Ever felt that the rumor mill beats the actual communication speed in your organization? Are you tired of lengthy, unproductive meetings? John Vance, Nick Brunacini, and Terry Garrison, tackle the intricacies of effective communication strategies within fire departments. We unwrap our experiences in streamlining administrative needs and implementing new policies.
We want your helmet (for the AVB CTC)! Check this out to find out more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg5_ZwoCZo0
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Please subscribe and share. Thank you for listening!
This episode was recorded at the AVB CTC in Phoenix, AZ on November 14, 2023
Ever felt that the rumor mill beats the actual communication speed in your organization? Are you tired of lengthy, unproductive meetings? John Vance, Nick Brunacini, and Terry Garrison, tackle the intricacies of effective communication strategies within fire departments. We unwrap our experiences in streamlining administrative needs and implementing new policies.
We want your helmet (for the AVB CTC)! Check this out to find out more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg5_ZwoCZo0
Sign up for the B Shifter Buckslip, our free weekly newsletter here: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/fmgs92N/Buckslip
Shop B Shifter here: https://bshifter.myshopify.com
Register for the 2024 Hazard Zone Conference here: http://hazardzonebc.com/
All of our links here: https://linktr.ee/BShifter
Please subscribe and share. Thank you for listening!
This episode was recorded at the AVB CTC in Phoenix, AZ on November 14, 2023
Welcome to B-Shifter. It is John Vance, nick Barunassini, terry Garrison, and today, ask the chiefs, get questions from you. You can send them in to johnvance at bshiftercom and we'd love to get your questions. We'd love to talk about your questions, so we will do that today. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 2:That's the Mui Bien, I'm fine. He's dandy, we're fine and dandy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what's new with you?
Speaker 2:With me. Yeah, nothing, yeah, just leadership that we're working on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how's that coming Some?
Speaker 2:articles coming out. I think there's going to be an article coming out here very shortly on function number one, which is start with the work. I think we talked a little bit about that on our last podcast and Nick and I wrote that and the editor, Michelle Guerrero, fixed it after I wrote it and approved it. And I got the final yesterday. It looks pretty good.
Speaker 3:Well, Garrison wrote it and I just commented on a part. And then Guerrero, like you said, she did a really good job.
Speaker 2:Bleached it all. I used too many words to say too little, and then she fixes that.
Speaker 1:I have to have questions for her. Is this possessive or is it plural? Or do I put? And it's always at like 10 o'clock at night before the B-shifter Bucks look comes out, because I started looking at it again and it's like oh, I'm not so good with the English language, sometimes I go from past tense to present and then back to past.
Speaker 3:Or second person, first person and sometimes I mean for it to look like that and read that way and it'll get changed and I'll say no, I meant for it to say what it said it's. It's well, that's not correct. You edit a journal called B-shifter. It's the way I want it to read.
Speaker 1:Thank you, make up our own language.
Speaker 3:And sometimes I actually am successful in doing it.
Speaker 2:No, she'll. Sometimes she does. She takes a couple of my words and tries to use a better, bigger word and I go. No, go back.
Speaker 3:But she's so smart, you know she was going to run some something the other day and she says you know, it's the first time I've said this, but it's not very often that you can run an article where there's a graphic of a firefighter fantasizing of decapitating people. And I said, yeah, we talk about the struggle with our inner demons all the time, especially as it gets later in the evening. So it's yeah, these are issues that we need to explore and consider so we can dominate them.
Speaker 2:Some people are painting the neck and you try to remove that neck. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, it's. It's more metaphorical than anything else. We never killed. We never killed anyone on a call. They can prove.
Speaker 2:Hey, check out that mechanism of injury.
Speaker 1:Yes, oh, that mechanism of injury.
Speaker 3:I just want to rub it all over me.
Speaker 1:Well, I have to fly in a helicopter to the hospital that's three blocks away.
Speaker 3:You know it's the true things that hurt the most. You did what? Yeah, oh no, morning traffic's a bitch, no, not helicopters, but I like to sound a helicopter.
Speaker 1:Is your life worth $21,000?. You don't have to thank me. Hey, we got to ask the chiefs. Okay, wow, this this would be. You know, I'm really interested to see what Terry says about this one.
Speaker 2:Oh, there you go.
Speaker 1:But it's dear chiefs. Communication seems to be one of the biggest problems in our organization. Not on scene communications, but internal communications about administrative needs, new policies and general practices. It seems the rumor mill is faster than actual communication from the front office. What methods have you used to ensure messages are being transmitted up and down the chain?
Speaker 2:Yeah, communication I don't want to talk about it.
Speaker 2:So the rumor mill works really well. You can actually use that right If you use it right. So put something on your desk and say, highly confidential, don't turn it over and just leave it there for about an hour. The news will get out. Oh yeah, but yeah, you got to have some sort of formal communication line right. The problem that I see is that we over communicate goofy stuff too much. I mean, there's too many emails going out, there's too many memos or is to even when with with our department Bruno back in a day, we would get something from every everybody, all the to all the chiefs, all the way down. It's like cheapest creepers. This is not working. So you get to the point where you just ignore everything. It's like going to the, to the mailbox now and you put your recyclable dumpster right next to the mailbox and take all that trash and throw it right in the mail because it's not worth reading, it's just garbage. So we had something in Phoenix that worked really well for quite a while and that was a buck slip.
Speaker 3:That was the best.
Speaker 2:That, that out of all of my scene, that was the best, because we play bucks.
Speaker 1:So what was that? How did that work?
