领导Fundamentals: Anyone Can Lead

当我还是一名年轻的消防员时，我很屈服，充满信心，并被大多数人认为是屁股的痛苦。我知道我想要什么，确定的是正确的。我看到了对与错，黑白的一切。充满了盲目的确定性，我确定自己想要的是我的领导人，并且确定领导人“做什么”。

At the time, my departmental administration did not measure up to my yardstick. When I could not reconcile my ideals of leadership with how I was being led, I became disillusioned and bitter. I started looking to other departments for employment. I viewed the administration as lacking in “leadership.” I made an all-too-common mistake in my outlook, one that is pervasive in the culture of the fire service: believing that leadership is an extrinsic principle applied to me. What I have come to realize is that the most significant source of leadership is an intrinsic force for which I am responsible. This was a very powerful revelation and positively changed my career perspective.

Whether it’s the first day of your first station assignment out of recruit class or the first day you settle in the leather chair behind the large oak desk as you take on the new position as chief of the department, your thoughts and feelings are the same. You feel the mantle of your new role and have all the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of great things to come. You are filled with a sense that anything is possible with enough personal effort and hard work. That promise of a “new day” is the stuff of movie scripts, usually depicting a life of the hero’s overcoming adversity to achieve the impossible. That makes a great inspirational story, but we generally fall short when comparing the hero’s life to our more pedestrian lives. At some point, we find ourselves complaining about how our chiefs have lost their tie to the “field” and have become isolated. We sit around the kitchen table and systematically dissect where we see their failures in leadership. A common refrain is, “That #@h doesn’t even come into the station anymore. This place needs some new leadership.” This may be true, but the problem is not in the “Ivory Tower” we call headquarters; it is sitting right there at the kitchen table.