By Jeremy Sanders
I often find myself wondering why the fire service isn’t better off than it is. Like any good firefighter, I begin to formulate plans that will fix all its problems. Even better, I will often recruit one or two additional firefighters to be involved in the problem-solving process—a time-tested technique for quickly pinpointing those who are to blame. But if you find yourself in one of those honest moments of reflection, you just might realize that you yourself are the problem.
Wait… am I the problem?
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Could we—the senior members of the fire service, the same people who should be guiding it to better times—be holding the fire service back? Are we now the ones who are bound to an outdated, antiquated past? Instead of working to make the fire service better through constant learning and growth, is it me and my generation who are mired in systemic stagnation? The more I thought about it, the more I began to accept this disappointing truth.
This was prompted by a personal situation in my own fire department. Recently, our training division put everyone through a rapid intervention team program that was broken down into three different stages. As is the custom in every firehouse across America, stories started to circulate through the shifts of how some crews performed during these evolutions. Most of the time, I try to avoid the rumor mill, but sometimes we can learn from some of those less-than-stellar crews, so this time I paid attention. One story stood out to me, and not in a good way. The crew involved in the evolution has a good mix of experience levels, with a couple of veterans who had around 20 years on, one member who had around 10 years on, and a couple of newer firefighters with less than five years on. What disappointed me so much about their “alleged” performance is that it was a textbook version of how my rookie class was taught to search, but that was more than 20 years ago, and it was ridiculously ineffective. The crew allegedly lined up single file, found a wall on their right-hand side, and began to search for a down firefighter, looking more like a family of elephants traveling trunk to tail than an effective crew. The drill took place in a good-sized area with lots of open spaces, and the down firefighter had an activated personal alert safety system (PASS) device. For anyone who hasn’t had the chance, there is much that you can learn by watching different crews train. You will quickly see the difference between crews that operate with these old, ineffective techniques compared to the crews searching in a tripod stance using the sound of the PASS device to guide. Aren’t we better than this, and more importantly, why is this acceptable?
That’s when I realized that we are the problem—not firefighters in general, but specifically the senior men and women of the fire service. Don’t get me wrong, there are amazing veterans doing really great things for the fire service, but many more are coasting along, leaving nothing behind but a legacy of training scars and bad habits. These individuals have spent years and even decades relying on skills, tools, and techniques that were learned early in their careers that are now laughably ineffective by today’s standards. The phrase “If you aren’t growing, you’re dying” is applicable. Full disclosure: for many years, I had been that firefighter. I had no interest in training beyond what was required of me by the department. I’m sure there were times that I responded to anything new with a turned-up nose and a bad attitude. This was all I knew because it was all I was shown until I was blessed to spend time with some solid firefighters and great people. It’s easy to form bad habits and difficult to break away from them, depending on who you associate with.
As I thought it over, a clear cause-and-effect relationship began to take shape. My 20-year career has taken place during what seems to be a very drastic transition in leadership and followership styles. When I came on, there were lots of the old guard around preaching, “Shut up and do what you’re told,” “This is just how we do it,” and “You’re paid from the neck down.” These might have been unwritten rules in those days, but there was no confusion about how things ran. This was the “my way or the highway” era. The senior members in our firehouses were either from the Silent Generation or Baby Boomers and were accustomed to just doing what they were told. All seemed to be right with the world. They never went to a fire that didn’t go out, so obviously they were doing something right. However, this mentality was only setting the fire service up for failure. Generations of firefighters doing what they were told without any explanation of why created a knowledge gap that we are now struggling with.
All was well until a group of troublemakers began to enter the fire service—that’s right, the Millennials. The general rule is that every young generation is looked down upon by the previous generation as inferior, but amazingly enough, these Millennials seemed to be hated by all the generations before them. These people were the worst: always asking questions, trying to offer new ways of doing things, and constantly using the Internet to question what was always considered to be factual information. They of course never accepted “this is how we’ve always done it” as an adequate reason for anything. After all, who do these new people think they are, questioning the senior statesmen of the fire service? They were not hated because they were inept at the job or because they needed to be taught differently. There was something much bigger and more sensitive at stake here: ego. Underneath all the finger-pointing and blaming them for ruining the fire service, the real reason was that the Millennials had exposed the knowledge gap I alluded to earlier. The true effects of decades of doing what we were told without question had been brought to the surface, and we were not happy about it. There was no depth to our knowledge. Yeah, we may be able to get the job done and can show you how we do it, but if asked why it’s done that way or why aren’t we doing like this, we didn’t have any answers. We didn’t have the knowledge to back up our perceived expertise. When you aren’t allowed to ask questions or offer any new suggestions, it doesn’t take long before you are just recycling useless information and techniques without having any real understanding of why it is being done a certain way. My generation, Generation X, which is quickly becoming the most senior generation, must do a better job of staying squared away so that we have more to give the younger generations coming behind us.
