Ever wondered how the values and behaviors of individuals can reflect an entire organization? Or how the actions of our upbringing can follow us into our professional and personal lives? Join us, as we navigate these intriguing questions and much more in a captivating discussion centered around leadership dynamics, especially in emergency services. We delve into the critical role of customer service, both within and outside an organization, and how it can shape the collective perception of the entity. We also unearth the unique concept of "following ugly kids home," illustrating how our actions can mirror our upbringing or immediate surroundings.
We don't stop there. We venture into the world of leadership styles and the dynamics within an organization. Sharing effective strategies to foster a healthy work environment, even in the face of internal disagreements or "shift wars," we reveal the negative influence of unsupportive bosses and emphasize the need for accountability in leadership. We touch on the importance of empathy and respectful treatment of all individuals, regardless of their attitudes or actions, highlighting the significance of an empathetic leadership approach.
Rounding off, we tackle the challenge of improving behavior and accountability within fire departments using real-life examples. We explore the power of empathy, kindness, and excellent customer service in making a positive impact on individuals and enhancing the image of an organization. We wrap up with the essence of fostering a culture of excellence and creating a supportive work environment that encourages positive behavior and accountability. Get ready to revolutionize the way you view leadership and organizational dynamics with this enlightening conversation. Let's do this!
This episode features Nick Brunacini, Terry Garrison, and John Vance.
Sign up for the B Shifter Buckslip, our free weekly newsletter here.
Shop B Shifter here.
You can register for the 2024 Hazard Zone Conference now! Register here!
Please subscribe and share. Thank you for listening!
This episode was recorded on October 18, 2023 in Phoenix, AZ.
Ever wondered how the values and behaviors of individuals can reflect an entire organization? Or how the actions of our upbringing can follow us into our professional and personal lives? Join us, as we navigate these intriguing questions and much more in a captivating discussion centered around leadership dynamics, especially in emergency services. We delve into the critical role of customer service, both within and outside an organization, and how it can shape the collective perception of the entity. We also unearth the unique concept of "following ugly kids home," illustrating how our actions can mirror our upbringing or immediate surroundings.
We don't stop there. We venture into the world of leadership styles and the dynamics within an organization. Sharing effective strategies to foster a healthy work environment, even in the face of internal disagreements or "shift wars," we reveal the negative influence of unsupportive bosses and emphasize the need for accountability in leadership. We touch on the importance of empathy and respectful treatment of all individuals, regardless of their attitudes or actions, highlighting the significance of an empathetic leadership approach.
Rounding off, we tackle the challenge of improving behavior and accountability within fire departments using real-life examples. We explore the power of empathy, kindness, and excellent customer service in making a positive impact on individuals and enhancing the image of an organization. We wrap up with the essence of fostering a culture of excellence and creating a supportive work environment that encourages positive behavior and accountability. Get ready to revolutionize the way you view leadership and organizational dynamics with this enlightening conversation. Let's do this!
This episode features Nick Brunacini, Terry Garrison, and John Vance.
Sign up for the B Shifter Buckslip, our free weekly newsletter here.
Shop B Shifter here.
You can register for the 2024 Hazard Zone Conference now! Register here!
Please subscribe and share. Thank you for listening!
This episode was recorded on October 18, 2023 in Phoenix, AZ.
Hello and welcome to the shifter. John Vance, nick Brunassini, terry Garrison all in the house. Are you sensing something?
Speaker 3:No, I'm just smiling at all camera, all the cameras, and I forgot where they all are. I feel like I'm in a very public transportation building or something where you're. It's in every spy novel you ever read is a facial recognition. Oh, I love it.
Speaker 2:That's how they find the gray man. A friend of mine is running a company right now that does facial recognition and stops people at hospitals from robbing the honor system at their little snack bars because they're supposed to pay for it. But if it recognizes John Vance didn't pay his bill last time, it sets off an alarm or locks you out, or some security guards come up and hit in the head with a baton or something.
Speaker 1:Hand over the snickers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's crazy that that's how far down facial recognition is.
Speaker 3:That's where we're at, and pretty soon AI will take over and it'll just assassinate you for taking like three month old peanuts out of the box.
Speaker 1:I had one of those facial recognition. Look at me, it just became sad.
Speaker 2:Oh, look at that little man.
Speaker 1:Oh, he's so sad.
Speaker 2:He's from the desert.
Speaker 1:He's got skin. How are you guys doing today?
Speaker 2:Good, good, very nice, yes, well, we'd like to talk about leadership stuff. So I wanted to throw out a couple of leadership topics. And we were at the conference in Cincinnati what? Two or three weeks ago, whenever that was and a lot of conversations centered around customer service. Because, number one, the art of customer service just out and about with the regular public is dying. Yeah, shit, yeah, it's pretty bad, yeah, but we continue to be, you know, striving as a fire service to have great customer service. But then the question came up about customer service on the inside out, and what does that mean? And how, how, how come our internal customer service will affect our external customer service?
