Fireline Leadership for the NSWRFS

Fireline Leadership is a development program designed for brigade officers who want to build cohesion, adaptability and resilience in their brigades, districts, teams, and zones.  In the program, officers explore and discuss their responsibilities as leaders of high risk operators as well as tools and techniques for dealing with conflict and problems while fostering trust and cohesion.

Through the program, participants become part of a larger emergency response community that shares common philosophies, attitudes and vocabulary about the art of leading for work in high-risk environments.

The Program

Fireline Leadership uses a principle-centered leadership model and human factors psychology to articulate and explore the first-line leader aspects of the new emergency leader development doctrine.  This program involves classroom study, exercises and two real-time simulations, one of which is accomplished outdoors. The topics of the program include:

• Leading at the Point of the Spear
• Memory and Behaviour
• The Basis of Influence
• Building Your Team
• Defining Common Values
• Creating a Vision
• Promoting Concentric Decision Making
• Leading Adaptively
• Creating a Resilient Culture
• Training the Team
• Learning from Performance
• Stress as an Operational Risk
• Balancing Standards and Expectations
• Influencing through Communication
• Reducing the Friction of Conflict
• Building Accountability
• Leading Ethically

History

Fireline Leadership was developed in 2000 by Mission-Centered Solutions, Inc. as part of a far-reaching effort to improve the operational culture of the U.S. wildland fire services. The program rapidly became very popular with operators, and within three years it became the L-series leadership development training curriculum in use today by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG).

Starting in 2005, Fireline Leadership was adapted to urban/structural firefighting and law enforcement under various names. In 2007, all of these programs were approved by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for national use under the family name At the Point of the Spear. In 2005, the program was field tested in Australia with the Country Fire Authority. Since then more than 1200 brigade officers from seven Australian fire and emergency response agencies have graduated the program. The NSWRFS first started testing the program in 2006 and will run four programs in 2010. Worldwide there have been more than 12,000 graduates of the program from more than 50 agencies that use the program on an organisational level.