Skills Leaders Incorporate During Team Building

By: Frank Montes de Oca

Recently, I focused a post on common traits that good leaders demonstrate. It listed characteristics common to leaders who strive to build strong, effective teams. To recap those traits are:

1. Recognize People

2. Respect Employees

3. Communicate Effectively

4. Possess Integrity

5. Provide Ongoing Feedback

Now, let’s aim attention on skills that leaders should incorporate in their continuing team building efforts. Assessing and Monitoring the Climate: How do you know your team is forming at an acceptable pace? How do you know when your team is ready to answer the challenges of delivering emergency services? If you’re not constantly assessing and determining individual and collective progress, you won’t. The steps below outline a basic approach to assessing team development and can be modified to meet the needs of the team and its members.

Step 1: Develop (or copy) a set of guidelines or standards that are achievable and measurable.

Step 2: Make sure the guidelines or standards are relevant to your team’s mission.

Step 3: Train team members individually and collectively to the standards.

Step 4: Assess members individually and the team as a whole.

Step 5: Share the team assessment outcome with all team members.

NOTE: Communicate throughout the process to ensure no one is left behind and a sense of ownership or buy-in is present throughout the team. Some departments are managed by standards, guidelines and rules developed by others outside the department or unit. Some might have been developed years ago. To ensure relevance, make sure the guidelines are up-to-date to meet the challenges of the community. Showing Trust in Your People. In the life safety business, it’s understandable to be cautious of taking everything on face value. It is human nature; somewhat of a self-preservation practice to question. There’s a saying that serves supervisors and team leaders well: Trust and verify. That is trust people or groups, but for the sake of safety, check every once in a while to make sure the facts are what they appear to be. Regardless of how you manage to certify the accuracy of the statement or claim, demonstrating trust, confidence in and support of your people is an integral practice for leaders. Ensuring a Respectful Workplace.

This attribute was mentioned in the last blog and is #2 above. This takes it a step further by requiring all members to demonstrate respect for each other and every community member with whom they interact. Regardless of gender, age or personal beliefs, it is integral to an effective team that respect is practiced at all levels. Enforcing Accountability and Fairness

Providing emergency services requires a relationship between the responder, his/her supervisor and the citizens served. To ensure the service rendered is of the quality expected, all members must be accountable for their actions. To achieve this the unit leader holds himself/herself to the established standards and in turn holds all members accountable for their actions as well. The peak of the team’s development occurs when team members hold each other accountable. Duties should be assigned based on fairness and the individual abilities of those assigned. As soon as favoritism is witnessed or suspected, a breakdown in unit cohesiveness occurs. Therefore, to prevent this all assignments, assessments and training must be distributed equally and fairly.

Communicating, Managing and Sharing Expectations The underlying message in this post is communication. When managers and supervisors maintain an open, two-way communication loop, unit effectiveness thrives. Members want to know what is expected of them. And in turn they expect their supervisors to know and respect what they expect. This level of honesty and openness builds teams who operate with resiliency, pride and effectiveness.

Go forth and lead!

Frank Montes de Oca served as a firefighter/paramedic for over 38 years finishing his career as a fire chief and emergency services director at three departments. His focus continues to be first responder development, team building and firefighter safety and survival. Chief Montes de Oca can be reached at frm1@me.com. Visit his website www.responder1.org to find information and training programs focused on first responder safety, survival and leadership development.

Advocating For The Needs Of Your Fire Service

by Chief Robert R. Rielage

When I was a much younger firefighter, my Chief once said, “He who doesn’t speak up, is never heard”.  These words really sum up the topic of “Advocating for the needs of your Fire Service”.  You need to make others, such as your governing council, know what you need to effectively do your job.

This is certainly not as easy as it sounds, but it is part of the job especially for the Chief and your officers.

First, no one understands your needs better than you. You are the officers and firefighters of your department.  You see every day what you need to make your service better.  The people you serve expect you to respond to countless types of emergencies, give timely safety advice, and perform your duties with dedication, professionalism and without hesitation.  

Basically, that type of department requires four things: people, training, equipment and facilities that are all properly maintained and at the ready for you to respond.

Your job is to make sure that there are an adequate number of properly trained firefighters to handle whatever the emergency; that they have the proper personal equipment to safely perform these tasks; and a budget that provides and maintains the personnel, equipment, vehicles and facilities to support your emergency operations.

Is it easy to ask for all of these things?  No, but once again, no one but you understand better the needs of your department.  So how and who do you contact to express these needs?  

The Chief, especially, must know the “politics” involved.  Note that this word has a small “p” politics in the sense of how your governing council, mayor, trustee or board of supervisors operates, not  the Politics with a capital “P” meaning the dealings of a certain political party affiliation.

We are fortunate in that in the United States, there is a class at the National Fire Academy entitled “Politics and the White Helmet” which clearly teaches the right way to express the needs of your fire department to those individuals or governing body that provides the funding to allow a department to get things done.  But at the same time, I’ve never seen a fire department that got everything it wanted – so the Chief or the officers need to prioritize their needs and requests.

In addition to this, I think it is equally important to have a working relationship with the news media: those newspapers, radio or television reporters who come out when there is a large fire, explosion, or a natural disaster that occurs in your response area.  Standing in front of a camera or a reporter with a microphone may not be comfortable for everyone.  Again, in their absence, the Chief should delegate someone in the department to be a Public Information Officer (PIO).

The PIO is a firefighter or officer authorized to discuss releasable information at the scene of an emergency.  Why is it so important?  Because a picture or a video with a story about the emergency is worth more than 100 requests for new equipment.  There are guidelines that we can discuss in another article or an upcoming training session.

The reporters can also give you some tips on how you should approach an interview, especially when the camera is on.

Some suggestions may include:

: Being in uniform or in your turnout gear – helmet, and coat which tells everyone you are an official representative of the department.

: Having the key points of what you want to say clearly in your mind, e.g. What you saw on arrival (the volume of fire, or the number of vehicles or victims involved) Were there any rescues performed?  

: Keep it brief but let the public know what your department did to make resolve the emergency and how quickly that took to bring the incident under control.

The purpose of my article is not to answer all of your questions on how to be an advocate for the needs of your department, but rather to give you a starting point.  The first lesson being, if you don’t advocate for the needs of your department, who will?

Stay safe!

About the author  Chief Robert R. Rielage, MPA, CFO, EFO, FIFireE, is the former Ohio fire marshal and has been a chief officer in several departments for more than 35 years. A graduate of the Kennedy School's Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government at Harvard University, Rielage holds a master's degree in public administration from Norwich University and is a past-president of the Institution of Fire Engineers – USA Branch.