The Professional Development Difference

Ever wondered how to build a values-driven professional development program in a fire department? Ponder no more, as we venture into the heart of this topic, highlighting the importance of creating a holistic training approach that values members for their entire persona, not just their ranks. You'll hear Jeffrey's perspective on the essential role of a training officer in command staff meetings, shedding light on their pivotal role in assessing the effectiveness of training programs.

Jeffery King's suggested reading:

Simon Sinek - Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, The Infinite Game

Adam Grant - Give and Take, Think Again

Jim Collins - Built to Last, Good to Great, Great by Choice

Michael Schur - How to Be Perfect (great audio)

Brene Brown - Dare to Lead, Daring Greatly, The Gifts of Imperfection

Malcolm Gladwell - Outliers, Talking to Strangers (great audio), The Tipping Point

Sidney Dekker - Just Culture, Drift Into Failure, Do Safety Differently

James Clear - Atomic Habits

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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This episode was recorded at the AVB CTC in Phoenix, AZ on November 13, 2023

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:16

Welcome to the B shifter podcast, john Vance, today joined by Jeffrey King, and Jeffrey is our professional development manager here at Blue Card. He's in charge of instruction, so when you see new CEs coming out, generally you know Jeff. Jeff's the guy behind that. And today we also want to talk about Jeff's other job, because he's a training officer at a fairly good size fire department with training experience in a very large fire department, and we wanted to tackle the topic on what a training officer does. What are some of the best practices? Maybe some of the stuff that Jeff has learned over the years in his role as a training officer. And now your title is actually a little different than just training officer and we'd like to talk about that a little bit today too.

Speaker 2: 2:10

Yeah, sure, no, I think it's. I spent about six and a half years with the Houston fire department helping lead career and professional development. Back in earlier this year I decided to retire from Houston. I took an opportunity to take a deputy chief of training position with the spring fire department, which is essentially my hometown, the area I've lived and grown up my whole adult life. I've raised a family there and started a business and ran a business there. So the opportunity to serve the community that I love with people that I've worked with in the past was just an opportunity I really couldn't pass up. So it's a really exciting chance to do something great for a wonderful community, a wonderful fire department. It's just exciting. Things are happening every day. It's a great. It's a great opportunity.

Speaker 1: 3:00

It's a challenging job to be a training officer and in charge of training for an organization, but I also think it's one of those positions that really can affect a lot of change if done properly. And how is that set up for success? If you were going to design the perfect fire department and you guys, in a lot of ways at spring, you're building things from the ground up there how are you designing it right now for success into the future?

Speaker 2: 3:26

That's a wonderful question, as how do you, how do you walk into an existing system and then and then set that system up on a path for the growth, development, whatever the organization needs. And I can tell you personally that, walking in to spring, there's a lot of great things that were existing in place, a lot of great programming, a lot of great ideas, great leadership at the top helping facilitate some of this. So, bringing somebody in like myself to help as the deputy chief of training, they've really given me a lot of latitude and a lot of autonomy to do what needs to be done on the training side. When I look at setting up something perfect from the beginning, from the ground up, I think really the first thing you have to do is recognize the value of that training division.

Speaker 2: 4:12

There's a lot of organizations out there that I think immediately devalue it and they take it out of operations and they put it on an administrative side. And when you put it on that administrative side, what you're doing is you're just saying you don't have the same value as our emergency responders. You're not the same, and the truth is that everything that is happening on the operation side of the fire ground is coming through training. You're building the programings, you're developing them. If there's problems, you're creating the, the pathology to modify that behavior. Everything comes through that division. So if you were going to build something from the ground up, it really starts on the first level of organizationally being sound. It has to be tied to operations. They've got to be on the same side of the house because they are working in unison to be as effective as they can for the community they serve and to keep their people safe.

Speaker 1: 5:04

So, ideally, who would be the person that the training officer reports to?

Speaker 2: 5:11

So ours? We've got deputy chief of operation, We've got a deputy chief of training. I think we both work incredibly well together Right now, we both reporting to an assistant chief, and that system works pretty well. Having those two people work together on a regular basis is really the most important piece, because you've got to know what the other one needs and be able to respond to those needs with programs that support what you want to do. So our system is structured in a way that works pretty good. What you really just don't want to do is have them where they're on completely different sides of the house, where they don't talk to one another and training is really looked at as an afterthought. It's a means of checking a box. It's the one and done community, and that's not what you're looking to do if you want to build a strong professional development organization.

Speaker 1: 5:56

So we keep hearing that term professional development. What does that mean to you, and how does that differ now from merely a training division?