Speaker 2:So it was. It would go out to all the fires and it was something in paper to back then and even today I think sometimes papers better than it's the far superior.
Speaker 3:You shouldn't. Well, we produce a buck slip. Today. We converted the B shifter magazine into a buck slip. So to your point, vance is like we would send out every three to four months a new issue of B shifter. Well, it makes more sense to send out a weekly thing to everybody and then you can just it's the same content. Essentially. It's just that you divide it up and you send it out weekly, so it becomes more of a thing, and then you don't have to spend as much time with it either. So you get the the B shifter buck slip. You can go through and 20, 30 minutes, less than an hour for most of it. Well, the B-Shifter magazine was pretty dense and had a lot you know, so you would go through it over a week or so or whatever it was. I think it's just an easier, more digestible way to give you the material.
Speaker 2:And what it was is the different divisions would put whatever memo was most important that week and they would put one or two memos in there that would give you information. So it was what.
Speaker 3:Maybe it was open to everybody, which was a good thing. So in like, some weeks it was really thick and others it was a little thinner. But the other thing that was in there was all the EMT recertification stuff and EMS. So like the training bulletins that would come out and say, okay, this is the roster of who's got to go to staff three weeks from now to go through their EMT recert. So all that timely kind of information you would get and this kind this was developed before email. So you know you didn't have email to send out to barrage everybody with.
Speaker 3:And I think what Terry says is right there's too many forms of communication. There wasn't our fire department, so we had this weekly buck slip. Then you would have like these, these quarterly meetings, that for all the different committees that we use to run the fire department. So there was just so much going on all the time it was hard to keep track of what everybody was doing. And then you throw quarterly reports in it, which was more of a formalized organizational approach to it, and I remember as a BC and nobody told you this my boss comes in he says okay, it's your turn and you've got to do the quarterly reports for the battalion for the district, this, this go round. Well, what's that look like? And so you sit down and he shows you the template. So we all have to report these different things special projects, number of incidents, bigger events, yada, yada, yada.
Speaker 3:So the first time I did it it took like I bet I spent two or three weeks like at work during the week, at least two or three hours a day building this thing, and I think, okay, this is what it is, I took it serious. And then they would compile all this stuff into the quarterly reports and so every quarter they would put out about 1000 pages of quarterly reports from all the different divisions, you know. So you had all the battalions, so all nine battalions would have their own quarterly report that we could compile and they report on the same things you know. So, battalion to battalion, you could look at what was going on. Then all the different divisions would have stuff in it, and then they would have a formalized meeting once it would be four to eight hours depending. I mean sometimes they cater lunch and they would go over quarterly reports.
Speaker 3:And then people would report, and you did that every three months. So, like the second time it came around and nobody read it was the other thing I thought, and I asked my dad who reads this? He says I read it. Okay great. So about a year into it they said it's your turn to do quarterly reports again. Okay, fine. Well, I just sat down from my computer in about four hours I spit the whole thing out and towards the end of it I started just making shit up. I remember reading that so liar?
Speaker 3:No, you showed it to me.
Speaker 2:I may have sent it to it, yeah.
Speaker 3:But like the city, next test was Glendale. Half my cause were in Glendale. So I said I made this thing up and I said Glendale's coming into Phoenix and they're breaking into stations and stealing the peanut butter out of the kitty. And I said so what I have done is, late at night, battalion three drives around, we look for these crews and we take them hostage and shave their heads so we can identify them quickly as they're running down the street with our kitty supplies. And there was a submarine that I had bid and spec that we were going to put in the lagoon that we kind of shared between our first two, first two areas. So it was just this nobody.
Speaker 2:Right. So what happened was? You shared it with me like two weeks after.
Speaker 3:I didn't.
Speaker 1:I go.
Speaker 2:No, let me show you, but you know, so what?
Speaker 3:you could go to jail for some of the stuff I put in there. I thought nobody reads these things.
Speaker 2:You know so what I did in a couple of departments, because that was the book slip work for a while, because the really the key to the book slip.
Speaker 2:the next, and I left out at the time, there was a page in the back, a couple pages in the back, where you would sell stuff or you would ask questions. So you would ask a specific question about something, it would go into the book slip office, wherever that was, and they would route it to the appropriate chief and the chief would have a couple days or a week to respond and he get it out in the next. So you would actually some of those questions are really good and then people would sell their mini bikes or whatever.
Speaker 3:It was called the back draft. The back draft was the best part. You saved it.
Speaker 2:It was like dessert at the end, but what happened was after a few years that people were writing like if I knew you had some kind of issue going on, I would write a question about that and nobody would know that it was all. So then all the questions became a fodder for guys that you didn't know and the assistant chiefs were so disconnected from the organization they didn't realize that the questions are made up and they were just people screwing with other people. Wow, and so it kind of and then I think Bernal figured it out it's like, ok, we got to stop this.
Speaker 3:It became so exquisite is Chris Stewart and Mike Warrell would put. They would put propaganda in and fake stuff. So they did this deal once where there was this battalion chief on another shift that they screwed with constantly cheapest man in the history of the world. This guy was taking his family on vacation once and he's back and now he's got the RV hooked up, they're going to the mountains. The phone rings and they gave him like a 12 hour shift, the overtime shift on an Ambo. He pulled the truck right back into the garage. Sorry, kids Not going this week. Put us uniform. I went to work, worked on an Ambo 12 hours. They put this thing in at Costco where you got. If you bought one Caesar salad with chicken, you got a second one for Frank.
