, you will have to go over Mt. Everest to get there. You must set the stage, create the environment, set the tone, or do whatever you have to, but as the leader, you have to lead at all times, not just when you have to or it’s convenient. You are charged with setting the tone for ethical behavior, even if you were the biggest prankster in the house or told the best jokes. Once you are elevated to the next level, “you can’t play cards with the guys anymore,” as one of my former bosses told me when I moved up.
AREAS FOR SELF-DEVELOPMENT
Before we discuss self-development, consider the “KANTERMAN GAL” (Guidance Acronym of Leadership). It took me awhile to come up with the title for this one.
K – Kidding: Are you kidding yourself and those around you that you are or can be an effective leader, or are you really committed?
A – Accept problems, and go to work on them. Fix the big ones first. The small ones will fall into place.
N – Never forget your leadership role and your responsibilities.
T – Take action every time. Don’t procrastinate.
E – Evaluate every situation carefully for the best plan that will result in the best possible outcome.
R – Remember who you are, where you are, and the impact you have on the organization.
M – Make good decisions based on the best information you can obtain.
A – Act on everything with diligence and purpose. Prioritize your work.
N – Never put yourself in front of the organization. If you follow the goals and objectives of the organization, the things you want for yourself will eventually come.
BUILDING EFFECTIVE RELATIONSHIPS
Cooperation is one of those things that seems to work most of the time. Cooperating with your team is as important as getting cooperation from them. Sit and listen to their points of view and ask for input. Let them know up front that you may not use their ideas but you want to hear from them. Try a brain-storming session even though the first one may be more like a light drizzle. If your people have never been asked to contribute to the cause, you may get that “deer-in-the-headlights” look. It’s OK for you to start it off with an idea or two, but then let them do their thing. You’ll be very surprised to hear what comes from your troops. It lends itself to ownership.
When you are locked in your corners, butting heads, and trying to get to “win-win,” try to move to higher ground. Agree to disagree if you have to, and move on. At least you agreed on something. When you are in the mix at a disciplinary meeting, always reserve judgment until after you have all the facts. Don’t rush to judgment! Do your homework. When you’re wrong, admit you are wrong; don’t get defensive.
Once two of my members appeared to have made a dire mistake in their work, resulting in what I believed would be a life hazard to personnel. In anger and in haste, I drew up the papers for two days off for each member, which would have resulted in dismissal on their next offense. I wrongfully accused these normally good workers and felt compelled to make amends. The disciplinary action was expunged from their records, and I not only verbally apologized to the men but sent a letter apologizing to their families for bringing undue grief on all of them. Not only did this make it right, but these men are still with me, and our level of mutual respect is high.
Bill Hopson, Ocean County (NJ) Fire Marshal, has stated, “If you mess up, fess up, clean it up, and move on.” These are words to lead by.
TAKE OPPORTUNITIES TO LEARN AND CONTRIBUTE
As the leader of an organization, you are looked on to continually contribute to move the organization forward. Generating new ideas fosters excitement in the members. Try new things. Chief (Ret.) Alan Brunacini, Phoenix (AZ) Fire Department, must have said it a million times: “We’ll try it, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.” He’s right. If something new doesn’t work, then try something else. Get out of the box and see what everyone else is doing. Go to conferences and seminars, and bring ideas and information home. Apply the new knowledge rapidly. If you hear or see something great at any class, seminar, or school, and you get home and shelve it, you’ll never pull it out again.
When I returned from a National Fire Academy (NFA) class four years ago, I Ieft that oversized white binder (you NFA students know what I mean) on my desk with a yellow note sticking out of one page. That one page was going to change the way my department responded to buildings on a pre-emergency planning basis. I knew if I shelved the binder, I’d never pull it down. It sat on my desk for three months until I got to it. I had a meeting with my staff; we looked at it and all agreed it was the way to go. The project took 10 months to complete, but we’re better for it.
Show flexibility with your team. That could mean working hours for the administrative staff, accommodating a shift person with different hours for a personal problem at home, or bending the rules but not breaking them. Captain (Ret.) D. Michael Abrashoff, U.S. Navy, bent every rule the Navy has (and there are millions) to get his crew and ship to be the best they could be. (I highly recommend his book, It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy. Although the book has a “management” title, I believe that the good captain hit all the good leadership buttons.
Remember to develop yourself functionally and technically so you can speak, operate, and lead at the proper levels across the board. You don’t necessarily need to know how every new tool operates or have it in your hands when you’re at the higher levels of the organization, but you need to understand the concepts so you can support the need. I can’t physically create a 4:1 Z-rig mechanical advantage system, but I know what it’s for and what it does, and why the rescue company needs the equipment (rope, pulleys) to make it happen. (For the record, I could never make a figure 8 either!)
DEVELOP YOUR DEPARTMENT
Be customer focused. Most of us know who our customers are. They are the people who dial 911 and ask us to come and get in between them and their problem and make their problem go away. They don’t know if we get paid or not; frankly, the average American doesn’t care. “I dial 911, and somebody shows up and helps me.” That’s the bottom line. It goes deeper than that. In a leadership role, you have to dig a little bit. Keeping up with the demographics of your town is very important. Few, if any, communities in the country today are stable, in that people aren’t moving in and out and the culture isn’t rapidly changing.
