BY ALAN BRUNACINI
In recent “Unplugged” COLumns, we have been discussing the current pondering, writing, and teaching project No-Brainer Management. I get to interact just about every month with firefighters and fire officers in a two-day seminar where we discuss the six No-Brainer areas of organizational behavior as they relate to being an effective boss. The material in the class is directed to what a boss routinely does; that is the reason we call it “No Brainer.” The participants typically are enthusiastic, smart, and experienced, and they always seem to teach me a lot when we get together. My role is to pretty much turn the lights on when we start and off when we are done. I guess they call that guy a “facilitator.”
I have been going through the six No-Brainer areas in this column where I started describing a really simple approach to evaluating and improving our personal effectiveness. To be more effective, we learned and then applied a set of performance rules of engagement to a basic inventory (13 components) of body parts (simple anatomy and physiology). This very personal self-improvement system is about as basic as it can get. As an example, outlining behaviors like “run what you are about to say through your brain (think/edit) before the words get to your mouth” is not complicated, but consistently being conscious of (and aligning) your thinking/speaking flow path will prevent all sorts of problems. The point of the exercise is that we are personally in control of how effective our body parts perform, and we all can become better bosses if we study the engagement rules to keep using all those parts better-first separately and then collectively. It’s really pretty simple.
We talked about the connection that exists between how well we operate our departments on the inside with the service we are able to deliver on the outside. I used a description of an A+ boss I worked for when I was a young firefighter and the lasting effect he had on me. He behaved as a boss in a way that continually produced positive support to his workers and then positive service to whomever we were assisting. He taught his troops the techniques that would be developed into a structured organizational customer service program a scant 25 years later. He was truly ahead of his time (to say the least). He continually emphasized that our effectiveness was directly connected to how well we could execute the work we did that actually solved the incident problem-and that was his favorite reference, “the work.” He managed in a way that everything we did as a company always led back to our being able to “find the fire/cut it off/put it out” (another of his favorite sayings).
Later in my career, I landed in a job where I was truly in charge of “the work.” I became the Operations assistant chief during a period when our department was most in need of improving our performance in the street. Our city and our department had gone through a period of unbelievable growth, and experienced officers were retiring; we also had many new, inexperienced (particularly) company officers and lots of new firefighter kids. The new folks were very capable and highly motivated; they just needed to participate in an overall development program that would prepare them to effectively and safely do “the work.”
Another big problem at the time was that I was just as new in my job as the troops were in theirs. I had worked in the line in every position leading up to being an assistant chief. I was an instructor in our community college fire science program-I was familiar with a classroom full of students, but I was not ready for an entire department full of students. Although I was not in any way prepared to take on the overall challenge of raising the operational ability of a thousand firefighters, I had chased the car and caught it, so off I went half-cocked on my adventure to improve how we all did “the work.” My approach was to create a more energetic training model; and although training is always critical, it must connect to other related, integrated management functions to be effective in an overall and lasting kind of manner. I kept cooking a five-ingredient “stew” using only one ingredient and then being upset because it didn’t taste right.
Given my training preoccupation (almost genetic) whenever we had a performance problem (funny tasting “stew”), I tried to correct the problem with more training. As we moved along, we were continually out of balance because we had not identified the other parts of the overall performance management process that are absolutely required to consistently produce an effective outcome in the street. I was ultimately responsible for the overall performance of the system; many times when I was frustrated with an operational problem, I confused moving us toward fixing the problem with just instinctively and habitually shouting “more training.” My singular focus on solving every problem in the classroom was causing me to do the wrong thing harder.
After our system frustrated itself for a while trying to capture a usable performance management model, we assembled a group that went off to a planning place and locked ourselves up until we developed a system (model) that would take us to a better place where we could manage and refine better tactical operations. The model we developed identified the major functions (separate steps) required to consistently produce effective performance. As we refined and integrated the steps in the new approach, we realized that these parts in the model were all necessary and included five basic functions. I have referred to the model we developed in many places and ways in our discussions in previous columns.
THE BASIC MANAGEMENT MODEL
The basic management model performs the following functions:
- We discipline ourselves to create an effective beginning for performance [standard operating procedures (SOPs)].
- We prepare our people (TRAINING).
- We create an effective operational approach (APPLY).
- After we perform, we know our boss/bosses will ask, “How well did the people and the procedures work? (CRITIQUE).
- Then, based on what we learned, we are going to update the SOPs (REVISION).
