BY C.V. “BUDDY” MARTINETTE AND DEBORAH H. DUNFORD
Can you imagine being in a more difficult position than that of being the person farthest away from the first point of service delivery and yet being ultimately responsible for that service delivery? You know what I mean: You are the chief or hold some other leadership position that has no real-time influence on the primary service delivery aspect of the system, but you still are responsible for its success or failure.
If you are a new chief officer, or even an experienced chief, it may be comforting to believe you are in full control of your organization. If you think this, perhaps you are deluding yourself! Eventually this type of thinking will lead to a high-stress environment in which you will have a decreasing ability to cope with daily activities. In addition, you might end up with a department full of paralyzed workers who won’t or can’t help you. Worse yet, the more involved you become in helping to correct the problems, the more ineffective your leadership will become. This, my friends, is not a pretty picture.
Many chief officers fret over the fact that to be really successful they have to empower their employees to act on their own. That’s right. Give employees across the entire organization the power to make decisions concerning system operations, and expect consistency of purpose.
Some are good at letting the power go and leading their organization successfully. Others hold tight to the power because they fear losing control. Still others declare that personnel lack the experience or maturity to make system decisions. Sometimes, we hang our hat on a fire service culture that dictates we be involved in every aspect of our department’s operation because “that’s the way it has always been.”
Whatever your rationale, here are a few questions to consider:
- Do you have an organization full of good people who won’t engage in departmental goals and actions?
- Are you “Mister I have to know everything that goes on in my department?”
- Do you hear imbedded within nearly every conversation the dreaded “we” or “they” language?
- Does it ever amaze you that the majority of the staff only “reacts” to situations instead of taking personal ownership and being proactive? Do you wonder why this is so?
- Do you continuously hear, “That’s not my job” or “I didn’t know I was supposed to be responsible” or “He never told me to do it ” or, the crème da la crème, “I don’t have time”?
If the leadership gurus tell us the most successful organizational leaders are those who have employees who thrive in an environment of empowerment, system ownership, and stewardship, why would you not strive to be that type of leader?
THE PROBLEM
As officers, we want the members of the organization to act and behave in a manner that brings credit to our department and the jurisdiction we serve. To accomplish this objective, we rely on standard operating procedures (SOPs) or operating guidelines that align decision making and create a disciplined workforce.
Discipline, in this case, is not meant in the negative sense. It is used to describe a situation in which the members of our team can be expected to perform in situations when they are given clear direction and, more importantly, when clear direction isn’t evident.
The problem with many of our SOPs is that they are usually written in response to some behavioral problem or even, heaven forbid, a single incident. Many are named after firefighter “so-and-so,” who behaved in some fashion we don’t want repeated.
The very nature of this type of response creates an environment of mistrust between the organization and its members by inferring they will usually make the wrong decision if not given definitive direction. In fact, it has been my experience that organizations with the greatest number of SOPs and written guidelines are least capable of managing an unsupervised workforce.
The nature of our business, and the necessity of command and control, dictates that we have multiple levels of command within our organizational structure. We are taught early in our careers about the benefits of span of control and unity of command. Those concepts get even more attention as we stress on-scene accountability for our personnel in emergency situations.
The problem remains that all these levels of accountability don’t go away during the 70 percent of the time we aren’t engaged in fireground operations. You could go so far as to say they sometimes bind our systems; create additional confusion between shifts, battalions, and divisions; and are directly responsible for inconsistent decision making.
So how does a chief officer create a system of alignment and ensure consistency among all personnel when every scenario isn’t specified in departmental rules and regulations? You know, those times when staff just needs to do the right thing and not be fearful of the proverbial hammer! How will alignment of actions and employee empowerment lead to organizational discipline?
To move forward, you will need to buy into the belief that developing a platform for consistent decision making will not only align your folk’s decisions but may indeed lead to consistent employee behavior. With that little bit of an opening, you’ll discover that if a proper environment is established, the people in your organization will do right things and that consistent decision making in your organization will be the norm, not the exception, eliminating the need for an excessive number of SOPs and discipline.
