Leaders Stay Off The Grass – Personal steps to becoming a leader.
Have you ever been in a store trying to find something and none of the employees ask if you need assistance? Have you ever gone into a public restroom to find the person before you didn’t flush the toilet? Maybe you’ve noticed someone put a container of ice cream in the bread isle at the grocery store. If you’re anything like me, you’re thinking to yourself “What the f*ck is wrong with people?”. I find myself thinking, and saying out loud, that phrase all too often.
These things are all trivial in the grand scheme of things, but this could be an important lesson for us firefighters who have a desire to lead a better fire service. We are facing a membership crisis in the volunteer and paid/on-call fire service. In order to address the crisis head-on we need more, and better, leaders. The qualities of a good fire service leader are not only limited to experience, education and skill sets. There are many other habits to develop in your personal, everyday life to become a valuable leader for your fire department.
In order to successfully take care of our fire department and it’s members, we must first learn how to take care of ourselves. What I mean by that is we need to personally develop ourselves with positive habits to make our own lives successful and productive. If we cannot become leaders in our personal lives, how can we lead our fire departments?
It is important to understand also that to be a leader in the fire service, you don’t need to possess rank. Any one of us, from the brand new recruit to the senior member to all of the officers can be leaders. Quite frankly, we should all be doing everything we can to lead in one area or another. Leadership is not a competition among members, it is an obligation for all of us. Furthermore, there is no such thing as a “natural born leader”. Leadership is learned, practiced and developed. I have put together a list of some simple habits we can develop in our everyday lives to become a better leader.
1. Stay off the grass. When you’re walking through a parking lot or a public area, stay on the pavement or the designated walkways. I can almost guarantee you that nobody will notice you doing this, but it will provide you a sense of discipline that is necessary to be a leader. So the next time you’re walking through the grocery store parking lot, instead of going up and over the grassy (or mulched) island, walk around it.
2. Put your shopping cart away. Some people don’t know this, but they have these things in the middle of parking lots now that hold shopping carts. Don’t be the one to leave your cart in a parking spot. Leaders take the extra few minutes to walk their cart back to the carriage coral. Hell, take it a step further and grab the other abandoned carts on the way. If you can develop simple habits of assertiveness in your every day life, you will succeed anywhere. Assertiveness is needed in the fire service in order for it to thrive.
3. Practice cleanliness in the restroom. I owe Andy Frisella of the MFCEO Project Podcast credit for this one. Whether it is at home or in a public restroom, wipe up your damn piss dribbles off the toilet, flush the toilet and then wash your hands. This shouldn’t even be a thing, truthfully. Leaders don’t leave a mess for the person coming in after them, and this theory can be applied anywhere.
4. Keep your fuel tank above half full. This isn’t only to be sure you don’t wind up stranded on the side of the road, it sets a habit for preparedness in all other areas of your life. My wife is constantly on me about keeping my gas tank full, and she is right. She is always prepared for the worst and as leaders we should, too.
5. Let others go before you. I’m not talking about in traffic since most drivers don’t pay attention anymore. I’m talking about holding doors for people, letting the person with two items cut in front of you at the check out line, or letting your friends and family order before you at the restaurant. This may seem to contradict my statement I made earlier that we need to take care of ourselves first, but if you look deeper you will see that letting others go before you will make you feel good. By feeling good, you’re taking care of yourself.
You may be asking, how do we apply Point 5 to the fire service? Quite easy, actually. When you’re in a meeting or training, let others speak before you. While they are speaking, listen to them. This simple practice will make that member feel valued or even empowered. It all comes full circle back to you in the end. By making others feel valued, it is like giving someone a gift. When we give to others, we feel good.
This is a short list, and the items I mentioned are very simple and pretty much common sense. However, as simple as they are, we may overlook them. I strongly believe that if we all develop these simple habits they can compound into greater things for ourselves and our fire department.
We all have a job to do, and that job is more than responding to calls. We must also focus a large amount of energy on membership retention and leadership. Like I mentioned before, we all have the potential of being leaders. Leadership is developed, not breed into us. So the next time you’re in the store and see a pork tenderloin sitting next to a stack of cookies, be the leader and bring it back to the meat counter.
