Fireground Management: I Know It When I See It

by ALAN BRUNACINI

In our ongoing march through the vertically arranged performance activities that connect to a boss's capability level, we have covered attendance, appearance, and maintenance. These functions form the very practical foundation for how we prepare to deliver service. As we stated last month, these necessary functions are not glamorous or sexy when we do them and are only exciting when we don't do them; then the boss must exert personal authority/influence to cause them to come up to the standard. A lot of what we do operationally/tactically is exciting, and we should create an approach where we limit that excitement to the challenge of solving the incident problem and not to some flub where we didn't effectively maintain a critical part of our system ahead of time and the mistake suddenly is discovered at showtime. We should always operate where the main action (like putting water on the fire) is the primary one instead of using self-contained breathing apparatus bottles that are half full when we put them on.

Early in my boss life, I was trying to figure out how to effectively connect to my crew. I engaged them in a conversation about being an effective boss. They were very practical, experienced, tough guys (all guys then). Finally, I asked them how they wanted to be managed. I loved their answer: (1) "Tell me what to do"; (2) "Give me the training and tools to do it"; (3) "Get out of my way"; and (4) "After I do it, tell me how I did." Their list was simple enough that even I could understand it. For the next 40 years, whenever I had to act like a boss where work was being done and it required me to give directions, I tried to do all four (in order). During that same time while I was a boss, I was also a worker, and I had my own boss. The best bosses did those four basic functions (at a somewhat higher organizational level), and their doing that seemed to consistently bring out the best in everybody involved.