A SOLUTION
Creating Alignment Through Strategic Planning
For me, the term “strategic alignment” conjures up images of arrows all pointing in the same direction toward a stated and clearly defined outcome. This means that all people in the organization can understand, articulate, and visualize what needs to be done. Also, it also ensures that at any given time all are “rowing the boat” to the same beat, the effort is consistently coordinated, and available resources are ultimately maximized. Your need to “be in control,” therefore, will be diminished.
Stop for a minute. Try to visualize what the term “strategic planning and alignment” means. Certainly, it means something different to everyone. Are we deluding ourselves into believing that if we do good strategic thinking and communication that we will have “the best” fire department? Do we really believe that the above describes the “blue sky” world of only the best fire departments? You see, most of us struggle daily with keeping the ship on course. Let’s be honest. If being chief were easy, everyone would be one.
It is difficult for some chief officers to think strategically. If you are one of these folks, I understand. Getting caught up in the minutiae of daily delivery of our services and making certain that “moment of truth” service delivery is taking place are essential in some chiefs’ minds. You can’t argue with the fact that ultimately we are accountable for the service delivery and its related trials and tribulations.
To understand the plight of a chief fire officer, you must first understand that our daily work lives are spent addressing the issue(s) of the day, answering a question for the city manager, dealing with a citizen’s complaint, or mediating a dispute between employees, just to name a few. There is nothing strategic about any of that stuff; however, it is very important to the successful operation of our systems.
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If you are a chief officer, your job is to identify the really important things that your organization stands for and is striving toward. Those “important things” are stakeholder identification, vision, purpose, and values, and they form the platform on which most organizations build a strategic plan. They also give rise to an important tool called a “decision filter” employees can use to guide their behavior, make consistent decisions, and align strategic opportunities (see Figure 1). This filter includes departmental values and decision-making criteria.
All the information necessary to do strategic planning is not included here, but what is included demonstrates how the identification of stakeholders and the development of vision, purpose, and value statements of a strategic planning effort form the basis of an effective employee decision filter.
As an example, if the objective of employee empowerment is to create a high-performance organization in which employees consistently make decisions and behave in alignment with departmental values, it is necessary that employees first understand the organization’s relationships with its customers—beginning with identifying who the customers are, why they are customers, what we do for them, and what we perceive they want from us. Once you have thoroughly answered these questions, it is important to further understand who the “driver” is, and why. Always considering the needs and desires of your key stakeholders is fundamental to problem solving.
Customers are identified as “stakeholders” because in one form or another they are influenced by or have a “stake” in our operational decisions regarding service delivery. They make up the totality of our system, and understanding their relationship to service delivery is essential if you expect employees to consider them in decision making.
One of the most frustrating aspects of being a chief officer is receiving recommendations that do not include consideration or input from affected stakeholders. As an example, a recommendation to address an EMS issue would have many stakeholders. Citizens, political organizations, nondepartmental emergency personnel, and staff, just to name a few—all have a stake in the potential outcome of the recommendation. If the political implications regarding a change are not considered prior to its implementation, the effort most likely will fail.
The point to all of this is that the leader cannot expect consistent employee decision making when decisions are being made independently of consideration for the customers who could potentially be affected. Consideration of your system customers is the first priority of your organizational decision filter. Identifying the customer and answering the stakeholder/customer questions is just the beginning; validating your perceptions is the next most critical step and requires total commitment from the chief and staff to plan for community dialogue and to do something with what you hear. Compar-ing the data collected with your original perceptions and incorporating their suggestions, feedback, and criticisms into your planning efforts take courage.
VISION, PURPOSE, VALUES
Now that you know for certain what your customers, including your staff, want from your department, you are ready to work on developing your vision, purpose, and values.
A “vision” is some objective the organization is striving toward. Our vision for Lynch-burg Fire & EMS is an “environment in which our customers are safe and feel secure through community partnerships and innovative uses of resources.” It is not necessarily a place we will ever reach; if you get hung up on that, you will have missed the point.