Speaker 3:Oh well, he cuts that out, man, he's going to eat free Costco chicken Caesar salad for the week and he goes in and he takes his coupon and I mean they almost called the police on him. Is that we don't have those coupons? It was all made up, it was in the Bucks lap.
Speaker 1:Oh, it was in the.
Speaker 2:Bucks lap the whole deal. Guys are selling other guys equipment and stuff.
Speaker 3:Guys would be in jail in Mexico over like things they shouldn't have been doing, like whatever, and they would. So they would make things up about this guy's name garage in Tijuana and it would appear and you think, how far can I take it? Just being completely out of bounds in the Bucks lap. They had to stop it. It was like a year. It was the greatest publication that existed. Well, shit, like in New York City. This kind of came up during this period where they were trying to figure out what to do is and you talked about it.
Speaker 3:Rumors are halfway around the world before the truth can wake up and put on the shoes. Right In New York City, if a firefighter gets arrested for something, it's usually like for DUI, domestic violence those are the mains. You know that the anybody who works in HR could tell you this. This is what happens in FDNY. They would publish a journal and they would put in your name that you were arrested, what for and what your penalty was, and then the discipline that you were getting in the fire department. Yeah, and they said, no, we're killing the rumors, this is what it is, it's all legal and you can get all this information from the court. They said that's what we do. Is we just that be worth reading?
Speaker 1:Oh, exactly, so I mean that's well, you think about it, the rumors that go around. You know Billy's missing. He hasn't been here for 30 days. What's going on with Billy?
Speaker 3:Oh, ok, yeah, you got suspended because, of HR, whatever Disclose.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hr, hr wouldn't. But I bet you that's something in their contract or something allows them to be able to disclose that, because I've seen them hanging up in New York City fire stations. Yeah, I mean it's, it's on the bulletin board.
Speaker 3:It's just, here's the facts. Wow, ok, yeah, you know, which is completely different, because most places, oh, it's under investigation, we can't discuss anything under investigation.
Speaker 2:I use that a lot.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, that's maybe a good answer, but we kind of know what's going on in the fire station, so you could say that to the, to the reporter, but it's a little different inside.
Speaker 2:That's absolutely true. So so back on your track, because that was fun.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But so I.
Speaker 3:I never know where this is going. I know right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I used in Houston because it's such a large department and it worked in a smaller department. So I tried in Houston. I used like a message from the chief, so it was titled, and I use in Glendale too and it's like so if it was coming from me, I thought, well, maybe somebody would read it a message from the chief and and I thought that would work well. But you know, it's one of those deals where you know it only if it feels good when you you check a box. I sent this out so it feels pretty good. I don't know who is reading it or not reading it. I found out later that you know the same people are going to stay connected and read it and that's probably about what 20, 30 percent maybe at the most that may read it, but a lot of people don't. Another thing they did in Glendale just kind of answer your question is Chris Gustafson.
Speaker 2:The guy who is there, who is a resource guy, did a really good job. He was running logistics or resource or support, whatever you want to call it, and he would put out a quarterly or I think it was a bimonthly, but he would put together a really nice package of what he was working on and it would maybe be four pages and he had some graphics to it and everything and he would send it out and people would read that. That was a great way to do it. But but, like you said, so you got to. You know, you could do the written, you could do the email, you could do the meetings. Meetings to me are the worst, or absolutely worse man. It's like we have meetings on top of this fireteeth, who have four hour meetings every Monday. What the hell can you do? What happened over the weekend that you got to talk about for four hours every Monday?
Speaker 3:Meetings have the greatest capacity for communicating with people because you're in person.
Speaker 1:But it's like the little boy that cried wolf like you said, is there's too many of them, as you're like no, I can't do this anymore.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're just meeting now to meet, and I think that's that's part of like the like the cup you want to fill up. Oh, I went to all these meetings. I'm a great employee, you know. Like no, you. All you did is you sat on your phone today and you played Solitaire while they talked about bullshit nobody cares about. I mean that's. Everybody gets to have a meeting. We're doing command training at the CTC. We had the highest attendance of any training, whether it was mandatory or voluntary. It was because people wanted to do it. It was important to them.
Speaker 2:It was training, not meeting now. Yeah, no, we were training and they said no, no, no, no.
Speaker 3:I'm going to learn how to sound better on the radio so people will respect me at a higher level. That's kind of what it was. Personnel HR calls up and they say we need 30 minutes of the next session. We've talked about this before in here. And why? Well, because we need to inform the workforce about the new grooming policy, to talk about tattoos and foo man shoes. We're having a real issue with that and I thought you know that does not fit into an IDLA Chasar zone anywhere. The way I deal with that is they wear full protective gear. We don't worry about beards or any of that. It's you know well. No, we're going to do it. No, you're not, thank you. Five minutes later the assistant chief calls back and says I outrank you, yeah, but I ain't in your division. Goodbye, uh-uh. The reason people come to this training is we don't talk about this silliness. This is a put it in the buck slip. You can't do this anymore. They know you've informed them, so now they're aware of the rule.
Speaker 3:We got into this deal about code three driving for a while where we were crashing trucks and hurting people. I remember there was a thing with the training that we had, as people were going to have to sign a document that they understood they couldn't run red lights anymore. And the union went crazy. They said you can't do this and you're like. Well, because it was like a contract where if you violated it you could be held criminally and all those other stuff. And you're like you know I guess that's a discussion for somebody else and personnel and legal and wherever else with the union I mean the administration and figure out how are we going to proctor this to you know, but at the end of the day, you can't run a red light anymore, asshole. So what you need to do is get the chiefs together and say, when you see them do this, this is what you have to do.
