HARRY R. CARTER, Ph.D., MIFireE

My friend and readers, is there no end to it? Each day as I peruse my growing list of e-mail messages, my heart begins to sink. With each passing day, new examples of bad leadership pour into my e-mail store from around the world. Some are so strange you might think that they’re from another world. People are being placed in leadership positions that do not have a clue as to how to interact with people. And the damage that they cause is truly unbelievable.

It seems so bad to me that some days I feel like setting up a booth similar to the one the late Charles Schultz created for Lucy Brown in his classic comic creation, Peanuts. You know the one: "The Psychiatrist is in: Advice five cents". Only my booth would sport a different title. The sign above my head would read: "The Doctor is in: Leadership Advice – ten cents". Inflation, you know.

But there would be one problem. The people who really needed the advice would never come to learn anything. They apparently already know it all. I would continue to be swamped by the victims of poor leadership that are literally strewn across the face of the American and the International Fire Service. Yes, poor leadership knows no bounds.

I want to state for the record that many of our leadership problems are clearly self-inflicted wounds. And there is enough blame to go around for everyone in the fire service. In the Volunteer World, we elect our friends to lead us, without assessing their skill, talent or training for the positions that they occupy. In the world of the career fire service, thanks to our friends in the court system, many people are taking ridiculously simple tests to move through the ranks. And in far too many places, other people are being anointed /appointed by their friends and buddies in the front office ranks to positions they can never properly fill.

This is probably how the bad leadership we see all around us is being perpetuated. The bad leaders take care of their friends. These friends are then so grateful for the favor that they hang on the leader’s every word, often to the exclusion of reading, researching and attending training opportunities. You then see the next generation of dinosaurs graduating from the America Academy of Dinosaurs’ training program, a most informal agglomeration of training if ever there was one.

Let me offer a few examples of what I perceive to be bad leadership.

My top candidate for bad leader of the month comes from the Mid-Atlantic region. This man would be the truly gutless wimp who recently demoted his two senior captains via e-mail. Not via phone call, or in his office like a real man, but via e-mail.

Bear in mind that I know one of these two captains. He is a talented state-level instructor, and oddly enough, was the Chief of his volunteer fire department just ahead of the guy who fired him.

I would like to add that, according to my sources, one of this guy’s first official acts was to do away with a number of previously established professional attributes, one of which was simply answering the telephone in a professional manner. In this man’s defense, I would offer the following thought. Maybe no one ever taught him how to be a leader. If this is the case, then it is a matter of ignorance, rather than malevolence. And we as a fire service share the burden for creating countless legions of people just like this man.

Another example of poor leadership comes from the Northeast. A long-time buddy of mine took his newly appointed volunteer fire chief to the Fire Department Instructor’s Conference in Indianapolis last March. My buddy even introduced this guy to me, so I can verify that he was at the FDIC. It appears that a trip to the FDIC’s font of knowledge was more than this poor person could handle. After five or six seminars, he suddenly received a blessing from on high and became an expert in the world of training.

It seems that while they were on the plane going home, this guy started presenting his newly-learned gospel on training and vowed that everything was about to change. I know my associate to be a fairly even-tempered man and a dedicated trainer, so that it must have been a real bad scene, at least from what he told me. These two guys had to be placed in different parts of the plane to halt the argument. When they got back home, this guy fired my buddy from his position as municipal fire training instructor, and personally took over the task of training the troops. Apparently it got to be so bad that he started driving the troops away. A tense calm has taken over the department, and my associate is back at work training the troops.

And then, just as I was sitting down to write this week’s commentary, another e-mail came floating in from the mid-western part of our great nation. It seems that yet another of my associates had just run into the stone wall of ignorance in his fire department. During a critique of a recent fire, the issue of mutual aid and low staffing levels came up. The troops asked why mutual aid was not summoned. The answer to their question, as relayed to me, leaves me astonished.