The point of a vision statement is that all employees have in front of them a shared “dream” to align their actions and behaviors, one that will ultimately contribute to achieving the vision. This is very powerful because it allows the chief and all supervisory personnel to begin the process of aligning employee actions.
A “purpose statement” is just what it says. It professes to all that this is the reason you exist and the actions you will be engaged in to help you strive toward your vision. In our organization, the purpose statement is, “To form partnerships that cultivate a safe environment through education, direction, and resolution of fire, emergency medical, or life safety situations.” The innovative chief officer knows that these are not just words on a wall. They can and should be used as a tool to align employee efforts.
The best example of this is when an employee suggests we start a new program or community initiative. In our case, I would question whether this effort will help our customers to be safe or feel secure or if it will form the basis of a community partnership. In addition, I would ask whether it includes the innovative use of resources or is associated with our stated purpose of education, direction, and resolution to fire and EMS or other life safety situations?
This filtering effort alone ensures our organization works on the right things for the right reason and helps keep the organization from chasing too many proverbial “rabbits” we can’t (or won’t) ever catch. The bottom line is our people may be doing different jobs, but they are all in the boat and at the very least headed toward a common destination.
If you are the strategic leader and haven’t developed a strategic direction for your people based on a defined vision and purpose, how can you expect them to help you get there? It would be like starting off in a boat with no clear purpose for your journey or destination. The people in the boat may be onboard, but they won’t know why they are there when the journey is over or be able to help you chart a corrected course if you get off track.
Now the bad news: Honest strategic planning is hard work and can take considerable time and expense. My suggestion is not to go it alone. Hire a professional facilitator who can help you avoid the pitfalls of the strategic planning process and produce a solid document for your citizens, organization, city manager, and elected body.
VALUE-BASED DECISION MAKING
Up to this point, we have addressed only how to align employee efforts. The real trick is in making sure the decisions that drive these efforts are implemented based on consistent values.
Once strategic thinking forms the basis of your organization’s forward progress, the alignment of decision making and uniform discipline evolves out of a set of shared values. Values are those things we hold dear. They form the very foundation of our organization and are critical to success.
The reason organizational values are critical is that if you don’t have them, people will use their own personal values as a filter to determine right from wrong or to make choices when new opportunities present themselves.
Mention inconsistent decision making, and I will show you how someone’s personal values were used in making decisions regarding the organization. It isn’t that their personal values are inappropriate; it is that they might not be in alignment with the department’s stated values.
In our department, we espouse honesty, integrity, compassion, and trust as our organizational values. These may happen to be your personal values as well; however, they are what our employees said they “valued” most in their leaders and themselves. Our employees want leaders who are honest with them, will support them; are compassionate when mistakes are made; and, above all, have integrity in their personal and professional lives. In turn, our leaders expect these values to be demonstrated by employees.
Don’t minimize the importance of values. When you are expecting consistent decision making and consistent behavior from employees, you must have a discussion about what these words mean and how they are used to guide employee behavior and decision making. As the leader, you need to have all employees in the organization use these values in their decision-making processes.
Having everyone, leaders and staff, use the same set of values as the first-level filter for decision making allows you as a leader to hold them and yourself accountable for using those values, not leaders’ or employees’ values. Leaders’ inconsistencies occur most frequently when personal values are allowed to prevail in work situations.
Imagine how powerful a tool you would have given your employees when they consciously begin to consider the departmental values when making choices. When you add to that the results of your strategic planning effort as discussed above, your employees will have a decision filter that takes into consideration your organization’s customer groups, a vision that describes what you are trying to achieve, and a purpose that describes the specific outcomes of your work efforts. These are powerful tools to help create consistent decision making at all levels of the organization.
From a practical perspective, you as a chief officer can now filter out efforts and suggestions that won’t help you get to your most critical destination points. Every employee will have a document explaining how they can add value and help with the journey. Even more importantly, your employees’ actions and behaviors can be effectively aligned because they are all using the same filter to make decisions.