Speaker 3:So you kind of have a, and having a CTC was a great place to do that, because the stuff that typically will injure or kill you is operational in nature, and we had an ops training center where you could bring people in and you could discuss things that actually apply to like co three driving or like deployment of ambulances at the hazard zone and under IDLH and the supervision of what a captain, a company officer, had to do, particularly one who was the IC and kind of so. And that's why people came to the CTC is that nobody's ever given us a straight answer on this, and so, oh, no, no, no, no. We're answering questions now because we need to this is yeah, this is for us more than you guys.
Speaker 2:But don't, yeah, but you can't let your training be diluted with information that could be provided some other way.
Speaker 3:Communications basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so in Glendale they had, they still do. They have an EMS Wednesday for training, which is very effective. Everybody knows on Wednesday when you show up your crew is going to go.
Speaker 2:And if that's the day you're identified for that Wednesday you're going to go to training. Nobody so kind of having consistency and set expectations for people where they know, on this day I'm going to do this. If we could do that with communication, to that we say, ok, like that was what's good about the bucks, that they would come out on a specific day every week. People would read it. It had a beginning, a middle and an end and people would move on from that one to the next one. But what you see is you see a lot of communication like the people are there. You're being informed of something that's going to happen three months from now. Or that whole deal about the quarterly reports with the data.
Speaker 2:I hated that. Nobody gives a shit. That's a history lesson, for maybe some fire chiefs and maybe some other people within the system can use to get resources later, but fire fighters don't give a shit about Now. There are some that like to mark their calls and know, oh, we had more calls than anybody else. But in general people don't want it. They don't need all that data on the back end.
Speaker 3:No, my old man would tell. He'd say no, I use quarterly reports to run the fire department. This is how I keep everybody on track and do the thing. That's that. Well, hey, man, that's good for you, right? You just keep making up your silliness and having your fantasies and what you do at the third battalion and report on that. He hears that story about us having a submarine and we're at war with the Glendale Fire Department and he says you know, I, early on, I wrote in the first page, the introduction of the first quarterly report, that that your fingers touched poison. On the first pages and the only adedote is contained on the pages in the back.
Speaker 1:So you have to read the whole thing, and I said so you knew from the moment you started this what you were doing.
Speaker 3:He says exactly. He says it's it's not to inform so much, it is to keep people on track. That's, he says when you have to report on these things, that becomes your job, you know? Oh, look at the big brain on, Bruno. You're manipulating us, is what you're doing. It's exactly. He says yeah, I was raised by an Italian mother who believed in the Catholic religion. That's man.
Speaker 2:I think, yeah, I think any organization where you have decentralized workers, like we have, is communication is an issue, right? So how do you communicate with them best? I think you ought to try a fire chiefs ought to try a couple of different things and see what work, whether it's an email that you need to somehow click on and then you know you read it. There was a time in our fire department Nick I was back then when you got a really important email. It came with your pay stuff. Now, of course, that's silly nowadays, but if you could tie it to where there's some pretty good, you remember that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, some sort of an email that was like an actual unions customer service book. It was right with stapled right. Wow, that's very, that's powerful message, yeah, or?
Speaker 2:your W2. Yeah, exactly your uniform allowance, right. But yeah, I love that my wife never knew about those.
Speaker 3:Yeah, nobody did for a while.
Speaker 2:But so I think, but you got it. You can't just not communicate, you can't quit right, you can't say it was nothing's working, so I'm not going to communicate, because then you seem like you've got to stay connected somehow. What's worked for you?
Speaker 1:John, and you can't over communicate those.
Speaker 2:The other thing is, deludes it and people don't give a shit, right yeah, people don't make quick listen. Look at the problem we're talking about.
Speaker 3:It's good. How do you communicate? Keep the workforce connected? Yeah, every one of us has a goddamn smartphone that we're on all day. I mean, that's a communication device, I guess. So, yeah, and you're seeing that more and more people are using the well they have been forever social media to get your message out and the rest of it. It's just. I mean, it's like using your toilet to make spaghetti in. No, it doesn't work. It's, yeah, social media isn't used to communicate.
Speaker 2:I don't think it's. Yeah, you're an IT kind of internet.
Speaker 3:Mm, hmm.
Speaker 2:Intranet yes, those still are still pretty effective.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've got an intranet.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:It's called insight, but yeah, you can get on there and get get it, get your information. Yeah, I think that one of the things that we want to watch is because you've dealt with these employees before that want to send an email out on everything.
Speaker 1:It's the daily email and we say save all of that, don't send the entire department and email every day. Or you know all all these different divisions. Every two weeks we put out a newsletter called smoke signals. Put it in that Now if it's something important, you know there's been a death in the department, or say you know those are the, those are the bulletins that that has to get out right away. But anything else that's a normal operating deal and we do the same thing. We have operations reports every week. That's that is in the. That goes right into the smoke signal. So everybody gets to read the reports if they want to. But that helps the fire chief run the department because it's going to help with requests for resources or new station staffing or whatever else that we're doing. But I might, my piece of advice is be transparent. Don't hold back information, but put it out in regular intervals, whether it's every week or every two weeks or every month. Collect it all, give it to them and then it also let them know how the fire department.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you kind of said you got to have a clear and House for that. It can't come from just everybody. Yeah, all you know, people are sending out emails to the entire.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it becomes therapy. Yeah, and it's not the right way to do it. I got that to where I have people.