Speaker 1:Mm, hmm.
Speaker 1:So yeah, bruno said it best right when he when he said follow ugly kids home and you'll find ugly parents. We said that a lot on this show and Bruno wrote about it and it makes perfect sense. I think we might have talked about it at the conference. Even it it gave some examples of them. We'll do it here today.
Speaker 1:But that whole deal about, you know, following ugly kids home and finding ugly parents isn't about how they look. Obviously, it's about how they treat other people. And I gave an example. Just happened at the school that my kid goes, my grandson goes to, where there there was a kid who was having. He was saying bad jokes and he was picking on people and he was using the N word. Well, just so happened, his dad was the coach for one of the sports teams volunteer coach at one of the sports teams, and I witnessed his dad with the same behavior towards the kids that were not, he wasn't saying a bad joke, but his treating them like shit and it's like but there you go, you got the kid. So the kid got removed from school and then dad eventually got removed from coaching and you saw that pass through. But that was a. That was just an example that occurred over the last couple of weeks outside the fire service.
Speaker 2:Pretty amazing how trainable, you know. I always wondered about the ugly kids. Follow them home, ugly parents. So how trainable are those people with the ugly parents? Because how much of that is embedded in them that you're never going to train away or get their behaviors to change. Or is it possible to get their behaviors to change if they were raised that way?
Speaker 1:Well, I feel strongly that you can change behavior and we talked about that too, where people come to me and they go, chief, he's just got a bad attitude and how do you deal with his attitude? And I'll ask well, what's his attitude? Well, he comes in late, he doesn't participate in training, he's mean to the customers. I said that's not an attitude problem. Those are actually actions that that person has taken. Those are behaviors. You need to hold them accountable and tell them not to do that and have conversations with them about that and then hold them accountable if he doesn't change. But that's a behavioral thing.
Speaker 1:There's some people that are just idiots, right? I mean, they're going to come to work and they're going to be knuckleheads and they don't need to be in the service delivery of the fire service, and those people have to. They have to lose their jobs eventually. We can't keep them on because when they put that name on the back of their shirt, they represent all of us, right, Both on and off the job. How often do you drive to work or drive around the city and you see a fire department sticker, union sticker, on a truck or a car and that guy's driving like an asshole? Come on. Dude man, you're representing everybody, right? It's kind of goofy.
Speaker 2:That's why Nick doesn't have a sticker on his car.
Speaker 3:And I'm not around long enough for them to think I'm an asshole. I'm not in their field of vision at all.
Speaker 1:I have no stickers. I have no stickers either.
Speaker 3:I drive in the city of Phoenix, where the average is every motorist has 1.5 guns in their car. So yeah, being nice in traffic means survival or just fleeing faster than them and they can't get you.
Speaker 1:I always felt that to be the best, but I believe to a certain extent you can change people's behavior right. I mean we have to be able to do that, because nobody comes in perfect and we're not perfect and I know there's probably a time in my life where I had a boss somewhere along the way. Change my behavior because I probably did something that was in a knucklehead.
Speaker 3:We can do things organizationally that encourages the member to change their behavior. They have to voluntarily join the fire department. So if it's a deal that we have to keep deprogramming and reprogramming them, like you said, they probably should get a job doing something else.
Speaker 1:But there is examples of what when the guy wasn't very nice to me, when I was blocking my license plate with my bike rack and pulls me over, anyway. So, talking about this inside-outside customer service piece, I was thinking the other day because it's so important the way you treat your employees has such an impact on how they treat their customers. I think I was thinking about writing an article and the article would be titled hey, idiot, be nice, kind of an oxy one down there right when you call somebody an idiot and you're belittling them and they expect them to be nice to the customer.
Speaker 1:it doesn't work very well, it doesn't.
Speaker 3:You know it all, really everything's got a support doing the work. And when you look at that then that's kind of what we did in the leadership thing is we moved the work to the top because the work that we do is very important. It's a public safety thing. That is a basic level of keeping society safe. So, whether it's a community-wide disaster is going on or a house fire or a heart attack, whatever it is, see, it's already pre-programmed and set up for us to be successful, because people just love that we show up and we help them. So I figured out pretty early in my career that that was where that's where they measured your performance is your ability to go out and deliver service. So we figured out well, if you do this, so when you go out and you're nice to everybody and you do your job like you're supposed to, is that buys you the freedom to live a free life in the station, basically within limits, you know, because, like we said that one page of rule, there's certain things that if you get caught doing them it's fatal, you're done. So you want to avoid that.
