The Foundation of Leadership

BY ROBERT BURNS

I can still remember the day I was promoted to lieutenant in the Fire Department of New York (FDNY). It was a hot summer day during the first week of August. It was a proud day for me, my family, and the members of my firehouse. It was the day that I took the giant leap from firefighter to fire officer and officially became a “Leader of the Bravest.”

The FDNY gave me a new badge, a different color uniform shirt, and a set of single bar collar insignias to signify my new position and the formal authority that went along with it. Putting on these outward symbols of my new rank was easy. Fulfilling the awesome responsibilities that came along with them was not.

The path to a formal leadership position in the FDNY was long and hard. The promotional process was extremely competitive, with written exams, in-basket exercises, and oral assessment centers. Although these tests may have been difficult and stressful, they were just academic exercises. Successfully demonstrating that I was qualified to be a leader on paper was the result of years of study and the ability to provide classroom answers. Proving that I was a legitimate leader in the real world would require a much different course of action and involve a whole new set of skills.

THE FOUR CORNERSTONES OF LEADERSHIP

Effective leadership, like most other things in this world, is built from the ground up. As a new leader, I would first need to establish myself as a trustworthy and competent individual if I expected others to be willing to follow me. Having others “accept” your promotion is an important factor in the leader/follower dynamic. The best way to gain this acceptance is to build and maintain a personal reputation of “leadership legitimacy.” To be viewed as legitimate, I would need to earn the trust and respect of others by virtue of my actions and behaviors-not just my title or rank. In the long run, it would be this “leadership legitimacy” that would serve as the real source of my authority, power, and influence.

So how do fire service leaders earn leadership legitimacy? We earn it by demonstrating the qualities that serve as the four cornerstones in the foundation of leadership: character, competence, credibility, and consistency.

Character

One of the toughest parts of being a leader is that you are always on stage. People are always watching you, evaluating you, and talking about you (usually when you’re not there). They want to know that their leader (you) will do the “right thing” and not sell them out for personal gain or when the going gets tough.

We use the phrase “do the right thing” a lot in the fire service. But when it comes to leadership, what exactly is this “right thing” that we talk about all of the time? What “things” do the followers expect their leaders to actually do?

In leadership, doing the right thing means having the courage to speak out on important issues and matters of conscience. Our leaders are the “voice” of our fire companies, our fire departments, and the fire service. It also means having the strength of character to stand up for our shared values and beliefs. The fire service culture is like no other on the planet. Our leaders must protect and defend the positive elements of this culture and be willing to hold accountable those among us who do not live up to our high standards. Doing the right thing means having the grit and integrity to practice what you preach-to consistently walk the leadership talk. If you’re not leading by example, you’re not leading.

But it is not so easy to demonstrate these three “do the right thing” qualities of character. To speak out, you have to know what to say. To stand up for beliefs, you have to have a deep commitment to what you believe in.

To consistently walk the leadership talk, you have to have a personal “talk” to walk!

These displays of character are only possible after engaging in a process of “soul searching” and reflection that must be part of every leader’s personal development activities. This is not a simple process. We are not an introspective society. Many of us have been raised in an overstimulated, instant-gratification, video-game culture. But to be effective leaders, we must find our voice, connect with our values, and demonstrate that we are individuals of character.

Competence

Trustworthy leaders in the fire service are technically competent. I’m not just talking about technical competency in firefighting and emergency operations. Obviously, being able to manage the complexities of fires and emergencies is critical. People are virtually putting their lives in our hands.

But when you’re the boss, your people expect you to be able to handle all of the other functions that go along with your position. If you are responsible for filling out injury reports or workers’ compensation forms, people expect you to do it correctly if they get hurt. To a certain extent, their livelihood is in your hands.

If your unit has a particularly difficult member of the law enforcement community to deal with at the scene of vehicular accidents on the highway, it is assumed that you will have the “smarts” and the communication skills to handle the situation so that your crew can extinguish fires, extricate crash victims, and perform medical duties.

If personnel issues in your command are affecting your team’s ability to operate as an effective and cohesive unit, your members count on you to have the courage and the skills to deal with these issues.

So, to be an effective leader, do you have to be a “know-it-all”? Of course not! We are all human beings, and we all have our shortcomings. But effective leaders compensate for their humanity (imperfections) by being aware and humble. Once we possess the awareness and humility to recognize and admit our weaknesses, we can use three basic tools to increase our competence: Deliberate practice, team building, and networking.

Deliberate practice. When we become aware of the personal deficiencies that hinder our ability to be effective leaders, we must discipline ourselves to engage in the specific activities that will help us improve in those areas. This sounds a bit simplistic, but it’s not.

