I was recently with a group of firefighters, and the conversation was directed to what happens when a fire department has had a difficult experience, issue, or event. As we continued the discussion, someone in the group brought up how critical boss behavior is before, during, and after a difficult occurrence. This leadership behavior (+ or -) will determine what happens next, both inside and outside the system. Everyone agreed that it is pretty easy to be a boss during peachy times, but tough times define a leader’s basic character and capability. The older, more experienced members related that they do not really pay much attention to kitchen table bravery but wait until the battle involves real bullets that will produce big jagged holes in a boss who is leading and not bragging. A sports commentator once told Mike Tyson (one of my favorite philosophers) that his opponent “had a plan” to outbox him and take his title. Tyson quietly responded, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” He just described showtime in our business.
As the discussion went on, I used the term “recovery” several times. One person in the group asked me to describe what I meant by “recovery.” I am writing what you are now reading on the day after the Orlando, Florida, nightclub massacre, so a lot of the current news involves not only what happened but is also beginning to describe the reaction that is creating the “what’s next?” phase of the tragedy. A lot of that reporting is directed toward how we respectfully remember and then get on to mentally and emotionally getting through what happened and to progress (and survive) into the future. For most of us when we try to understand what happened in the nightclub, it is very difficult to go on to the next phase when we can’t even begin to imagine what occurred in the last part. I never before really thought much about being in a state of “shell shock,” and I don’t mean this as a pun but as a really sad emotional state of disbelief. The Orlando area public safety agencies have been positive operational performance and command and control models for the past half century, and this long-term investment in their effectiveness certainly paid off for everyone on a very, very dark and windy night.
Moving Toward Recovery
As our class discussion continued, we talked about the context of recovery and then some of the details of what we do to create and continue recovery. As usual, the topic of boss behaviors was continually connected to the interaction and outcome. When we examine the basic role of our service, it is to respond to the disruption of normalcy in the lives and situation of the people, places, and things we protect. In a very special way, we could be called the “Recovery Department.” When we think about that very special operational context, we regularly and routinely take the edge off chaos by directly and quickly placing our bodies in between the customer and the disruption; it is inescapable that some of that chaos will sometimes get on us emotionally and physically. We deliver service (up close) in person, and the conditions we routinely and directly encounter can be very unforgiving.
Sometimes, it is very difficult to get the hazard off us when it gets on. Lots of times, we are more effective in solving the problem for Mrs. Smith and assisting her with short- and medium-range recovery than we are in supporting the episodic and ongoing wear-and-tear on our troops directly involved in delivering this service. If anyone can describe how to manage a fire department in the real world so there will never be a situation that will seriously challenge, sadden, or sometimes even assassinate us or the customer, I will be first in the listening line.
A major boss capability is to develop the ability to consistently determine an effective level of engagement to match the needs of the situation. We have been discussing for a while about imagining the capability of a leader vertically with more routine things a boss does as the foundation and then going up the difficulty scale to more difficult and complicated activity. When we think about our exceptional, highly motivated, and trained (and highly trainable) workforce, they do both their routine and many times special functions very well within their assigned role in their team without much supervision or direction. This is a very good thing for both the boss and the worker. As a baby boss, I asked an old hand what he wanted me to do to help him. He responded, “Tell me what to do. Give me the training and tools to do it. Get out of my way. When I get done, tell me how I did.” I tried to do that for the next 50 years.
When To Be a Boss
The basic challenge was, how did I engage in causing that routine to be effective for the workers and for me? The longer I did it, the more I was convinced that the self-starting, very capable workers only needed me to act like a boss about 10 percent of the time and needed me to really be a boss about 1½ percent of the time. The trick was that I had to be present, awake, and paying attention 100 percent of the time to know the 10 percent and 1½ percent that required me to sometimes step in front of (take the bullet) and always assist and support my troops (to avoid the bullet). Lots of times, I observed and concluded that I actually messed them up when I supervised them when they really didn’t need it (modern term = micromanagement), but they were looking for me when the 10 percent stinky stuff was sailing through the fan, and we were all in a foxhole together during the very exciting 1½ percent adventure.
A huge part of this “when to be a boss” math involves leading and supporting our humans after an event when they must get through and then (hopefully) over some difficulty that happens. We have all refined our incident management skills and operational systems, and these capabilities are critical to manage our resources to get us to operate in a functional way that will get us through a difficult event. An incident has a standard set of phases (beginning/middle/end). The fire will eventually go out because we put it out or it simply runs out of fuel. We don’t go home until the fire is out and the victims are accounted for.
There is another part of the process that involves our getting over whatever the trauma is that occurred when we operated on the tactical conditions that got us through the incident. Once the incident starts, it will evolve (or devolve) through the standard stages-with us or without us. The outcome (I observed) can be quite different if we fight the fire or just witness it; but, in either case, there will be an outcome. The action we take is highly dependent on the stage of the fire when we inherit it. Basic tactical reality = standard conditions require standard action, and that should lead to a standard outcome. Sadly, in the real world, “standard” is many times not nice.
Getting Through vs. Getting Over a Difficulty
There can be a huge difference between getting through and then getting over a difficult experience. We have not developed as well the effective techniques, programs, and relationships to produce the process of returning to a normal state after a period of difficulty. When the humans in the system require recovery, they need a boss who is an advocate and not a cop. They (the troops) will remember a lot longer how they were treated on their worst day than on their best day. Worst-day recovery requires we stabilize the situation, support and assist the players, and then try to fix the system to be safer and more effective in the future.