New cultures bring new challenges for the emergency services. It’s your job to keep up and ensure that your new customers are getting what they need. You may have to meet with community or religious leaders to get a better understanding of who they are and what they need. I have an associate who works in a large city where diversity is the norm. As an Italian-American fire officer, his firehouse was smack in the middle of a Hassidic Jewish area of the city. By taking the time to read a bit and study the customs, he created a relationship with his customers so both parties understood each other, particularly with regard to fire prevention and code issues.
Consider that you, as the leader or boss, have internal customers as well, which includes everyone in your department under your command. If you’re the chief, your staff chiefs, line officers, and line firefighters, along with the administrative staff, are all your customers. You need to fulfill their requests as you would those of the civilians on the street. Your people are your greatest asset. You need to take care of them.
You also have customers in the other municipal agenciesthe police department, the department of public works, the parks and recreation department, the office of the mayor or city manager, and others. Take care of them the way you want to be taken care of when you make the call for assistance.
Get involved in your community. Successful chiefs I’ve met are members of the local Rotary Club or Chamber of Commerce. One volunteer chief told me that his apparatus hit a tree on the way to a call (no injuries; everyone was belted in). The local truck body shop called him and asked if it could fix it for him for nothing. He sat at Chamber meetings for three years with all the business people in the town. It paid off.
Personally support your department. If the leaders of the department talk bad about it, especially in public, then what could you expect from your people? Most of us support our department by wearing a marked shirt or jacket or by displaying a window sticker on our cars. Remember, however, that you are now a “marked person” and that what you do will reflect not only on you but also on the entire department. When a firefighter gets arrested for drunk driving, the news usually reports, “An off-duty firefighter was arrested today” or “A volunteer firefighter with 25 years of experience responding to road accidents was arrested today.” If you hold a rank, it will only be worse.
COLLABORATION
If you are at or near the top, you need to discuss with your companies, divisions, bureaus, and units why it’s important for all of you to align yourselves with the department’s goals, objectives, and guidelines. If you’re a company officer, you need to lead your members to the “alignment trough” and have them take a sip. Many career firefighters and line officers have told me that they work in a four-platoon system, with the result that there are “four separate fire departments within one fire department,” because each shift and shift commander does it a little differently or, in some cases, a lot differently. It gets real interesting when a firefighter is detailed to another shift and the officer admonishes him for doing his job the way he knows how. “We don’t do it that way on C shift,” the C shift commander says.
Alignment is key, and leaders at all levels are responsible for making that happen. Align the Fire Prevention Bureau with the suppression forces. Align the shifts. [You would think that standard operating procedures (SOPs) or standard operating guidelines (SOGs) would take care of that.] Align the line and the staff. It’s okay if everyone is singing “Jingle Bells” in different keys; if everyone is on the same sheet of music, all will have a general idea of what the others are singing.
Sharing is another way to get collaboration within your department. Share your ideas, and solicit new ideas from within. Share your successes and lessons learned, and document them. We seem to be getting better at that lately (firefighterclosecalls.com; the International Association of Fire Chiefs’ Near Miss Reporting System @ IAFC.org). If we don’t learn from the past, we’re doomed to repeat our mistakes. Our founding fire service father Benjamin Franklin defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Don’t forget to take advantage of collaborating with other agencies as well. Many jurisdictions form task forces with police, fire, and other municipal services. Get onto these task forces and do some cross-jurisdictional work. As a leader, you are expected to do this type of work; don’t forget to encourage others to do the same.
THINK AND ACT STRATEGICALLY
First things first. You need to know who you are. You can’t do anything until you are comfortable with yourself and confident in your position. Once you’ve conquered you, then you can lead others and make the necessary changes to move your department forward. Successful entrepreneur Jack Kahl of Manco, Inc., once said, “Today’s leaders must be students of change first, before they become teachers of change to others.” You have to have your act together, and you have to believe in yourself before you can present anything to others. You must also know your departmentevery function, position, policy, procedure, SOP and SOG, rule, regulation, what to do, andmore importantlywhat NOT to do.
Then you have to know your people. The success of every good leader I know or knew was because of two things: having the ability to lead and having good people around them to carry out the mission. As a 14-year chief, most of my successes came from my staff of chiefs, line officers, and firefighters. I used to love talking to chiefs (not really) who thought they were bigger than their department. I always had to break the bad news: “They’re bigger than you and, by the way, probably much better.” For some reason, they never liked that. Get that valuable input from your staff; look at best practices and benchmarks with your peers and professional associations. There are no excuses for today’s fire service leaders not being on top of current information and technology. Florence Nightingale said, “I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.” No excuses. There is no need for a fire department anywhere in the world to operate in 2008 like it’s 1955. Successful leaders are part of local, county, state, and national organizations so they can get what they need to stay ahead or at least keep up. Chief Charlie Dickinson, deputy United States Fire Administrator (Ret.), shows a chart called “The Five Horns.” It’s all about being the fire chief:
- Horn 1: The Department
- Horn 2: The Firefighters
- Horn 3: Public Safety
- Horn 4: Politics
- Horn 5: Personal Integrity
That last one says it all. If you give up your integrity, you lose everything. If you lie to your people and they find out, they will never trust you again. Some things you just can’t get back. Maintain your integrity at all times. Your leadership legacy depends on it.