Each separate function has its own capability to contribute to the overall effectiveness of the model. Together, the five parts all working together form the overall performance management process. If we consistently apply the steps in the model over and over, we will automatically “fix ourselves” because the steps require us to continually prepare, evaluate, and refine the effectiveness of our local humans, applying our local resources/system resources to local problems producing local outcomes.
The development of SOPs becomes the foundation of the performance management process. SOPs describe the details of the operational approach the entire organization will use to perform a particular activity or function. In the absence of such official procedures, it is very common for each organizational segment (companies/battalions) to decide how they will operate within their own unit. In these multiple cases of fragmented local operational self-determination (many times nutty) within an organization, a medium-size department can have more than 100 separate, many times autonomous, little local departments operating within the overall system. In such a system, it is very difficult to learn how a particular boss on a particular day manages his own operations, and incident operations can look like an unmanaged (and generally unsafe) rodeo.
The process of developing and refining SOPs becomes a major leadership function of bosses and a standard role (behavior) of leaders on every level. Professional teams use highly practiced and refined plays (SOPs) to organize how they use their resources so they can effectively execute when they “play ball.” It’s nice to have a game plan for game day when we must show up and play the game.
The application part of the model is show time for the business of our business. Our role/promise is to quickly put us in between Mrs. Smith and the incident problem. The major point of the performance model relates to the “work” of the organization. This is how we carry out our promise. Every level must focus on how it performs when delivering service. This requires that “all roads” return to actually delivering service. When we look at how an effective boss does an effective level of engagement, it must be diverted and directed to helping Mrs. Smith. I do not mean to be disrespectful or to lessen the importance of the routine inspection, readiness checklists, cleanliness, and uniform activities; they are in place and are absolutely necessary to support Big Red going out the door to make the customer safer and more comfortable. We are seriously messed up when we lose the perspective of actually performing in difficult situations because we are distracted by or overly attracted to the easier-to-manage and easier-to-control everyday nonservice delivery stuff.
In the critique part of the model, we must outline and connect
- Conditions
- Action
- Outcome
- Lessons learned and reinforced
- Action Plan for improvement
The five critique steps create a complete review process that describes the problem we found, how we operated on that problem, and the result of our action. Then we plug in the new lessons the event taught as an evaluation of how well we and our previous lessons worked.
A critical part of the process is that we must develop an organizational plan for how we are going to implement the lessons in what we call an action plan for improvement. This plan is the punchline/objective of the critique, and this is where we “fix ourselves,” because in the plan we describe the action it will take to get better, who is going to work on and implement the changes, and a timeline for how the process will occur. The action plan converts the experience into a real, live continuous improvement system that becomes an organizational way of life where every incident with a lesson (i.e., most of them) will naturally go into the front end of the model and come out the back end as an organizational improvement. A major boss role is to manage, maintain, and continue this process simply because it requires a lot of ongoing work and applying the model to our ongoing activity never stops.
A standard part of the critique is that it creates a framework and a never-ending opportunity for reinforcing effective work. It is a challenging process for most bosses to commend workers when they do a good job. Positive performance feedback becomes the foundation for encouragement and motivation. Our organization should attempt to maximize the places in the regular operational system where effective execution can be positively acknowledged. The vast majority of the work our firefighters do is exceptional and deserves to be commended. Workers want to please their boss, and having that boss positively comment on their effective performance causes the workers to want to repeat that performance. Most current bosses were raised in a system where compliments and commendations were very awkward for our elders. Today’s young people have received positive reinforcement throughout their (young) lives, and they typically have a lot of experience and skill receiving praise.
The revision part of the model causes us to continually process any changes that will improve how we operate. SOPs and training set up the front end of the process and prepare us to apply what we have received. After the event, we conduct a critique that evaluates our effectiveness. Sometimes the lessons we have learned require that we revise some parts of how we operate (people/procedures/tools) based on our experience. We also must continually review experience in other places and other data to keep current. Recent fire testing is giving us better, current information about tactical conditions and the new tactics that match the outcome of that testing. Any management activity requires an active, ongoing review and revision process to match the details of the system to the current environment in which it operates.
Our service has used the five-step very simple performance management system since the early 1980s. It has survived in its original form routine audits by a number of big-time consultant services. Any boss who is responsible for delivering service will continually chase his tail until the department adopts and applies some system with an integrated set of performance steps that effectively leads the workers to the customers.
I was a boss committed to effective performance before we developed the five-step model. I was also a boss after we developed and applied the model. After was a lot better.
The process of developing and refining SOPs becomes a major leadership function of bosses and a standard role (behavior) of leaders on every level.
Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the fire service Web site bshifter.com.
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