Your People are Your Customers
As a leader, your people are your customers. The further you advance in any organization the more customers you are going to have; not actual customers but subordinates. The primary concern for any leader is to ensure their people have the skill, tools and resources necessary to serve the citizens. The more we are separated from the front line duties of incident response and customer care, the more the focus needs to shift towards providing the resources necessary to the front line workers.
As leaders, our ability to have direct contact with the citizens is quickly replaced with other duties. The primary focus is no long direct service delivery but firefighter support. Every fire officer and Fire Chief needs to start taking this approach when leading. Mission accomplishment; patient care, extrication, fire suppression, and victim rescue; is no longer the sole task of the leaders. We have personnel who stretch line, conduct search and provide patient care. Our job as leaders and officers is to give them direction and provide them with everything they need to get that done.
Administrative staff is responsible for developing policies and SOGs, but we often see that these offices forget their primary purpose; to provide resources to the men and women on the front line. Policies and SOGs should be focused on providing guidance toward mission objective not for disciplinary actions. Disciplinary action should always be the last step in correcting issues, we should try leading our people first. When the front line firefighters feel threatened when policies and SOGs are released we know we have a problem.
Officers need to approach leadership from the mindset of servantship. Not only servant to the citizens but to the firefighters. We often see administration or officers who believe that without them, the trucks fail to go out the door. I will guarantee you that is not the case. The firefighters become the face of the organization because they are interacting with the citizens in the community, on incident, and during events. If your Fire Chief becomes the face of the department, then something isn’t going right. Typically this is after an incident either emergency response related or HR related. Seeing the Fire Chief on the TV is usually a bad sign.
If we, as officers, invest in our people, provide them with the resources they need, and support them in their pursuit to accomplish the mission, we will be successful. We cannot become jaded in our responsibilities to our people, they are the priority. Without them, fires don’t go out, medical emergencies are not transported, and services are not provided. If we are able to provide them with the most adequate staffing, the best apparatus, and good benefits so we have employees want to show up for work, their quality of service delivery will be enhanced.
When we have administrative staff who becomes jaded in this thinking, poor outcomes usually follow. When egos take over or incompetence becomes acceptable, the climate will suffer, morale will plummet, and the culture will soon follow. When the line staff don’t feel the support from the top, it becomes, Us verse the Man, attitude. Firefighters want to provide excellent services to the community, but if the support is lacking, it will have negative consequences that may be unrepairable.
Treat your people like you treat your customers because I don’t remember the last time I seen a Chief transporting a patient to the hospital or on the end of the nozzle. Great leadership is about trust and relationships. What better way to show your support that providing the staff with everything they want, need, and desire to accomplish their objective. Have constructive conversations, hear their concerns and provide a vision that they can be excited about.