Apparently this guy’s boss is a throwback to I an earlier era, and I don’t know where that era was. I warned you that some of these e-mails were out of this world. During the discussion, this manager (I hesitate to call him a leader) said that the three-member truck companies should have skipped the primary search, and that the three-member engine companies shouldn’t have stretched a 2-1/2" attack hand line. I had to read the message several times to be sure that I saw what I saw.

This genius was also heard to say that if he had his way he would just have a Quint with three people, and they could handle it all. Where do people like this man get their brains and their ideas? I can understand fire people not interacting well with city administrators, because we are not trained to do that, but this guy would advocate understaffing as a way of life. What a sell out merchant this guy must be.

I am sorry, but it takes people to extinguish fires. When I was in Wisconsin last week, I observed a staffing level that scared me. The engine company and truck company that I saw each had three people, but the full-sized heavy rescue had a crew of only two people. All of the necessary equipment, but only 50 percent of the talent necessary to get the job done. And my hosts told me how lucky that department was to have so many people.

Why have I studied so hard over the last 35 years? My years of in-depth research tell me a totally different story than I see happening out there across the country. But I will tell you that these people who kiss up to the politicians are not really the root cause of the problem. Those of us who teach and lead at the national level are the problem.

Think about it. When was the last time that anyone taught you how to create performance-based standards to justify the size of your department? We were on the verge of doing just this very thing back at the Newark Fire Training Center in 1991. We wrote the standards, the troops trained to the standards, and we assessed their performance at the academy. And then suddenly, the big boss decided that this was all nonsense and abolished the program. Talk about a lost opportunity. People were studying and suggesting better ways to do many of the tasks. It was a beautiful thing.

We have no way of assessing good behavior or poor behavior. That is how these poor leaders, of which we speak, continue to thrive within a system that has no strong base of widely accepted professional knowledge. I am just as much at fault, because this is an area that I have only covered in passing.

Let me pose another thought. Are there standards for a person who wishes to be a physician? How about someone who wishes to become a dentist? What about the police officers that most states turn out from their training facilities? You bet your butt that there are standards for the people, tough ones.

Our problem is that we, as a field of endeavor, don’t have the guts to create a fully accepted national standard of knowledge for being a fire fighter, or an officer. But Harry you might ask, don’t we have the National Fire Protection Association Standards? Yes, but only in those places where people have had the strength of their convictions to fight for them.

We give the whole concept of standards a lot of lip service, but when the time comes to get tough, we are stampeded by the naysayers who tell us that we will not have a fire service if we make it too tough. Nonsense my friends and readers. All of the problems I spoke of earlier in this commentary come from a tradition of poor leadership training.

We somehow think that the miraculous nature of a promotional ceremony will imbue a person with all of the necessary skills to be a leader. One day I was a firefighter in Newark, New Jersey, and then through the miracle of a ceremony on November 14, 1977, I was deemed to be a leader and tossed into the front seat of a speeding fire engine. That was it. Talk about learning on the job.

What is the answer to this epidemic of self-inflicted leadership injuries? Frankly, I wish that I could just create a potion to sell through the wonder of the Internet. You know; take two pills and all of your leadership problems would go away. But that is only wishful thinking. I shall do what I do best.

I intend to continue writing, lecturing, motivating, and pointing out the flaws as I uncover them. I shall continue to offer solutions, options, and opinions. Much like the Biblical story of the mustard seed, I shall go on my merry way sowing the fields of the fire service with as much knowledge and wisdom as I can. It is my fervent prayer that I will hit some fertile soil, because up to now, it seems like the land with the rocks and poor soil is winning.

The commentary in this column does not necessarily reflect those of Firehouse.Com, Firehouse Magazine, their employees or parent company Cygnus Business Media. Harry R. Carter, Ph.D., MIFireE, is an internationally known municipal fire protection consultant and contributing editor to Firehouse Magazine. He recently retired as a Battalion Commander with the Newark, New Jersey Fire Department. His commentary appears regularly on Firehouse.Com. For more commentary and information, visit Carter's web site at www.harrycarter.com Harry has published several books available for online ordering, including Firefighting Strategy and Tactics and Management in the Fire Service