Speaker 2:I got to get this out right away. Well, let me see what it is. No, no, why would you need to get this out right away?
Speaker 1:You know we're going to change training next month. Well, no, put that. Put that in the newsletter. Yeah, that's a schedule. That's in the schedule, yeah.
Speaker 3:See if you can electronically control the schedule for everybody in the fire department. That's a huge deal because that's where you put the oh, here's the change, and you just go to your. When the crew comes in in the morning, that should be what they're looking at. Okay, what's on our calendar for today? In fact, if they're the regular crew there, they should be looking at that to shift. They're getting off and what are we doing? Next shift? See, that way the engine oh, the engineer knows it's rigged. I got to call in sick. Next shift no-transcript. So being informed. You know that One of the things we did, which was quite fascinating, is we took this to the whole next level, way back when, when we opened up our own TV station.
Speaker 3:I mean, we ended up with the TV station. The city of Phoenix was able to strong arm Cox Cable and say we need our own production facilities for the city and we'll give you, whoever we give the exclusive contract to for Cable, that comes into it. You got to figure out, you got to be able to broadcast out of our public safety facilities. So you know, that's where you can like, take the airwaves over and let people know there's an emergency, whatever the hell it is. So our fire chief said well, we're going to use that as a, we're going to do one hour of TV every week, we're going to put out.
Speaker 3:And so the first guy went in and it was like corporate TV, where there wasn't a host and it was just this stupid elevator music and a bunch of graphics that you've read, and then sometimes, every now and then, they'd highly produce something with an air raider. That was a bunch of B roll. And you thought, no, this is something you put in the waiting room. Nobody gives a shit about any of this. Oh, music, oh, exactly. Well, we ended up. However it happened, my brother and I ended up at PFN, and so we said, no, we're changing this, it was fate. Yeah, it was, it was, it was meant to be, so it was beautiful. I remember the dispatchers in the alarm room said they started calling my brother, jed Clampett, or Jethro Jethro Baudi because his daddy, his daddy.
Speaker 3:Jed Clampett bought him a TV station. Well, I worked that into like a promo thing. I just pissed my brother, yeah they can't.
Speaker 2:It's hysterical man, Come on.
Speaker 3:I think we'll you know, we can really do something with this. You know dress up and why I could be somebody else. We'll get Ellie May, I think. No, we're not.
Speaker 2:I hear there's some fire chiefs that are doing videos and then they send it out and yeah, I tried doing that, that's not.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah and it's like some Eva Perone stuff. Okay, message from the chief. Those just lend themselves to be in sarcastic commenting, you know so we did after action reviews for a while after action. That's what got us down into PFN is we were doing after action reviews, and with just one thing led to another.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, it's kind of like I guess it's content right, you got to have good content if you're going to want somebody to read it and what brings people into reading. After action reviews.
Speaker 1:You guys were entertaining.
Speaker 2:That brought people in the entertainment value.
Speaker 3:Well, we used to say that, like it was broken into thirds. A third of them watched it because they hated it, a third of them watched it because they loved it, and a third of them just weren't going to do anything anyway, so it didn't matter.
Speaker 1:Didn't people pirate cable boxes back then?
Speaker 3:Yeah, Like citizens yeah.
Speaker 1:That just to get the PFN content? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because they're for about a year it was. I mean, there was going to be four or five minutes in every broadcast that probably shouldn't have been there. I don't know that you could do it today.
Speaker 2:They would round you up and you would get charged, but he's right, I would go to you know being a roving captain or running around as a battalion chief. I would have people one third of man. That was great. Did you see that You're going to say that, freaking neck, I hate that. Why is he doing it?
Speaker 3:That's embarrassing, I mean. So it was like oh, wait for next week.
Speaker 2:People that hated him watched it, so they could hate him more.
Speaker 3:Oh, they were the biggest fans. It was like the Howard Stern show, it was. Yeah, they watch you because they hate you.
Speaker 1:So the secret of that, the reason that it was successful, though, was because it was done entertaining. Well, it has good content.
Speaker 3:We called it, had you taming at the time it was is the bullshit word we made up, but it was like 95%, just good, straight training content.
Speaker 3:If you followed it, you would have success in whatever you were, whether it was laying in supply lines or doing fire attack, or we got to the point where you were actually getting like CE credit for like EMS stuff. And they say it's just so boring, though, to watch an hour of EMS training on TV and that's what came in. They said don't do that anymore. We need it broken up, like you guys do, because we like the five to 10 minute things. And then what we would do is it was easier to make a bunch of smaller clips and like even creatively, and then you could like use these clips and play one off the other, and so it would like we did an elevator deal on elevator operations and high rise buildings during fires, right, and so it was like a 15 minute video and it was full of just excellent information about how you safely use elevators when you have a floor on fire.
Speaker 3:The only silliness we had is like the narrators there talking to like his crew and this is what we do and he pushes the elevator button, the elevator comes down, doors open up and they're getting ready to go in and Dr Tulio comes out and looks at him like they're insects and just storms off. That was the comedy. Yeah, it was it, that was it. It wasn't 30 seconds long and that was the whole thing we did during that little piece. So that was it, but that was the hook that they were just waiting.
Speaker 1:It's a little Easter egg. Everyone's waiting for it to pop up because they know something funny is going to pop up during the middle of the serious. Well, it was all outlaw TV.