Many times, being personally involved in the process of fixing the system is the best recovery therapy for those who were directly involved in the difficult situation. Those players are typically experts in what happened when the game had a difficult outcome because they were directly involved. Their open, willing, and active participation in the recovery will depend on the long-standing relationships inside the organization. They can either hide out (and shut up), or they can step up and help improve the system.
How they step forward to help the organization recover will be directly connected to how they relate to their boss and how they were treated in the past. When the participants who were involved in the difficult incident serve as a part of the recovery team, they have an opportunity to convert the sad feelings/emotions/stress into a productive improvement process in the future performance of their own organization. Doing this creates a way to direct the negative energy produced by the difficult experience in a positive way that sends a very supportive message inside the department that our future performance will be the result of using what happens to us (+ or -) as a set of important lessons that produce safer and more effective operations.
I had the chance to be a chief for a while in a very active metro department. We had all the happy and sad stuff occur just like every other system. Through the years, I got to watch troops who were directly involved in some incident that required some recovery effort because we messed up or it was just a bad night tactically and Mr. Fire won the British thermal units vs. water war. I had the opportunity to interact with those on duty, present, and those who were involved when the problem occurred. It was a critical boss function to assist those players to put the event in some kind of constructive/hopeful personal perspective that could lead them on to the next stage of recovery. It also seemed that if they were involved in part of a recovery effort to develop an improved departmentwide response that would prevent another such occurrence, their involvement added a very relevant (and therapeutic for everyone) advantage to the effort.
Having the senior department leadership encourage and support them to participate in the recovery also sent everyone a very powerful message that we would collectively convert their direct involvement and knowledge of a negative experience in a positive way that would improve our safety and effectiveness in the future. I also noticed that many of the very active recovery participants became so involved in the process that they studied, researched, and became well-informed about their part of the effort so that they became the resident experts in that area, process, or operation. Over time, using a recovery to mobilize that capability created a team of very expert internal department consultants; the effect of the application of their skill and knowledge many times lasted throughout their careers. Developing this capability also sent the positive and authentic message “If they give you lemons, make lemonade” inside the system.
The recovery process is by its very nature reactive-something happened that is out of balance with regard to safety/effectiveness that creates a setback to the welfare (and, sadly, survival) of the humans in the system. Many times, that setback also requires that some part of the operating process be evaluated and updated (i.e., recovered). We have routinely presented the elements in a very long-standing performance management model (SOPs/train/apply/critique/revise). In a very special way, the “revise” step creates an almost automatic routine organizational recovery function that is directly connected to and integrated with the other stages needed to effectively manage and improve overall performance. All the steps are necessary and must connect to each other. If we take a shortcut and skip a step, it will smack us in the face.
Foundation for Recovery
As stated earlier, I don’t know how we could operate an attack-oriented, problem-solving system that would repetitively produce a foolproof, perfect, flawless round trip into and out of an active hazard zone or difficult, tragic customer situation. Based on the reality that our business routinely requires hazard-zone operations, we should create and always maintain a set of organizational capabilities that provide the foundation for recovery when we need it. Refining the process and relationships necessary to produce a relevant recovery must be balanced with a never ending proactive capability that will prevent the need to recover. It would be dumb (and very painful) to operate in a dysfunctional way just because we have a snazzy recovery process. It’s reassuring to know there is a skilled orthopedic surgery team on duty down at the town hospital, but it’s smart to behave and operate so you don’t fracture your femur.
Throughout my career, I have been disoriented and distressed by the reaction of a senior fire officer who is called on to describe a tactical event in his organization that either killed or seriously injured a firefighter. In his response, he makes the very definitive (and sometimes emphatic) statement that if the organization had to do it again in the future, it would do it exactly the same way. That comment suggests to me that the organization has stated that it has in effect created an SOP that states it is acceptable to injure/kill a firefighter-this response makes a line-of-duty death a standard outcome. Although this reaction probably is a defensive justification during a very difficult time, it completely eliminates the value or, I guess, the need for a recovery.
Most of the time, when you examine what occurred at the incident, it in no way involved taking a justifiable and conscious high risk within a highly refined and practiced risk management plan to do a physical rescue to protect a very well-evaluated savable life. Simply, what occurred in many cases involved acting out an attack addiction directed toward protecting lost property; this is the reason command and control is based on a very critical and unforgiving overall operational incident strategy. The fire is going to destroy everything in the fire area in the absence of fast/adequate water. My observation is directed to the setting and situation where we operate and is not meant to beat up a boss whose heart has just been broken and is now called on to represent (or defensively justify) what has tragically occurred. Interrupting a high-hazard event is not precision work. My point is that in Fire Chief’s School, there should be a highly coached session where we get to practice and refine articulating a description of the recovery that will occur. The reaction and description should be hopeful and not hopeless, which is the primary spiritual objective of a recovery.
I realize the previous paragraph qualifies me to be a charter member of the grumpy, elderly, risk-adverse, old fogey club. I was an active participant (lifelong student) in the development of our long-standing, standard (big/little/no) risk management plan, and I still enthusiastically support that approach to managing our tactical operations. The members of our organization continually attempted to play firefighting as safe and as sensible as we could, but it seemed that if you operate in the real world, you are going to win a lot and lose a few.
During my career, I was part of the strategic level management team that led an effort to get everyone through the crying time and then on to a recovery. In every single one of them, a major conclusion was that preventing the negative outcome was a lot smarter and far less tragic than trying to recover from it after it happened.
We also learned that when bad stuff happens, you have to put on your big boy pants and do everything you can to keep it from happening again. This is where the rubber meets the road in creating a recovery.
Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the fire service Web site bshifter.com.
Fire Engineering Archives
