Growing Leadership Capability in Fire Departments

First-line leaders are the primary keepers and trainers of an organization’s culture. They influence the workforce more than any Chief can hope to.  They are the organization - its present and its future.

Throughout their history, fire departments have developed their future leaders through an ad-hoc system of informal mentoring, patchy leadership training, merit, and politics. Selecting candidates for development opportunities often follows a corporate model of leader development, with minimal training and investment for first-line leaders, with more substantial opportunities for upper management personnel.

At a Crossroads

Today, the fire service is at a juncture concerning the way it develops its leaders and future leaders. It faces a watershed choice: to do more of the same or to set a new path.

Faced with more complex operations, more moving parts, more exposure, more risk, and higher consequences for failure, fire organizations are finding that the stakes are too high and the consequences too dire to spend years waiting for new leaders to evolve and eventually float to the top of the organization.

New demands drive a need for more adaptable and flexible leaders. In spite of this need, most departments paradoxically build cultures that produce the opposite effect. They increase the mass of rules and policies guiding firefighters and operations - sometimes to the point that these become the primary force of leadership and influence in the organization.

The increased bureaucracy takes the job of applying judgment and discretion out of the hands of leaders, which undermines trust, cohesion, communication, and synergy. This saga represents the classic organizational trap inherent to fire organizations everywhere in the U.S. - the slow march toward rules-based organizations, often erroneously promoted as a focus on safety.

This culture focuses on compliance rather than intent even though people intuitively understand that safety is an outgrowth of sound judgment and decision making and cannot be decreed by rules. A compliance-focused culture creates difficult ground to grow seeds of initiative, responsibility, and good leadership - the requisite materials for adaptive and resilient operations.

The Fire Service Leadership Gap

To the fire service, this culture is generally understood as a leadership gap. In response, the industry is now awash with retired fire chiefs providing, in articles and presentations, pearls of insight about what good leadership is and looks like. While all good, these efforts cannot hope to meet the requirements for building a pool of effective leaders to meet the demands of the post-9/11 world quickly enough.

In the end, the old formulas for developing leaders will not meet the new requirements of the business. MCS offers a family of proven products and services to assist fire organizations to achieve Operational Synergy through leadership development training and consulting efforts at all levels.