Speaker 3:So, like we introduced stations and shifts, so we would go to a station, videotape all three shifts, and then we would say what's your favorite song for the station? And so some rock and roll song, we would put it on. And we've violated every copyright deal in the history of copyright stuff. Because it was all closed circuit in the fire department. You thought nobody knew what the rules were Like. Our video crew would go out and videotape real calls and so you would have people's images in these videos.
Speaker 3:And I remember one of the PIO gals early on says, well, no, you got to get their permission. And you're like, no, you don't. The media can, they're unconscious. Yeah, the media, exactly. Well, I mean there's dead people, there's hands, feet, I mean it's just, it's like faces of death TV, some of it. You're like, no, I can't, but anyway, you could do that back then. Well, today you can't do that. I mean there's a whole set of rules and privacy. And so it was just the 80s and 90s were an easier time to be like a social society. I guess there were less laws that went with that.
Speaker 2:So you talk about. You know what brings a man, what's the hook. So in a lot of organizations in ours the meeting the hook with Bruno, right, so everyone's on. I don't know how often he did it, whether it was quarterly or whatever, but he'd have captain's meetings and he would. So people didn't miss those. Man, if you had a chance to sit down in front of Bruno with all the rest of the captains on about half the captains on that shift for a couple hours, you made those meetings. Now there's a time commitment to a fire chief. I was able to do that in some of the smaller departments I worked and, like you know, houston that would have been oh, he preferred those to everything, but those are so good.
Speaker 2:So he would bring them in and do that and but other. I've seen other fire chiefs in that same city try it and it doesn't work because what they do is they come in and I'm being critical here for a moment because I don't want anybody else out there to do. What they did is they would come in and they would be in the room, but it would be more of a reporting session where they would have each one of their division, each one of their assistant chiefs, go around the room and would tell and it was just reporting and it was. It was a waste of time. People didn't want to attend it from what I heard and I wouldn't want to attend it.
Speaker 2:But when you got the fire chief right there and you just one or two topics, just maybe even just one, maybe something that's happened organizationally, maybe a current event type situation with a I don't know a call you went on or an incident or whatever, those two would capture everybody and we would sit there for two hours and wouldn't want to leave and you got face to face with the fire chief, which means a lot to a lot of people did for us because we respected them, we wanted to be there that's. That's not a bad way to hold a meeting, but to bring everybody in and just report, have each report, and then it's just like chin boogie.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so in those captains meetings where all the other chiefs in there, or was it just the captains in Bruno, it was everybody.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the chiefs who come in and but see, there's trust in there too, right? So you could ask Bruno certain things in front of your chief and it feels like you're not going to get one of those. Hey, man, would you ask that kind of thing? Why did you? Why'd you go around and chain a command or whatever? So there's a lot of trust in that. But he would sit in those meetings and he would talk and there would be people that would show up who they wouldn't even have a reason. They would come on their days off. I'm going to go to. I went out of town and I missed my chiefs meeting. So I'm going to go this week and it show up for no overtime and for just paying the meeting. But yeah, the chiefs were involved, but the chiefs wouldn't report. They would be a part of the conversation, right.
Speaker 3:So yeah, you see the deal, was it? You wanted to go to those meetings? Well, the reason I wanted to go to them and it was not to hear what the fire chief had to say. I could hear that anytime I went to hear what the crazy ass captains were going to say.
Speaker 3:Well, they were those were comedy shows I mean you would have, because it was an open forum typically, as he would have people in and, like Terry said, it was like if it was an operations thing, like the meeting mostly dealt with operational stuff the ops chief would be there and comment, so he would talk a little bit more, or a shift commander would you know somebody animated that understood what was going on, but a lot of it was just him discuss it. I'll give you an example Union negotiates contract. The city comes back and says, well, no, we want you to be drug tested, we're drug testing everybody and you guys have them. You're the only ones not being drug tested and you have to agree to it. We can't make you do it. And so we had a very robust, a very robust union guy who understood how all this worked, and so what he was able to do was parlay a 10 percent across the board raise if we would do drug testing, right, no, I mean, that's what it was. So the fire chief comes in and says, ok, here's the big deal on the city thing. And there were union guys in there who supported it because that's their job is to get your raise. They're like and this is and this is what it's going to look like. So the city didn't care what the drug testing, like the details of the policy where they could give a rat's ass. We just want to say we're drug testing, yeah. Well, the union comes back and says, ok, this is the most, this is the least invasive way to do this. For us it's an unscheduled drug test that you can only give from like the months of July to December. You know well, shit, that's half the year. So I mean, you get it. But anyway, we all come in fire, chief.
Speaker 3:It says, hey, listen, the union wants to do this, the whole city is doing it. You know we're not doing it. So you know. Well, what do you think, chief? Well, you know, I'll be the first one to pee, and the first one to pee in the cup. And Randall done, the most senior person in the room of anybody of. Well, maybe, with the exception, my dad, had more seniority, but he was the only one. My dad looks Mrs Randall, what do you think? And he says well, chief, you're the chief for a reason, as I'll do what you tell me. And he says what do you want us to do? And he says, well, I would do the drug test. You know he says good, because I got a piss, and he gets up and goes yeah he says come here, give me a cup.
Speaker 3:He says, well, you go ahead and take care of your business. But I mean, and then you had three people that had a seizure, that he said that and so we had an argument for like 15, 20 minutes and it was good you could process all that, but what happened is the communications is before you got back to the station. 25% of the fire department knew what was said in that meeting. I mean because I mean yeah, it was cell phone.
Speaker 2:There were cell phones there.