Speaker 3:But an example of this inside-outside leadership is we were kind of well-known as B-shifters and being a pirate ship and all the other stuff. At the station we had a great time when we went to work. We love going to work, it was a lot of fun. Well, and they were having a discussion one day because there was a shift war going on in our station. Right, and it wasn't mean spirited, but it was like no, you guys are stupid and we're smart and you know it was back and forth. There was a typical shift war. Nobody got there was no one got blown up or killed. But our bosses were talking about this and they're like okay, we finally got the B-shifters at 11. They've done it, they've they're set up and we can execute them. And they started processing this and of all people, it was this, this like medium Level IQ BC that represented us, who wasn't on our shift. And they're looking at the whole station dynamic.
Speaker 3:And this guy comes back and he was looking at citizens complaints and he says B shift is the only shift at 11 that has zero citizens complaints. Everybody else has buckets of them. And he said so what are we going to do? Those guys piss everybody off being themselves in the station, but when they go out there, they're golden. He says I vote, we do nothing and it was like having a hung jury. So that's what they and we knew there's. What can you do, really? Because we go out, we do our jobs, so as long as we do that, we're going to be okay. And see, and we were all conscious and alert members and we could see what was going on in other parts of the city. So there was stations that we thought no, if one of my loved ones was in trouble, I don't want those mouth breathers going on, I'd rather have us you know this Mary, band of pirates Go deliver service. So that really kind of became the driving force for the way we operate it, at least on the task level.
Speaker 1:But you know it's interesting because I know that situation and you guys on the task level were being nice but the tactical level, your tactical level boss, wasn't very nice guy. But because the organization in the strategic level and Bruno and other people within the organization were nice. He was your boss, was such an aberrant Personality in that system is like, okay, we can outperform that guy. The problem is when you have those people throughout.
Speaker 3:Exactly, especially the fire chief position, because that became the rubber bumper for us.
Speaker 3:It's like if it gets up to him, he's going to do the right thing. So we all trusted him that way and in fact it became obscene that, like in meetings with them, people would actually start to tear up and call him mommy, and strange Freudian shit like that was going on. And you know he was kind of Jesus Christ, can I be the dad? Maybe it's a no, you get to be both. In fact, none of us know this, but it's going to be really big in the future to be both. So you know, just embrace it, be the mommy and daddy that all of us never had. And he'd look at me funny, think, well, but I'm, it's an occupational thing with you, buddy. Yeah, yeah, I mean, we just did.
Speaker 1:But the system was always supportive, right, 100%, hundred. And there was people within the system. There were, in fact, there was, there was a, there was more than there was a few of them. Right, there was more than a handful of knuckleheads. Oh yeah, phoenix, fire, there were a ton of them.
Speaker 3:It's no different than it is today, terry.
Speaker 2:So, it's.
Speaker 3:The difference at the top is what that's like. That's the seasoning cabinet, and so if you put in enough garlic and oregano is going to be delicious too much and it's shit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's yeah and we talk about that in our last podcast about the coddling and people being coddling the coddlers. You don't need that in your organization. You need to. You need people that are realistically nice to you and you can tell when that's a phony niceness and you get that crap.
Speaker 3:I may have used this example before, but inside, outside customer service, we were setting the board. The call comes in. No, you can't Nick the nose on the phone. So I picked the phone up. Hide this, neck what you need. It was a engineer who wanted the day off I need.
Speaker 3:I need vacation today. Since you can't have it, we're in a CM mode. We're already hiring back. You can't, and if we were to allow you to have it is, it would cost you 36 hours of vacation to be off today. Well, I'll never do. No, it's only 24. I said see, exactly that's why you have to call in an advanced get vacation. We're under staff. Well, this individual starts crying and says I have to, I can't be at work today, and I said well, why not? What's going on? Well, my mother's in town and I have to have lunch with her. Well, I don't know, maybe have her to the station for lunch and she can go on the call with you, because that's what you're doing today. I were no denying your request for vacation 10 minutes, for you're supposed to be at work. Yes, so you.
Speaker 1:So that's the difference between being nice and following the process. So you can. You never yelled at him. You said no, you can't have the day I'm sorry, you can't have it, it's not possible.
Speaker 1:You know it's interesting how, as bosses, we have that positional leadership and you don't have to be mean to people. I mean and I've said it before you know, in Houston, unfortunately, and in other far departments, I had to lay people off and Glendale had to lay a couple guys, and I wasn't mean to them. They went through a process, they did this. I had to react this way. They did this again, then I had to react this way and at the end they lost their jobs.