TIME ALLOCATION
Building a system of empowerment results from people in various job functions within the organization understanding their role(s) and what the expectations of others are with regard to work outcomes and employee/customer interactions. When these expectations have been clearly stated, accountability and responsibility are natural outcomes.
Fundamentally, time allocation refers to how employees spend their time. Consider that we, as employees, are primarily responsible for operating the system, improving the system, or creating the future. All of us, regardless of rank, spend time in one of these areas. In many cases, we are involved in all three areas at one time or another while dealing with multiple issues.
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The Time Allocation Model (Table 1) philosophy has nothing to do with gathering information and everything to do with who acts on that information. For instance, use of the model should not preclude the chief or any other officer from moving around the organization to gather information. Harry Diezel, retired chief in Virginia Beach, calls visiting stations and talking to firefighters “taking the temperature of the department.”
The Time Allocation Model is a visual reminder that in addition to the responsibility of operating, improving, and creating systems, there are considerations for what percentage of time we should spend in these areas based on our position within the organization. The biggest mistake we make as leaders has more to do with the percentage of time we spend in each area than the area within which we are operating at any one moment of time. Let’s look at a few examples.
The largest component of any fire department consists of the firefighters and their first-line supervisors who provide direct service to the public. These employees are operating the system; that is where they will spend most of their time training and practicing how to operate the system. It makes their job much easier when leaders give them tools, empower them, and trust that they will do what is necessary to get the job done.
This is not to say that we don’t want our front-line service providers making suggestions concerning improvements or recommending strategic direction. It is the percentage of time they spend in each category of the Time Allocation Model that is critical to role clarification. Certainly, it is critical to maintain a system that is open-ended and in which all persons are engaged. That said, if your largest contingent of personnel were all engaged in improving the system or creating the future, your front-line service would suffer.
Our middle managers should be concentrating on how alignment occurs at the street level and how efforts can be directed at improving current operations. These employees are seasoned and least removed from the front-line service. They are generally required to coordinate the folks operating the system, and they should be in a position to make recommendations regarding efficiency and effectiveness of operations. This is called “improving the system.”
Chiefs and other senior staff personnel should plan for and create outcomes that will help the organization adapt to the future. This place in the Time Allocation Model is called “creating the future.” It is our responsibility to determine the course and provide adequate assets for our front-line employees to operate the system and our mid-managers to adjust and improve system operations.
It is not the front-line folks who have issues with time allocation or who generally cause system problems, but the mid-managers and upper-level leaders who spend a majority of their time operating the system. Our employees call this micromanaging. I call it working in the wrong portion of the Time Allocation Model, and it is responsible for many practices that poison our ability to lead organizations.
Think about how we chief officers frequently articulate that we trust our employees to operate the system; however, we then spend our time questioning employee actions. I am not talking about special-cause situations that need immediate attention. I am referring to the chief who is obsessed with how many hydrants crews painted or why the trucks aren’t washed. In these situations, you should recognize and respect that the accountability and responsibility for these things fall at some other level in the organization.
I should caution you that it is easy to send mixed messages with regard to time allocation, so make sure your employees understand the model is the key to its successful implementation. If you elect to lead by empowerment, you must be willing to let go of some trivial things on the one hand but also understand that accountability for more serious issues remains your immediate responsibility.
Another important aspect of time allocation is that employees at all organizational levels must understand that at various times we are all supposed to manage within every area of the Time Allocation Model. For instance, one could argue the chief who modifies an emergency response while the incident is unfolding or sees a piece of apparatus being operated recklessly and tells the driver to slow down is operating the system.
The truth is the chief may indeed be operating the system; however, if the chief has information that other people in the system don’t, he has a responsibility and duty to act. If the situation were not critical, one would expect the chief to handle it by finding out why those who are expected to operate the system failed to do so. What we have to be careful about is truly questioning where we spend a majority of our time and if being there conflicts with what someone else in the organization is supposed to be empowered to accomplish.
It is imperative that employees be trusted to operate in all areas. The really advantageous aspect of this model is that some of your most strategic thinkers may at the time be at the bottom of the organization. You want those members to be able to help the organization by thinking strategically about events that may be a future reality for the department. Remember, we are all in this together, and the difference in being a success or failure may be in how you use all of your employees’ best traits and skills.
