If I Were My Fire Chief’s Boss

I’d give them something our leaders rarely get enough of: the space to think, explore, create, and see what comes next

If I were the boss of my fire chief, one of the greatest gifts I would give them is space. I would want them to have time to think, explore, chase an idea, and look beyond whatever problem needs an answer in the next five minutes. I would want them thinking about where the department could be three or five years from now, what we could do differently, what we are missing, and what is coming around the corner that the rest of us have not seen yet.

We say we want our chiefs and officers to be forward-thinking. We want them to innovate, solve problems, challenge old ways of doing things, build better cultures, and somehow anticipate what the fire service will need next. Then we fill nearly every available minute of their day with meetings, emails, personnel issues, budgets, apparatus problems, phone calls, reports, and decisions that needed an answer five minutes ago. We give our leaders plenty to think about while giving them very little time to actually think.

Protecting Space to Think

There is something almost ridiculous about that when you really look at it. We hire people for their experience, judgment, imagination, and ability to see things the rest of us might miss, then build a workday that keeps pulling their attention back to whatever needs dealing with right now.

If I were responsible for getting the best out of my chief, I would protect some of their time from all of us. I would actually be happy to look at their calendar and see a couple of hours when nothing is scheduled. No committee meeting, conference call, report due, or agenda attached to it. I would give them room to use the brain we hired them for.

There is a difference between having a thought and thinking. A thought can come out of nowhere, such as driving home, walking through the station, or standing in the apparatus bay. Thinking means you get to stay with it for a while and ruminate. You mull it over. You create questions around it. Let your mind wander a little and see where the idea wants to go. One thing leads to something else, and maybe 20 minutes later you are looking at an old problem in a completely different way. That is where the creative part starts, but you have to stay in that headspace long enough to get there.

For me, I have to make time for that. Even though I spend a lot of time in a creative space, I still have to force myself sometimes to think beyond whatever I am worried about, dealing with, or trying to solve at the time. I have to get past the immediate stuff in my head and give an idea enough time to go somewhere.

Does Your Brain’s Fire Engine Have a Broken Think Tank?

There are times when your brain is ready for that kind of work and times when it absolutely is not. I think we need to get better at recognizing the difference. If the creative side of your brain has left the building, go pay a bill. Answer some of the stuff that needs answering. Do a budget. Fix the schedule. Hell, go do something for your soul. There is plenty of work available that does not require your mind to go exploring. But when that creative mental gear catches, unleash it. Push some of the other stuff aside and see where it takes you.

When an idea starts to develop, sometimes you need enough room to see what might come of it. Maybe you cast your pole into the proverbial pond and catch something worth pursuing, and maybe there is nothing there that day. Either way, there is value in having the opportunity to find out. Some of the best ideas probably never get much further than the first thought because the next meeting, problem, or decision is already waiting, and the idea gets pushed aside before anyone has the chance to see whether there was actually something sitting just below the surface.

Time is limited, the list is long, and nearly everything on it feels important. Some of that work requires execution and concentration, while others require imagination. When we throw it all into the same bucket, creativity usually gets whatever scraps are left over.

That is especially hard for leaders because interruption is part of the job, and somewhere along the way, we started treating an open-door policy as a sign of good leadership. I agree with the idea behind it, but does “open door” have to mean open access at any moment, simply because that is when someone else wants your time?

Accessibility Without Constant Interruption

There is a difference between being accessible and surrendering your entire day to whoever walks through the door next. Put a chief in a batting cage with three pitching machines firing at the same time, and you are getting pretty close. The phone rings, somebody walks in, a personnel problem develops, an apparatus issue pops up, and there is a meeting in 10 minutes. Then someone needs an answer to something they have been thinking about for three weeks, and the chief gets 30 seconds to respond before the next ball comes flying in. Maybe preserving some time to think is not closing the door on people. Maybe it is part of making sure the person behind that door still has enough of themselves left to lead well.

Research from UC Irvine’s Gloria Mark and her colleagues has found it can take around 25 minutes to return to an interrupted task. Think about what that means in a chief’s day. They might technically have an hour to work through a problem, but chop that hour into five-minute pieces with calls, questions, and drop-ins and they did not really have an hour at all. Their calendar says they did, but their brain would probably tell a very different story.

I wonder if creativity and exploration deserve more attention in how we think about leadership development in the fire service. We spend years building capable leaders and asking them to see around corners, anticipate problems, challenge assumptions, and develop better ways of doing things. Then we hand them a calendar that barely gives them enough time to piss between meetings.

Nobody sends a calendar invitation titled Figure Out What Our Department Is Going to Need Three Years From Now. There is no flashing red light when a good idea never gets explored. Nobody writes an after-action report about the opportunity we never noticed because everybody was too damn busy.

Making Room for What Comes Next

If I were my fire chief’s boss, I would be perfectly comfortable seeing some blank space on their calendar. I would not immediately assume it needed to be filled with another meeting, another committee, or another project simply because there was room. Maybe part of getting the most out of talented people is resisting our instinct to account for every minute of their day.

Because being busy and doing important work are not always the same thing. Maybe your brain’s fire engine does not have a broken think tank after all. Maybe the tank is just empty because we never give it enough time to fill.

And the truth is, if we want our chiefs to think about what comes next, we have to give them enough space to get there.

Photo by Steve Baer | FireDog Photos