Speaker 1:It's like I'm not going to be mean to your, I'm not happy with you. I'm actually mad at you because now we've got to go through the process of hiring somebody and all the training and everything that you went through. But I'm not going to show that and be mean to you. So whatever you do tomorrow, you're not going to do it. We're in a Glendale fire department t-shirt. Good luck to you. But sometimes our boss, when they get caught up in some sort of disciplinary deal and I can see that you know there's there when you're on a fire ground and somebody does something goofy and you're in that autocratic position where you just get bad for, get the heck off the for, whatever that looks like. But when you're in an actual process and you're dealing with somebody in a disciplinary process, there's no reason to be mean to him.
Speaker 3:Well, what? Churchill say you know, if you're going to shoot a man, you don't have to be mean about it, just kill him and be done. Did you say that? Yeah? Yeah, churchill said something to that effect. Do what you got to do and don't be an asshole about it. You can smile and cut their head off, yeah.
Speaker 1:And also the other about the smile. Don't look like you're really enjoying it when you fire somebody, Even though I had fired a guy and it was a very enjoyable experience for me. He never knew how much fun I was having because he absolutely needed to be fired and not be a firefighter, no more. And but you can't, you can't do the gotcha, I gotcha.
Speaker 2:I knew a fire chief that would take a box of Kleenex and set it on the desk and just look at the firefighter for a second, like without saying anything. So it starts to get in the firefighters mind and it's like why is he putting a box of Kleenex in front of me? Then he would proceed to fire the firefighter and he goes it's like batting around a mouse. I'm a cat batting around.
Speaker 3:So he was a mean.
Speaker 2:SOB. Yeah, and he was doing this just to be mean. He loved that power. Hey, you guys said something about loving work and loving what you do. How do we love what we do while also dealing with an awful boss? How do we, how do we create an environment where we can control and get away as much as we can from that awful boss? Who's setting a bad tone? Who's the ugly parent?
Speaker 1:Well, bruno said it over and over again as people don't quit their jobs, they quit their bosses. Right, and I've quit a boss before too, because I had a boss who was just just not a nice guy and the nice, the mean things he was doing he was doing not to me personally, but he was doing to the fire department by budget cuts and trying to make two person engine companies and decrease I mean, he was impacting the entire fire department in a real mean, spirited way. I could now perform that, right, he was just mean. But I've always thought that and I don't think this is the right answer, but this is a answer is that we have a lot of opportunities in the fire service, right? I've been fortunate enough to in Phoenix.
Speaker 1:If you get a boss that you can't work with, go to another fire station. He will fit with that guy, whoever that guy is. But go to another fire station and enjoy your job. If all you can control is yourself, right, and you need to leave and get away from that bad relationship and get away from the bad. Sometimes we stay too long and tolerate that. But the organization, once again, for us, we always had trust in the organization that that guy was. Whoever that idiot was going to be was going to be dealt with eventually. That means we're going to boss.
Speaker 3:I worked at a station. I was an officer there for 10 years and during that 10 years eight years of it we had the worst boss in the field on any shift. Yeah, yeah, on purpose it is. The people above us wanted us to promote and we didn't want to. We wanted to stay where we were in our little task level cocoon. And so to motivate us we would have different full array of bosses on the east side of town there and it never. It was always us against our boss.
Speaker 3:So that became kind of just the way you played it and that time we had one really good boss and most of the rest of them were not. They were, but when you look at it those bosses weren't very effective. The bad ones is they really didn't know how to like chain a set of activities together to get a produced desired result. So, like you could set up companies, like when I was a BC, you could figure out this guy's an asshole and he needs to quit being an asshole on calls. So there was a certain routine you would go through with those people.
Speaker 3:You meet with them and say hey knock it off and you'd broach it softly. So it's almost like they think, oh, he's just worried about this and I'm so smart and I'm so much better, and blah, blah, blah. Well, after about the third or fourth discussion with them, as they started to understand oh, this is different word. He's not just making observations, now, he's giving me like directives If I don't do, he's threatening to do this and that. So that was the way you would kind of go after them.
Speaker 3:But when it was happening to you, the solution was is just to keep doing your job. If I keep performing like I'm supposed to, there's nothing they can do to me, because I watch all these other people, I go on calls with them and some of them are not competent. You said it earlier and the fire chief retired. It didn't change the cosmic makeup of the fire department. It's the same group of people were there minus one. So one of the 2000 left. Well, it was just the wrong one.
Speaker 3:And then all the others that took the place, didn't it changed it too much? So you could no longer count on that of doing your job of? Ok, this is my cloak of invincibility. But if you did your job, they didn't care, because that wasn't the benchmark anymore. That's where you could see like a five to six minute response time grow into a nine minute response time. So the leadership of the fire department did not care about that anymore. They cared about whatever their bosses in the city told them to care about, which is typically being large and in charge. That's you know. Ok, we're the ones, and boom. So yeah.