The concept of time allocation and its successful implementation in your department will be determined by many factors. For in-stance, if mid-managers aren’t effective at improving the system because they don’t have the required skill set, the leader may have to be more involved in that aspect of the model. In this instance, you may have to elicit the help of some system operators to bring the mid-manager along. The other and more practical thing for the chief officer to do is, dare I say it, mentor and coach the mid-manager into thinking more in line with improving the system as opposed to operating it.
At this point, it should be clear that one of the reasons we are comfortable with doing someone else’s job is that if the promotional system works effectively we are promoting folks who have mastered their previous job. It is very comfortable for them to do what they have already mastered instead of being challenged to operate in an unknown area.
None of this is perfect. Nor could one expect we will always be where we are supposed to be in the Time Allocation Model. We are, after all, human. There will inevitably be those situations when you catch yourself doing someone else’s job because the bottom line is it may be easier to do it than hold yourself accountable for its not getting done. Keep this last point in mind: We all have a primary responsibility for some aspect of the system’s operation, and that is where we belong when doing our work.
CREATING SYSTEM OWNERSHIP
If you have ever studied the Marine Corps training philosophy, it becomes apparent very quickly that it works hard on culture. In fact, many of the concepts focused on in this article are consistent with a model used by the Marine Corps.
In the Marine Corps, a new recruit is assigned to basic boot camp and is immediately taught the Corps’ values so the basis of decision making is consistent among all Marines. In addition, they all know what the mission is and how they are to be involved in helping the organization accomplish that mission.
From a training perspective, every platoon member is taught how to do the other person’s job and why each job is important to the mission. If any person in the platoon goes down, someone else can, and is expected to, step up and do the work. In addition, front-line officers are empowered to make decisions regarding platoon operation.
However, the plan can fail if the leader doesn’t lead employees to value system ownership from a macro perspective instead of just from their much smaller field of responsibility. Ultimately, they must understand that the people on the other shifts are part of the same team and are working toward the same goals as they are.
I recently had a discussion about system ownership with my battalion chiefs and mid-managers. The discussion was about the result of using overtime for staffing apparatus (something I am sure all of us can relate to these days).
The operations chief had directed employees to keep apparatus fully staffed if at all possible. Several of the battalion chiefs had days when they called back and paid overtime to a very high number of employees because of sick and scheduled leave. In one case we had nine people on overtime in a system that can pay only for about two per day during the year. The bottom line was that we had spent 50 percent of our yearly allotment of overtime in the first three months of the year.
As we analyzed what occurred, the senior staff assumed responsibility for providing inadequate direction with regard to staffing. The battalion chiefs and the other mid-managers in this case were doing what they were told, keep the equipment in service if at all possible and staffed accordingly. We, as leaders, failed to identify the boundaries within which this direction could be applied.
The talk with the battalions was not about the decision to call back so many people on one day. The discussion was about system ownership and the manner in which the battalion chiefs viewed overtime as something for which they were not responsible. The attitude was almost like, “Well if the money runs out, someone will get some more for us.”
I wanted the battalion chiefs to recognize that they were responsible for the use of overtime within the system. I wanted them to take ownership of the system and understand that although it is our department’s overtime, it is their responsibility to manage it properly—that’s stewardship! Remember, I am trusting that they will work as hard to “own” their part of the system as I do to own mine. That is the only way empowerment will work.
This value in system ownership extends to other aspects of the organization and contributes to its overall maturity. For instance, in our line of work, we tend to worry only about the progress of the people who report directly to us. If this type of situation is allowed to become an overriding organizational culture, the people will lose focus of the overall team effort. Success, then, becomes something the supervisor views as important only for that functional area.
Sports analogies are great for demonstrating the importance of system ownership. For instance, every player on a football team ultimately contributes to the team’s overall success. All aspects of the game must be played correctly for the team to be successful. The offense, defense, and special teams are all comprised of different people; however, team success depends on how they perform individually at their specific responsibility and also how they contribute toward assisting other members trying to achieve the same goal.