Speaker 3:I mean, but yeah, that was a hit. Yeah, so you hung up from your 900 number. You had to call station 15. We had a pager, exactly yeah.
Speaker 1:Telephone telephone tele-firefighter.
Speaker 2:But those were good, those worked out really well and you know, to have the fire chief show up and actually listen to people, that was a big deal.
Speaker 3:The pager was actually a ventilation device. The pager yeah, like when I, you were a response chief to have a pager and if it was like the second time it woke you up, you ventilated by throwing that on the ground as hard as you could and it would come into 27 pieces and you'd have to get a new pager. Sorry, but that's my pager story. That's his pager story.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So limit the communications. You know, don't over communicate. You've got to communicate in a way that people are actually going to pay attention to it and you're not saturating them with messages all day. And then have some creative ways to communicate, things like PFN, if you could have some fun while doing it, and then regular meetings with the fire chief, if it's going to be a forum to actually ask questions.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And it's a two way communication, not just the fire chief addressing the masses. And we shall wear this uniform and we shall do this. You don't want that you don't want that you want there to be an actual conversation with the people.
Speaker 3:Well, even just like keeping connected. I remember this was an issue we talked about all the time and people thought, okay, a good BC goes and visits their stations at least once every week they go to every single station in their battalion or every other shift.
Speaker 3:So like twice a week you got to go see all your stations. I thought, all right, I'm a new BC, I go, we drive around for I don't know two or three weeks and I'm like this is bullshit, jesus Christ. We just drive around and so what I started doing is I get all the correspondence I have with all the companies in my battalion, I put it in a box, I throw the backseat of the truck and then when we would go on calls, that's where I hang on. We're going to have a two minute meeting, so like greetings, anything like that, that was just standard, routine, everyday communications. That's the way I did it. So I don't go visit the stations very much unless there's an inspection or something. They invite me because I take care of most of my business on the road with them.
Speaker 2:So two things about visiting stations. First, it's a good idea for a chief officer, even a fire chief, to visit a fire station. I tried in Glendale and they were so busy they were always gone. I drove around. They're gone, they're on calls.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was the other part, but as I've had people ask me when I was kind of a new battalion chief, even when I was a little battalion chief is that there's always that one captain that you really don't get along with, that you don't want to visit. I don't want to go visit that rat master. Go visit them in the morning, get it over with. You know, if you have somebody you really enjoy, save them for the afternoon and cutting in, that's the treat Kind of in your day with that.
Speaker 2:But get that other guy. Now people hear this and they'll go. Oh yeah, I'm the guy you don't like. You're here in the morning, but they know it because they don't like you either. But that's kind of the way it works. But you got to get out and visit your stations and have a you know, just stop in with a purpose, one or two little items and go visit, because a lot of chief officers they don't visit their stations until something goes wrong and then they're showing up as like, oh the chief's here, something's wrong. You don't want that in your organization, whether you're a mental manager or an executive. He's here. What happened?
Speaker 3:No, and I would explain that because that happened to me several times and I'm like you are 100% correct. I would not normally come here because I don't like you and but you know I'm your boss and you can't keep doing this If you don't want me coming here. You got to stop these behaviors Period. You're screwing all of us, not only me, but my boss and the people who work for you. They knock it off.
Speaker 1:One of our blue card instructors had a visit from the chief and the chief was visiting all the stations. And the chief told him and goes you know, next time I'm going to visit, I'm going to let you know so you can send an email out to everybody and make sure they're in class B uniforms, because I don't want to visit the firefighters if they're not in their you know, class B, with the badges and all that stuff. And this battalion chief said you want everyone to be comfortable with you, right? Yes, well then why do they have to dress up when you're at the station? I mean that just doesn't make any sense, that it's this formal event when the, when the chief comes in. So I don't believe that it should be a formal event. I mean it should be. You're dropping in for a purpose, say I've got something to drop off, but it's not like an inspection where I'm trying to. You know, look at everyone's uniform.
Speaker 3:You know how that'll never happen is when your boss shows up and they're dressed in brush pants and a t-shirt that says Phoenix Fire Department or whatever your fire department is on the back, and so they're dressed just like everybody else and they're like well, the pushback we got were from other chiefs staff chiefs that always wore their clown costume and they said well, I don't like that, you get to wear that. And so well, yeah, I actually have a job in operations. I don't know what to tell you, pal.
Speaker 2:You know, there is some culture like when I was in Houston I would. For about three and a half years I lived there without my wife. She lived here taking care of the grants and I was there. So I had a lot of time to visit fire station. I go in the evening, I go on the weekends, it kept me out of trouble. So and so I would just show up at a fire station in the Houston firefighters, I'd just park in the back and start walking in somebody and then you'd hear chiefs here, chiefs here on the intercom. However, they did say that and they would all get up and they would line up like in formation in front of what they're apparatus, oh salute.
Speaker 3:And they'd have a flag and I told them I told them.
Speaker 2:I said hey guys, you don't got to do that. I said I just came by to say hi and you know you shake their hand, felt like you're running for office. But they were all so respectful they I couldn't get them to stop doing. I said please don't do that. And we're not going to stop doing that. That's the way they are in Texas. They're kind of respectful, like that, but it's like please don't do that. So I kept visiting stations. They kept doing it. I never got them to change that part of it and you know I quit going on this painful Well.
Speaker 2:I, we would get over that piece of it. Then we go upstairs and we sit at the table and have a conversation, or or walk around the apparatus, have a good conversation, but the front end of it was so you know that tradition was there for them.