Speaker 1:So, and I didn't know you're going to ask this. We didn't know this was going to be the topic, but I was just happened to be carrying out caring because I'm reviewing it again for what we're going to teach. And it's the Phoenix Fire Department way that we put together as an organization where we actually outlined what good behavior looks like and bad behavior looks like, right, even though we all know that we came together as an organization, we said, ok, this is what it means to treat people nice and this is what mean looks like. If you don't have that from the top of your organization down, when you get the asshole battalion chief or your next level supervisor and you don't have something to hold them accountable, because people will say the same thing what's just their attitude?
Speaker 1:That guy's just got bad attitude. Well, what's what is he doing? Well, he's threatening me, he's doing this, he's doing, but that's not attitude. Those are behaviors, those are actions, those are correctable within a process. But you got to have a process in place and that's what that guy had before he left. He had this and he believed in it and we all believed in it. And then, after he left, this was never spoke of again yeah, and then behavior became I don't know. I guess it just, it just wasn't, it wasn't enforced using this, but you can enforce right how you treat people.
Speaker 2:Well, I know you've codified this and some of the other organizations you've been in chief of. How do you go about promoting, like, discovering and then promoting what your culture?
Speaker 1:was so. So it's interesting because, yeah, so I'll put that the camera If you can see that. I don't know how to do that.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:So that's the the PFD way, which this is, from what the 1980s yeah, something like that yeah.
Speaker 1:So when I went to uh, uh, well, every fire department I've went to we've done something similar to this, where it's like we started talking about it, so that deal. When I come in, it's when I heard that, hey, are you going to start holding these people accountable chief? And you're going to start holding these people accountable chief, and it's like what's going on. You start hearing their attitude, their attitude, and then you realize, no, it's behavior. So it's like, hey, do we all agree that there's a certain amount of, there's a certain level of behavior that we ought to be following? And you get your command team to buy in on it. And then you put together a process, because it can't come directly from the fire chief down, it's got to be an organization who will approach to it. And then we put together teams in each one of the organizations I was with and we got people from every. We got firefighters, engineers, fire captains, chief officers, labor leaders and we put together what do we want the behaviors to look like? And it all pretty much looked like this, but there was some changes to it, there were some additions to it, and then everybody agreed no, this is way we ought to look. And we were able to process that organizationally and then we sent it out to the membership and we did that and then we used the accountability model where we gave the expectations, we gave them a book, we trained on the book, we held them accountable and it wasn't perfect and it's never going to be perfect and there's going to be people out there going to fight it every step of the way, like I've had. But it takes up an entire organization to process it and I guarantee you that, whatever organization it is, people want to be treated nice and people want.
Speaker 1:There's a large number of people who, when they see other people being treated bad by one or two guys like we had a boss who was just a knucklehead well, he didn't have any support in the system there was people everywhere within the system saying, yeah, good luck to you, you got to work for that guy, he's a knucklehead. So the system gets around the be nice part and it's not the, the being I use the words be nice but there's actual actionable behaviors behind the be nice part that you have to follow and then you hold people accountable. But you got to identify what bad behavior looks like, you got to identify what good behavior looks like, and then you got to say, okay, we want to accept this and you process that down through to the customer too. Right, there's organizations that don't have conversations about how they should treat the customer. Well, this should be a part of it, but along with that, you should have conversations about how you're going to treat each other within the system. So it gets processed through to the customer.
Speaker 1:Is that? Is that kind of what you're looking for?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I I Much. We always talk about how lucky we are. We get to go out and see how other fire departments operate, and I'll go into organizations where they're not very proficient. They're not on it when they pull up on a 911 call. They just have a lot of issues and failures and a lot of times it's because the internal focus is so negative and they're just trying to figure out where the next grievance is going to be and how can we be against sea shift and those types of things, instead of focusing on the service delivery that they're going to have. So it ends up that their service delivery is unsuccessful, which leads to a whole circle of them being not very proud of their organization.
Speaker 1:Well, if you look at every successful organization out there, whether it's McDonald's or whatever, macy's or whatever, they have a conversation on the front end of how they're going to treat each other and how they're going to treat the customer. Why wouldn't we do that at the fire department? Right? And we always say that. You know, mrs Smith, she gets whoever we send her and she doesn't get to give her the phone book and say, oh yeah, this guy got a. This company has a five star rating. I'm going to call this one. This one has no business. What is that? Better Business Bureau Complaints. I'm going to call in. They get the fire department that shows up and from their neighborhood. So it's our responsibility to make sure they get the best they can get. And sure, we've got knuckleheads within the system, but we got to hold the knuckleheads in check. Sometimes a knucklehead is your boss, nick.