Speaker 2: 6:05

That is a great question Personally and I you know that's the only reason I can speak to it I think there's something a little bit reductive about saying training.

Speaker 2: 6:15

If we're talking about training, we're talking about going out and teaching skills, being able to run some drills.

Speaker 2: 6:21

Those are the things training can happen at the station level.

Speaker 2: 6:24

When you start talking about professional development, you're looking at the entirety of the organization. How do we take somebody who's been trained as a firefighter and then take that individual for the entirety of their career through the promotional process of being a firefighter, through the different phases that they will have with that being a driver in your system, being an officer in your system, whether that be a lieutenant or a captain onto a district or a battalion chief level all the way up to deputy and even executive chiefs. There has to be a cohesive plan where you are training everybody to get the maximum potential out of all your people. So when I say professional development, I look at it as this all inclusive programming that we are going to take not just the individual but the whole person and develop that individual to maximize their talents for the organization, that community they serve. So for me it's really the reductive nature of the language of saying training. That's really talking about skills. Professional development is a much more global view of how you're going to improve the organization.

Speaker 1: 7:25

So, with the new training officer coming in, how do you determine what the needs are of that organization and how do you really develop what the curriculum is going to be, what the training calendar is going to look like and I know that's a very deep question, but just on the 50,000 foot view, what would be like some of the first things you did as a training officer?

Speaker 2: 7:46

Oh, at the 50,000 foot view. I think that strategic level view is probably the most important, and the first thing that I wanted to do coming into an organization was to one figure out what the organization does. Look at how they operate, how they perform, how they do things, look at the checks and balances that are in the system. But the most important thing that I think you can identify is defining the values. What are those things that are intrinsic to the organization, that you want to manifest through every level of your organization? What are those things that truly matter? Most organizations have a mission statement, they have a value statement. They have some things that are written up on walls and they look really good, they're decorative and they're wonderful. You know we've had these conversation millions of times.

Speaker 2: 8:32

I am a big fan of Simon Sinek. I love start with why, and for me, the why in an organization is finding those values first. We have to identify those things, because if I'm going to build a professional development program that is going to impact our officers, our chief officers, how we develop, how do we interact with each other, how we interact with the community, if we don't embed those values into the program, then we're failing in our ability to fully maximize what we want out of our people. So that first step for me is identifying your values. These things have to be, they have to manifest in our walks, they have to show themselves and how we show themselves and how we interact with each other every day.

Speaker 2: 9:14

We talked about my position, houston for the, for the entirety of my career. The side of our apparatus in Houston said courage, commitment and compassion, and there are three words in my mind that have a wonderful, wonderful meaning. But when you look at organization, you have to ask yourself are those words showing up in our training program, in our recruit training? Are they showing up in our training with our officers? Are they showing up at the station level? Are they showing up at how we interact with each other at the station or how we're interacting with the community? And if they're not showing up, then we've missed the ball somewhere in that process.

Speaker 1: 9:49

So what you're talking about is a real holistic approach to the way you look at this, and it's not just, like so often, checking boxes. So we need to make sure firefighter Jones can throw a ladder in advance, a hand line, but that that person actually believes in the mission and vision of that fire department. And not every fire department's the same right. Like courage, commitment, passion, whatever compassion, it doesn't apply to everybody. So you've got to discover really what your department's about.

Speaker 2: 10:17

You have to find your own voice. You have to find your own why and everybody's is going to be a little bit different and I know this sounds like you said a holistic approach to it and it might be a different way of approaching training. But I think as we look at where we're going as an industry, we have to recognize that maybe the way we've done things in the past might meet the best way to do it. Having this one and done mentality where we just check boxes is not going to solve our problems. That we need to figure out. If we want to be the best version of ourselves, then we need to look at our members and see them as a whole person.

Speaker 2: 10:52

What does, what does young John Vance need to become the John Vance that he is today? What sort of investment does an organization need to make into you to make you feel whole, beyond just the rank that you hold, but you as an individual and tapping into that? Having a shared value. Not a value that's my value that I impress upon you, that you buy into, but a shared value, a shared belief system that we are all tied into. That's when you build something that becomes kind of transcendental, it gets a little bit bigger than everything else.

Speaker 1: 11:24

So we were kind of pre-interviewing the other night and we were talking about how in some organizations and you alluded to it a little earlier that training was, you know, in admin or they were they were removed from the normal operations of the fire department. How embedded are you as a training officer in the command staff meetings and understanding where the mission and vision is going? How much input do you have? And you know, ideally, how much input should you have?

Speaker 2: 11:53

So as a deputy it's a little bit different because we're intimately involved with everything with the executive staff, with the command staff that this is what we do.