Many times, our weaknesses involve things that we don’t like to do or don’t do well. That’s basic human nature. For the most part, people don’t enjoy doing things that they don’t do well-so they don’t do them. But if you don’t step up and address your weaknesses, it will just leave you more insecure and vulnerable, and you will never improve. To use a golf analogy, if you stink at putting, you belong on the putting green, not at the driving range-even if driving is more fun. If you are a bad listener, sharpen your focus and pay attention-practice not talking so much! If you need to increase your self-contained breathing apparatus skills, get to the training site and work on them. Swallow your pride and discipline yourself to work on the things that need improvement. Sometimes as officers and leaders, we find it tougher to do this because we think that others expect us to know what we are doing. Our reputations are at risk and we don’t want to look “stupid.” But the first and most important step to increasing your competence is personal development. So make a commitment to practice, practice-deliberate practice.

Team building. The fire service attracts a lot of good people with many different skills. When we encourage cooperation and allow people to contribute their special talents, we develop a solid and an effective team. Team building is also a great way to improve morale and increase commitment. When people make positive contributions at an operation or help to solve a difficult problem, it gives them status in the group and increases their motivation.

When I was a young lieutenant working in midtown Manhattan, I responded to several “oddball” incidents involving situations that I was not familiar with. I always asked my personnel (many of whom had more experience in the area than I did), “What do you think?” or “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” As a team, we were always able to come up with positive solutions to the problems that we faced.

It is difficult to ask others for help and put your reputation at risk if you don’t have a sense of confidence in your own abilities. Work on being the best you can be so that you will have the confidence to build a quality team around you.

The role of the leader is not to come up with all of the ideas or to have all of the answers. The role of the leader is to create an environment in which solutions can be worked out and ideas can flourish.

We have all heard leaders talk about how the members of their team “made them look good.” This doesn’t happen by accident. Effective leaders create an atmosphere that encourages great things to happen. With a little deliberate practice, and a lot of advice from the members of my “team,” I actually became quite good at some of the things that I had previously been weakest in.

Networking. There are times in every leader’s career when he could use some help with a difficult issue or problem. It would be nice if every fire department had a formal mentoring program in place for its officers as they entered a new position. However, we all know that formal mentoring programs are the rare exception and not the rule in the fire service. But this is one of the areas where the fire service culture can help us compensate for the lack of organizational structure. We are the beneficiaries of a proud culture of “pass it on,” “do the right thing,” and “brotherhood and sisterhood.” This environment is custom made for “do-it-yourself” mentoring. Leaders at all levels need to build relationships (both formal and informal) with mentors and colleagues whom they can turn to for advice and counsel in time of need. To paraphrase the most influential leader of all time: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. There was never a time in my career when I sought help from the right person, at the right time, in the right manner, that I didn’t get all that I needed and then some.

Having a solid “advice and counsel” network saved me several times from doing things that might have otherwise resulted in big problems.

Technical competence is a crucial cornerstone in the foundation of leadership. But since none of us is perfect, we can compensate for our weaknesses by focusing on personal development through deliberate practice, engaging in team building, and cultivating a solid support network.

Credibility

Credibility is the product of honesty and integrity. Everything you say and do has to support what you claim to be and believe in. Leaders need to be conscious about the choices they make and the actions they take. People will evaluate your behavior to determine if you are believable or not.

Believability is a critical factor for leadership and influence, because if you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t trust the message. When you build your credibility, you make deposits into the “bank of goodwill.” There comes a time in almost every leader’s career when he needs to make a withdrawal from this important account and ask his people to “trust him.” Hopefully, when your time comes, your account will not be not overdrawn.

Consistency

Consistency is a key element of trust not only in your personal behavior but also in your organizational alignment. As leaders, we need to ensure consistency between our stated values and goals and the structural elements that we put in place to encourage these values and goals. Whom we claim to be on paper must be the same as who we are in practice every day in our organization.

If the structure (i.e., the rules, the customs, the culture) in your unit or department doesn’t match your rhetoric, the structure will always win out at the end of the day. If your rhetoric preaches cooperation, but your structure rewards competition, guess what you will get? If your rhetoric preaches safety, but your structure rewards unwarranted risk taking, guess what will happen?

It is foolhardy to reward A (formally or informally) while claiming to support B, but that is what often exists in many organizations. As leaders, we need to be consistent with who we say we are and what we actually do (or tolerate being done).

Organizations generally get what they are structurally aligned to get. What we put up with is usually what we end up with. So be consistent, both personally and professionally, and “water what you want to grow.”

•••

These four cornerstones are essential for effective leadership: character, competence, credibility, and consistency. They make up the foundation that provides fire officers with “leadership legitimacy.” All leaders must have these cornerstones firmly in place so they can build their leadership skills on a solid footing. A shaky foundation results in an unstable structure.

ROBERT BURNS is a retired battalion chief from the Fire Department of New York. He was an adjunct instructor at John Jay College and headed the curriculum development group for designing and teaching the leadership modules of the FDNY promotional training courses for lieutenants, captains, and battalion chiefs.

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