Speaker 2:Now they didn't dress any different. I wouldn't expect that, but I just kept telling please don't do that, not you. If you don't understand, I was lactose into, I'm lactose intolerant, and they were. Sometimes I'd go around lunchtime, not because I wanted to eat with them, but they would try to feed me and I said, no, I'm lactose intolerant. They say, well, let me make you a special plate. I know that. No, no, no, no.
Speaker 3:Like that fire stations, start giving my medical history.
Speaker 2:Well, I just told them I can't eat. And you?
Speaker 3:know I'm not hungry, thank you, yeah, like well, let me make it.
Speaker 2:No, I don't I know firefighters too well. I don't want to special, but they were always incredibly nice.
Speaker 3:Well, if you show up, if you're the boss and you show up and you've got to, ok, I've got to find something wrong to prove I'm the boss, that's ridiculous.
Speaker 3:We were. We were coming back from a call it was a car accident or some damn thing and somebody left a piece of equipment at the scene, and it was. It was a Glendale fire truck. We thought, ok, we'll just take that. You know they took the pace of the hospital, we'll just take it back to the station. It's on our way. So I don't know it was.
Speaker 3:45 minutes later we go to this fire station. They're back in quarters and it had been raining. That's what caused this whole thing. Well, they got the shallow truck and it's brown now because it's been driving on code three calls in the rain all day. So we come in and it's hey, we're here, here's your stuff. You know, blah, blah, blah. And so we're leaving. And what the engineer says to the captain? He says chiefs are different in Phoenix and there in Glendale. What are you talking about? I says well, we left the thing and you picked it up and dropped it off to us. This is our chief, just left 10 minutes ago. He says you know what he said? No one. He says they told us he'd never seen a truck so dirty in his life. I thought it. It's raining outside. He wants you to walk. He should have told it, gave him a bucket and told him to help yourself. Pal yeah, when you're done there's a ladder another mile down the road. You can go wash it, idiot, I mean Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2:So you went. So you went from meetings to like really have a purpose and show up and don't be a dick.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh. I'm here, yeah, oh, I guess you can identify a dirty truck from a fire truck.
Speaker 2:It's not a dirty word. Don't listen to that anymore. Morshish, mh-hmm, mh-hmm.
Speaker 1:Mh-hmm, mh-hmm, mh-hmm, mh-hmm, mh-hmm, mh-hmm, mh-hmm, mh-hmm, mh-hmm.
Speaker 2:I can't say it.
Speaker 1:Well, uh, beep.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, mh-hmm, mh-hmm, mh-hmm, mh-hmm. Well, that's uh, yeah that's, that's good. Right, you know lines of communication, Vance Lines of communication and I think you you got to keep them open, but but don't overdo it. Also, on these you're talking about, there's a couple of apps that you can use now. One's called the Slack Channel or Slack Channel, another one is called um Campfire. So there's, there's entire chiefs, command staffs, they, they communicate on campfire and like you have different channels on them.
Speaker 3:They can just text each other to well. That's all it really is.
Speaker 1:If it's like a logistics issue, then you go to logistics channels. It's a operations issue you go to operations. So if it's, admin you go so. So you're not inundating people with messages they don't care about. But if it's a logistics thing, ok, I'm going to go to the logistics thing and get my question answered, or whatever.
Speaker 2:So the key is just don't send out garbage to people and don't expect them to yeah, don't overdo it and make it meaningful and then be transparent.
Speaker 1:Don't, don't hide anything from.
Speaker 3:Well, you can have periodic meetings where you meet. I mean, that was kind of the nice thing about using committees to manage the fire department is it was a standing schedule of meetings you would have and you think, ok, and those worked really well. Where I have to go process some operational issues that we're going to do now, whether it's the, the ladder fleet is aged and it's not working the way it needs to, so we're going to need to change the way we do ladders at the scene, that that kind of stuff. So, and it was a, it was a good format to do that because everybody could comment and have a voice in it and you could somehow incorporate all that into a tangible plan moving forward. And then, and then those committees saw, oh, we did this and that this was the effect of this, is it actually had a good thing, whereas because it's always going to be 5050. This is stupid, waste of time or we have to get together to fix whatever this is.
Speaker 2:So those are the two and it's never in the middle, it's always one or the other in my experience and I know you don't want this podcast to last forever, but the other thing that I've noticed, Gary Fleischer does, yes, he does, and every other thing I notice in organization is the labor groups are really good about getting information out. They got stewards, they visit the fire stations. They listen. Maybe it's because of their contents different, but they it seems out like labor groups outperform us all the time in communications.
Speaker 3:Well, that's what they're doing, Committee, they're designed to do that.
Speaker 2:Well, you could influence people's minds and hearts, but you can use them a little bit too, too. If you got a message, you know if it's something that kind of matches with what you're doing operationally or resource wise. And there was a time in an organization where I went out with a labor president and say, hey, let's go out together and send the stewards out with the battalions. You got to have great relationships when you do that, but they're really really good, and man there's.
Speaker 3:Sometimes we're like the fire chief and union president would be doing whatever together their message and you think we are so screwed. They're together where there's, there's no, there is no shade to hide in on this one.
Speaker 2:Mom and dad's in the same? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:We haven't had two Christmases this year.
Speaker 2:They're sitting on the couch together. Don't walk by.
Speaker 1:Yeah, where they are they figured they found out. All right, gents, good times. Acts of the past. Thanks for being here on Be Shifter, I know.