Speaker 3:We provide technical service in emotional settings, essentially. So there's two different things going on. So we show up to do the technical part. That's our job right. So you have some people who are benevolent and some people that are assholes, and I think that's where the water breaks on the thing. So if I'm a benevolent person and I show up to do my job, I do the technical piece. That's what I'm trained to do. So whether it's CPR or laying an attack, a supply line, an advance in attack lines, whatever that looks like, there's a level of competence to execute in those maneuvers, those task level evolutions.
Speaker 3:The way we deliver that service is based on what kind of a person you are. So if you're default to being an asshole, is that's the way you're going to deliver that service? And those people you hear them and they'll say it's our job to educate the customer Is you shouldn't have called us for these eight reasons? So I'm going to educate you. No, they didn't call to get educated. This ain't school asshole. They called because of this, that or the other thing. So, whether it's, you define it as legitimate or an illegitimate. Call you legitimately, get paid every two weeks. So that's your commitment. As you showed up. You take the money, you do the work.
Speaker 3:So whoever's running that fire department sets that tone. That's the person at the top. Well, we had a benevolent dictator running our fire department, so that's what you would default to. When that person went away, then the new thing was not your job or this or that. It was me being popular as the fire chief with my bosses in the community, because that's what I have done for the last.
Speaker 3:So that becomes the driving force for the fire department to make me look good as the fire chief, so I can represent you a certain way. And that's what they would say Is I can't represent you when you don't do this, this and this. So you're like you're not a parent, is you're a warden in a prison now. So I'm going to start acting and giving you that back. And this is the other part of 911. Response is de-escalation. So if you go in there with the attitude like I'm going to be nice and I'm going to take care of this problem, you're already diffusing an emotional situation. When you show up to educate people, you're not diffusing anything as you're ramping it back up and saying these are my expectations as you're overlord and master.
Speaker 1:Now there are times when police officers and guys just don't want to leave it the way it was. But they need to educate people sometime right their role. If you run a red light, they need to educate you because if you do that unsafe act over and over again, eventually you're going to get some air.
Speaker 3:So I don't think the police should educate us. I don't think that's a good society approach for America.
Speaker 1:I think they can do that in a way that makes sense for them. But we're not educators. We don't enforce.
Speaker 3:No, and we suggest.
Speaker 1:Well, and people don't have to qualify for our service. We said that the other day. They don't have to smell a certain way, they don't have to be completely sober, they don't have to have any kind of pronoun that makes sense. They should not qualify for our service. And a lot of times we arrive on the scene and we've done it throughout our career is we'll look at them and go, oh gosh, this guy, he doesn't even deserve us being in this house. Look at this house. They got four freaking cars in the driveway and parked in the yard. Why are we here and we start qualifying, whether they are, judging them, whether they qualify for our service, and we shouldn't do that.
Speaker 3:We used to see Bunghole George three times a week. He lived on the street and people would call. I mean, that's just what happened, and these are in the days where you'd have to pull over and use a pay phone to call, okay, and so he got wheeled around a lot, but I mean you just and you really couldn't be mean to him, but you knew him. So there was a different kind of relationship with us and some of the regulars that you would see routinely.
Speaker 1:Bunghole George was not a nice guy. It was hard to be nice. You had to be nice from a distance or from behind him, because the truth about Bunghole George is he had one or two legs missing I can't remember where it's one and he had a colostomy bag and he'd sit in his wheelchair and when you had come up to service to check him out if you were a new guy, you didn't realize that he could hit that colostomy bag and shoot that stuff about 10 feet out. So he wasn't a nice person. So we understand and that's not a snivel call that started like in this era with generation whatever. We've been doing that forever, All right, so this individual.
Speaker 3:One night they're in a field sitting around a fire bonfire, right, just having a good time. Bunghole falls face first into the fire and he's got some free burning going on. By the time his associates figure out it's not a piece of wood, it's Bunghole. They call 911 and a shift went on him. So we relieve him in the morning and they said, ah, you ain't gonna see Bunghole again. And they tell us the story. It's too bad, you know, we go about our business. One month later Bunghole's going down the street and his whole heads wrapped in gauze except for his mouth, and he's just spitting at people. And you're like one day he's just gonna be ahead rolling down the street expelling fluid at the world.
Speaker 1:And we didn't nickname him. His buddies did. Oh yeah, well, no, that's what you would ask him.
Speaker 3:He put it on the form Bunghole George. No, he dokey.
Speaker 1:It wasn't a mean spirited thing. That's what, honestly, I'd never.
Speaker 3:Well, and on the weekends he would wheel into the station. It was rig day and they would. They'd soap him up and brush him and rinse him off and he'd wheel away.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when he was, when he was sober, he wasn't as bad as when he was drunk.