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When you’re new, it’s kind of as though you have an empty bucket. Your senior members are responsible for helping you to fill that bucket up, which, in a way, they did. We were taught the mechanics of the job, so we had a bucket with water in it. Over time, that bucket started to age and rust. Eventually, that rust ate through in some areas, and the water started to leak out. The problem was that we were only taught to keep this bucket with us to hold the water because that’s what has always been done. No one talked to us about new ways of holding the water, ways to reinforce the bucket as it aged, or that we could keep our bucket topped off by seeking out other ways to fill it up. As the rust worsened and the holes widened, the water over time vanished. A new generation of firefighters came along with shiny new buckets and a youthful excitement to fill them to the top. Sadly, all we have left in our buckets to give them is some old, dirty water that’s not useful for anything. This is the knowledge gap, and no matter how much we want to rest the blame on the shoulders of those who taught us, we have had every opportunity to break that cycle and do things differently.
This knowledge gap seemingly drew a line in the sand for the fire service. On one side, you had the old guard clinging tightly to the way things have always been done. On the other side were the Millennials, now joined by all sorts of rebels from across generations. To the first side, the new mentality was a nuisance and a disappointment. To the other side, the old mentality was spineless and complacent. Sadly, I believe this separation still exists among us, but there is great hope on the horizon when you get outside of your organization to see it. There seem to be training opportunities nearly every week somewhere, and many great firefighters are taking advantage of that. The result of this rise in training is a growing network spanning the country and growing our knowledge. All we have to do is care enough to want to be better and give a little effort.
I have learned more about firefighting in the past three years than I did in my previous 17. I can only attribute that to the fact that I’ve been blessed enough to have some amazing people placed in my life. These people showed me that there is so much that I must learn. I didn’t realize how much I truly didn’t know, how much more there was to leadership, and how I was wasting many opportunities to help others. That journey required me to completely tear down everything I ever thought that I knew and completely start over. It’s akin to a new CEO coming into an organization with a broken culture, where the individual must first demolish the old ways before the company can lay a new foundation. I had to relearn everything if I wanted anything to change. This of course requires one of the most essential requirements for leaders: humility (and lots of it). I had to be humble enough to admit that there are lots of other people who know a lot more than I do and from whom I need to learn as much as I can.
The journey to relearn everything has been quite a test for me. It’s not easy for someone who is supposed to be the crew’s formal leader to not only admit to not knowing enough but to step into the hands-on environment and let everyone see how bad your skills are lacking. Along the way, I realized that there is a huge difference between learning to absorb information and learning with the intention of having to teach others. That realization was really a wake-up call; just being present for training was no longer acceptable. Instead, I had to learn skills well enough that I could teach them to others in the future. That also means that I need to be competent and knowledgeable enough to be able to answer questions from those you’re teaching so that I can explain the why, so that the students leave with a more complete understanding.
That’s the moment that it all comes full circle. No matter how I was trained or treated as a younger firefighter, it is and will always be my responsibility to constantly pursue my own personal growth and pass on as much of it as I can. The fire service needs us “Senior Men and Women” to step up and become the leaders that we should be to those below us. Stop standing in the background, growing roots in the recliners, and trying to tear down the firefighters who do care enough to work hard. “I’ve already done that” will never be an acceptable excuse not to train, and “because we’ve always done it this way” will never be an acceptable reason not to try something new. We must do better! I have been blown away at the number of times over the past couple of years that I have been shown something–new technique, a new piece of equipment, or a new way to use an old piece of equipment—that has completely changed my way of thinking or the way I do things in a particular area. I don’t care how smart and squared away you are, there are many out there doing something better that you can learn from. The one caveat to that is that most of these people work and live somewhere else so that requires you to get outside of your organization and seek out quality training on your own. The good news? There are lots of great people all over America who are willing to share what they know with anyone who will listen. The possible resources are endless.
So, here’s your call to action. It’s time to do better. For those of us who have served more than 20 years, we owe it to ourselves and to each firefighter who has come on the job after us. We must adopt a growth mindset and become willing to challenge everything that we think we know. This doesn’t mean that everything we know is necessarily wrong, but we must test it. Be open-minded enough to learn new things. Be creative enough to blend some of the old and the new. Be humble enough to admit that you have a lot to learn. Be courageous enough to fail, because excellence will never be achieved by those who allow the fear of failure to keep from trying. Excellence is reserved for those who accept the inevitability of failure while having the wisdom to grow through it.
Jeremy Sanders is a captain at the Edmond Fire Department in Oklahoma, where he has served for 21 years. He is the creator of Crew 1st Culture and the Crew 1st Culture Podcast.