Part of thinking and acting strategically is consistency in how you handle your people when things go right or things go wrong. It’s most important when things go wrong. Inconsistent thinking can ruin a department, whether it’s allowing four shifts to operate four different ways or it’s preferring charges against one of your volunteers when two of them committed the bad act. Consistency is critical to keeping the ship not only afloat but also upright, on course, and moving forward at all times. Leadership makes the world move in a positive direction. So, contribute.
Training the troops, the staff, and yourself and cross-training are the hallmarks of strategic thinking. Fire departments that don’t train or do very little training are doing a disservice to themselves and the community they serve. In fact, it’s more important to do more training when things are slow than when we’re busy. When things slow down, we tend to lose our edge. A large city on the East Coast was reporting firefighter injuries at an alarming rate in the mid to late 1990s every single night on the news: “Five firefighters were hurt today.” “Six firefighters were hospitalized last night.” I called a friend who was a deputy chief at the time. He said, “We’re losing our edge, because the number of fires is down. With the influx of the new kids who haven’t seen a lot of fire duty like we did in the 1970s and 1980s, we’re getting hurt. We need to do more training.”
Present opportunities for training. Take companies out of service if you can. Get mutual aid to cover, if you have to, so you can get out and train. If you’re a volunteer outfit, use a neighboring company to cover your area so you can get to the fire academy at night or on a Saturday morning to get in those live-burn exercises. There are many online programs, books, and magazines. As a leader, bring your firefighters the resources they need to train and get the job done.
DEVELOP YOUR STAFF
Your immediate staff is the group of peopleor in small departments, the personwho will help deliver your message or, more importantly, your vision. You rely on this group of senior officers every day, whether or not you’re in town. If you haven’t developed them to your level, you’re cheating them and yourself. Bosses who hold back information so that their subordinates don’t know what they know need to get out of this business. You must delegate for development purposes and stand behind your staff so you can catch them, stand them up, and guide them forward should they fall. There are many tools you can use for staff development. Consider the following:
- Clear goals and objectives. Establish annual goals and objectives for the staff. Have them give you input on what they think is important to the department and will move it forward.
- Constructive feedback. Set up a system of constructive feedback. Telling your staff or even your line firefighters they messed up an operation without specific information accomplishes nothing. Constructive feedback changes behavior and sets it in a positive direction.
- Reward performance.Start out with a thank you now and then, or even a handshake for a job well done. Reward groups of people (tour, shift, bureau) as well, not just individuals. Everyone at all levels wants to know they did a good job and to be acknowledged. A pizza, a meal, or even a cake on the firehouse table does wonders. Start a trend.
- Training and personal development. Encourage your staff to train at the highest levels, whether they attend conferences, the National Fire Academy, or other training venues. It doesn’t have to be firematic all the timemaybe your deputy chiefs need a report writing class and an “English tune-up.”
- Be flexible. People sometimes have problems. Maybe someone needs steady days for awhile for child care or to take care of a sick family member. Do what you can to accommodate the staff within the guidelines of your rules and regulations.
COMMUNICATION
Communication is the cornerstone of good leadership. You must connect with people to move the wheel forward. Communication has to be clear and concise to be effective. It’s almost like trying to give fireground command orders over the radio. Almost. You must be consistently open and effective to maintain your level of leadership. Part of this is the dignity and respect issueyes, treat people as you would like to be treated. Take the high road. Remain calm, evaluate the problem, and quietly and effectively deal with it. Screaming matches don’t work; you’ll bring yourself down to lower levels. Show patience and courtesy even when the other person is not. Here’s where your leadership skills really kick in again.
On the other side of communication, keep the information flowing. So many seminar attendees have said things like “We know nothing” or “They tell us nothing.” No excuses. Bulletin boards, e-mail, chat rooms, notices, and good old one-on-one or group conversations are all good sources of information. I would err on the side of sending more information than less.
QUOTABLE QUOTES TO LEAD BY
WHAT DO YOU WANT THEM TO SAY ABOUT YOU?
At your retirement party or your funeral, what would you want others to say about you? Most of us never really think about that. The standard answers that I’ve heard include the following: He was firm but fair; he was a good husband and father; he was a good boss; he cared; we learned a lot from him; he was dedicated; he could be trusted; he never lied to us. Think about this question. After you come up with the accolades for yourself, consider if those given by others for you would, in fact, coincide with those you chose. If not, you’ve got work to do.
Ronald E. Kanterman is a 30-year veteran of the fire service and chief of public safety at a large industrial facility for a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company in central New Jersey. He has a bachelor’s degree in fire administration and master’s degrees in fire protection management and in environmental science. He is a contributor to Fire Engineering and lectures on a myriad of fire service topics nationally.