Speaker 3:And then some of those, some of those rummies. If you got them sober and they'd start talking. You think you were an airplane pilot during the war. Oh yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the next day you come back and I was a ferry boat operator during the 1800s on the Mississippi. Oh okay, you're just insane. Yeah, I could follow you.
Speaker 1:But we, but you, you, you can you imagine if your boss treats you like shit and he's, he, he or she's mean to mean to mean over and they're worried about shit? Like, instead of the way you just treated Bunghole George cause you were nice to Bunghole George, when you get back in the station they're looking at you like what's up with your shoes not being tied or some freaking stupid thing.
Speaker 1:That's what it is Always looking to enforce something, and that's that's what it is. They focus on those people that are kind of mean spirited. If you watch them, they focus on the little bitty stuff they focus on and Bruno talks about it in in the leadership program. That we're stealing from them is that they they focus on appearance, they focus on maintenance, and maintenance is important.
Speaker 3:Attendance is important, easily enforceable.
Speaker 1:They focus on those and you don't focus on safety, customer service.
Speaker 3:How to do your job better.
Speaker 3:These same people. You sit through an after action review of a hazard zone operation and they're clueless and you're like the the probationary firefighter has a better understanding of task level operations than you do, pal Don't? Yeah, and that's what they would do, is they'd go around and say, oh, this was great and this was great. And then they're oh, your uniform's a little out of color. Yeah, you need to work on that. You know what I'm saying Really? Yeah, my engineers doesn't have an ass in his pants right now. You're not going to like that and that's a firechaps.
Speaker 1:Exactly so. Inside, outside customer service.
Speaker 2:Well, I think we have, before we go, a little bit of a timeless tactical truth that plays into that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this nice mean sitting on the curb with Mrs Smith To have empathy in our jobs is very important. But I've really been talking a lot lately with my folks about de-victimizing people as soon as possible, and Bruno used to talk about that all the time. Why is it important for us to de-victimize and sit with Mrs Smith?
Speaker 3:It's the way you finish the call. So we get there and figure out what's going on, intervene. Once you take action, then you start to de-escalate the thing, and part of that is giving control back to the person that called, and that varies, I mean, based on the reason they called. So if Mrs Smith's got a burned out kitchen and living room, then there's going to be some stuff post-incident things that is going to affect her life greatly. So us finishing that call for us men, okay, we got to connect her with who's going to take care of this next. So, and then I guess that's where you educate her to okay, this is what just happened to you and here's what's going to happen after this. And you're going to have these people coming in and now, depending on the part of town you work in, you got insurance companies, you got the Red Cross, you got After Fire stuff we would have the AR vans back in the day. So you had these resources that you could connect the customer to, like even sometimes their own family is. You have somebody in town. Yeah, my son lives three miles away. Well, let's call your son and have your son come over. In the meantime, we'll get you your medicine and some clothes and your toothbrush and your kitty cat, and so we'll collect all that. So maybe it takes an extra 10, 15 minutes to finish the call like that, but what you do is you hand the patient off.
Speaker 3:See, alan Brunerceini used to talk, is he provided service in a way where you didn't do that, where you did the technical part and when that was done you disconnected. There was no emotional peace to it because we were strong and silent and you know, just signals of the community to keep it safe. Well, the new day it's like, no, there's a customer in it. So that becomes the driving force. It's really once the fire is no longer a threat that becomes the primary thing is okay, how do we get you back to where you're a self sustaining, functioning member of society? I mean and he used to talk about that that is a big deal. When the government shows up, they help you out, they connect you with the next set of services you need and then they leave. We don't send her 800 bills, we don't sell her information, we don't come back to reeducate or any of that. It's like, no, we did our job. Here you go. If you need something, call these three numbers again.
Speaker 1:So when I think about that. I think about that Mrs Smith sitting on that bench is a crack addict that's lived on that bench for a week and a half.
Speaker 3:Bunghole George.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's Bunghole George or whoever, and it's like sitting there with them for a second or a minute or whatever. Why you focus on the work. Nick said that in our leadership we got to go back and focus on the work. So what can we do for this person? Well, narcan, get them in an ambulance, get them transported, whatever you can do for them. But you know, at the end of that call, when that homeless person and his buddies are sitting there at the, and it's irritating, I get it. We're going to go back to our fire station, we're going to eat a big lunch, we're going to get in our big red trucks with our four wheel drives and we're going to drive away to our houses and we got a pretty good life. And if you could just spend a little bit of time focusing on? Okay, let me just empathize with this person, or even sympathize, because maybe you can't even put yourself in that position. It's like I could never see myself that way.