It is no small task to get everyone on the team to understand how their direct involvement helps the team move forward, but it is essential in an empowered system. Like many leaders, I have the basic belief that empowered employees will do the right thing in situations in which they have been given adequate guidance, direction, and training.
It is essential for you to help employees understand that leadership by empowerment transfers much of the system’s operation to the folks closest to providing the service. This also correlates into a tremendous responsibility for employees at all levels of the organization, because to be successful we all have to pull our weight. It demands nearly continuous engagement in system operation by all personnel. In many cases, success will depend on having members who are not afraid to hold other members responsible when they are not living up to their end of the bargain.
I am sure you can relate many examples of people not taking ownership in operating their part of the system. As leaders, we need to be certain that if we say the majority of the organization owns the operation of the system, they actually understand they own it and that they will be held accountable for the results of ownership.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Creating system ownership is the result of the leader’s effort to clearly articulate position responsibilities through individual position performance objectives that align expected employee behavior with the organization’s leadership philosophy, mission, values, and goals. In other words, we tell employees what their jobs are and then we let them do their jobs while keeping in mind that what we are ultimately looking for is consistent behavior from our folks directed toward helping the organization be successful at delivering our service.
Some leaders may balk at pushing too much responsibility downward in the organization. These types of leaders are afraid to empower their employees for fear they will be held accountable for something they view as out of their control. The sad fact is that, as the leader, you are going to be held accountable regardless.
Here are a few questions you may want to ask yourself if you are of the latter leadership persuasion:
- Is your system working?
- Do employees wait to be told what to do before acting?
- Is your name synonymous with micromanagement?
- Are officers on the same and different shifts making inconsistent decisions?
- Do you suffer from the “we have three different fire departments here—the A, B, and C shift departments”?
- Do you have discipline problems not attributed to special-cause situations?
- Are your people satisfied with just showing up, and do they consider that adequate performance is what they are being paid for?
- Do you always look to improve your system by first questioning your employees’ performance and not your leadership?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, perhaps some adjustments are called for in your leadership style and method. Maybe, just maybe, if you let go of some of that power ego and look at yourself as a servant leader, your employees will see you as part of the team. Perhaps they will even do the right thing when operating where there is no established policy.
Empowering leadership is the result of providing employees with strategic direction so they will know what is important to the organization and how to best apply their efforts to help the organization be successful. In addition, providing employees with organizational values helps define boundaries of behavior and consistent decision making. Add to this system a full understanding of time allocation and system ownership, and you as a leader will be well on your way to creating an empowered organization.
C.V. “BUDDY” MARTINETTE is chief of Lynchburg (VA) Fire & EMS, an Instructor IV with the State of Virginia Department of Fire Programs, Incident Support Team operations officer, task force leader for Virginia Task Force 1 of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Urban Search and Rescue Program (USAR), and an USAR rescue specialist instructor. He has a bachelor of science degree in fire administration from Hampton University and a master’s degree in public administration from Troy State University. He is a graduate of the National Fire Academy Executive Fire Officer Program and has received the designation of Chief Fire Officer by the Commission on Chief Fire Officer Designation. Martinette is the author of Trench Rescue (Warwick House) and lectures nationally on specialized rescue operations and fire service leadership.
DEBORAH H. DUNFORD has been administrative services manager for the City of Virginia Beach/Libraries for the past 35 years. She directs the human resources, fiscal, and staff development activities for the largest municipal library system in the state of Virginia. For the past 15 years, she has been a pioneer in the city’s whole systems organizational change efforts and served as the city’s first executive level facilitator for the Safe Community Strategic Issue Team, one of seven citywide teams established to use city council’s priorities and evaluate all aspects of safety including fire, police, and EMS. Over the past eight years, she has led several large fire departments and, for the past three years, the Virginia Fire Chiefs Association’s executive board through the strategic planning process. She is active at the regional and international levels of the International Public Management Association/Human Resources section and received national recognition for her state’s newsletter.