Speaker 1:We know people that were firefighters in big trucks that later on slept on benches because of addiction. So it could happen to anybody. So for me, the real challenge for our firefighters is not the Mrs Smith with that kitchen fire. I think that's a challenge too. But the biggest challenge is how do you keep that same temperament and that same giving perspective to people that are really, they're just down right? That's the hard part, that's the challenge, and you make a big deal out of that, right?
Speaker 1:When the fire captain sees their firefighter treating somebody kindly in those situations, go back to the station and say, hey, man, what you did there was really well. Now, next time don't get so close, because maybe they have, you know, whatever it is teachable moment, but really hold them accountable for that really good behavior that they just witnessed there. Or if somebody treats them like shit, you take them back to the station and say, hey, we can't, we can't do that, right. That is why we can't do that, because it's a direct reflection on us. Now, if you treat that person like shit and it's witnessed, say you stand them and I've seen this too and you've seen it too we stand over them like we're, we want to kick the shit out of them and cars are going by. They don't remember the guy on the ground, they remember the attitudes of the people standing over them and how they treated that person, and I think we just need to be very, very careful with that as we go forward.
Speaker 3:Well, a big issue in the fire services PTSD from your career is you know, you see this and that and the other thing, depending on who you talk to. Some mental health people say, no, if you're a fireman, you got PTSD from your job, and others are. It's like well, now there's four things, that if you have those four things, then you've got PTSD. Well, as I look at it, I don't have those four things. I have no trouble going to sleep, I don't have flashbacks of that kind of thing and whatever, the other two are, so it hasn't caused that much disruption.
Speaker 3:And part of that the protective effect is being nice to people Is. I worked with two engineers when I was on a company and they were the most judgmental son of a bitch as I knew that I ever worked with. And they were I mean, they had their own personal beliefs about how life looked and what you were supposed to do, and they didn't agree with each other on about 90% of it. But they got along, they were best friends and it was through the work we did and so. And they would show up on calls and they would not judge people or educate them, they would make simple declarative statements my husband tried to kill me and he beat me and did this and that and the other thing.
Speaker 3:My engineer, ronnie, would say ma'am, that's horrible, but we don't have a pill for that, you know. So he would just sit down and try to talk them through it and get them to where they felt better after we left them, before we got there. That became the thing. No, just don't piss them off and try to deescalate and maybe they'll go back to bed here, have a bottle of water and you know, we'll give you some taxi vouchers or if you identified a work objective when you go on these calls is try to make them feel better after you leave.
Speaker 1:Mm, hmm, that'd be a pretty awesome objective to try to shoot for on every call.
Speaker 3:Yeah, You're not going to do that every time. Oh no, I mean that's.
Speaker 1:I focus on the work, but one of our objectives with our work is to make them feel better. Yeah, it's a pretty awesome.
Speaker 3:Isn't that what most people want from a service encounter? I go in and I get some service and I leave feeling better than when I went in because I got whatever need met, like if it's going to a restaurant or the hardware store or wherever. And like fans said to start this off, man, service is going to shit today, as you go into a place, if you get good service, it's an accident, it's yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, Maya Angelou said that people will remember how you made them feel.
Speaker 2:They'll forget a lot of what you said, but if you made somebody feel like they were a hindrance or you made them feel like crap for calling 911 for the 10th time this week or whatever the case is, they're going to remember that and you know there's a lot of stuff we can get away with probably is as care providers. But if we make somebody feel like crap, they're going to carry that with them and they're going to tell other people about it. And you know that damn fire department did this when they came to my house.
Speaker 3:So I you know, and usually, in most cases, it's the opposite. Most people have a very good experience with fire department.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, oh, I'm tempted. I mean that.
Speaker 3:And I think that's what we want is an occupation of organizations and the rest of it.
Speaker 1:That's our brand. Yeah, if we don't, if we don't monitor that, it could go to shit. Oh, it can.
Speaker 3:Yeah, see, and we parlayed that during our careers. As you can see, the people that did their jobs did it very well. So we started off with a certain benefit package when we began our career and at the end of it it was did not reflect what it looked like starting, and that's because we had an organization that figured out okay, this is what the people want, we're going to give them this, we're going to put it on TV through the news for five minutes every single night, and that it just kept, and then your benefit package would grow and you would get more of this. But in 1980, the city manager says over my dead body, will you ever get paid for any of your sick leave? When I retired, they gave me tens of thousands of dollars for unused sick leave. I mean, and that was because we showed up and we did our jobs and we were nice to people. That is the 100% reason why.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a good spot to leave it, gentlemen. Great discussion. Thanks as always, guys. It was good hanging out with you. We'll be back real soon. If you've got questions, comments, whatever, send them to us. Our information is in the show notes Until next time. Thanks so much for listening to B Shifter.