Speaker 2: 12:02

I still respond to events so I can see what's going on. That becomes a huge piece that if you're going to have training and professional development, then the only way that you can truly evaluate the efficacy of the programs that you have is to see it with real time on the fire ground. So that becomes a huge piece of what you have to do. So we are very intimately involved with what's going on. We've got a great cadre of officers that are involved some involved with EMS, we've got some involved with Strictly Fire and we're really coming together as a good group to put programs together for our people. The biggest challenge that we have is an unintended consequence of how the organization has been set up, and that is that for the longest period of time, training was outside of operations. It was merely something that you know we did to be a means to an end and it wasn't really talking about hey, we've got to take this person from firefighter all the way to fire chief, if that's their aspirational goals.

Speaker 1: 13:00

I think a lot of places are probably pretty similar to where I work right now, where I will be working for just a short period of time. But when we hire people we say we are a training fire department. We tell them when they come in, like the expectation is is that you're going to train every day. Every day is a training day and whether it's a 15 minute drill or whatever, we're going to get it in somewhere. And I run into departments that are similar size to us that are getting very busy. They're running, you know, a lot of calls every day and they're saying they don't have time for training. Do you have any tips or tricks or anything, especially for these smaller departments that can't take a company out of service to complete that training? How would you do that? I mean, I know we didn't really talk about that question before, but it kind of popped in my mind as you're talking about all this because it takes a high priority with us. But how do you make it a priority?

Speaker 2: 13:56

One I think that becomes part of your value statement is that your value training. One of the things we've done, which is completely different than what I've seen in the past, we are about to provide a promotional test for our firefighters wanting to advance to apparatus operator. One of the books we picked to be part of this testing process was James Clear's Atomic Habits, and if you've ever read Atomic Habits, one of the things that he talks about in it is this idea of getting at least 1% better every day. You don't have to climb the mountain every day, but every day you've got to get a little bit better. And you talk about these smaller departments that can't pull anybody out of service, that are getting a little bit busier.

Speaker 2: 14:36

There is opportunity On every run that you make. There is a learning opportunity embedded in there somewhere, whether we're coming back from a run and we're sitting in a red light and I can tell the driver next to me give me a size up at that structure, or we can talk with the firefighters on the way back about how we responded to something. There are training minutes in everything we do. Even as an officer at the task level who's facilitating fire attack, I can be in an instructional mode as we are still engaging with what we need to do, because I can still be teaching as we're engaged in fighting fire. So I'm not one who buys into this idea that there's not enough time to train. You've got 24 hours in a day. We've got plenty of time in a shift. If you're not finding time to train, then you don't want to find time to get better. That's just in my mind, john. It's 100% a cop out.

Speaker 1: 15:25

Yeah, what do you think should be the trainings that are mandatory, versus you know the things that are on a regular basis? You're training on the stuff that you need to do the sets and reps on versus you know the occasional training. How do you prioritize all of that?

Speaker 2: 15:42

Look there are certain things that we have to make sure that our people are not only proficient in but they are competent in, and the only way you can do that is through drills and skills and doing training of that kind and having delivery standards of some kind, some kind of performance standards. One of the things that we've done with performance standards was trying to change the way we approached and looked at them. When I look at the normal performance standards that exist across the fire service and everybody's got a version of them, everybody's got something they're all set with a time. Here's what you've got to do for this performance standard. And as I'm looking at it and I'm evaluating it, I'm realizing if I set a bar for a five minute mile, I'm going to run a five minute mile and then I'm going to walk off the training field. And the truth is that me, as a runner, maybe I've got the ability to run a four 45 mile, maybe I've got a four 14 mile in me, but we're setting a standard that has a top on it. What we're trying to do is say, go back to where it was maybe for all of us that are listening right now that played sports in high school or college, when you walked into any football locker room, you could see all the best statistics for any game that you had the weight room, the lifting, the running, the anything else. In 1997, this person ran this 40 yard dash. They're bars for us to aspire, to us to be the best version of ourselves. So we're trying to build standards where we allow you to determine your best sense of yourself.

Speaker 2: 17:46

So we did a 215. Okay, this beats the national standard. Is that your best time? No, we can do better. And now we got companies who are going out, who are trying to beat their time and with the goal being is having a bar saying these are all of our standards. This is going to be the best time that we've ever got. And 2023. We had engine 72s crew do a great, you know forward, lay into a scene in advance of handline. We've got a great time from them. Now, if engine 72s crew changes over time, they get a new firefighter, a new rookie. They still got something they can go shoot for because they know the bar that they can reach. So it's just little tweaks on existing systems that allow us to get a little bit better.

Speaker 1: 18:30

Can we put in the show notes your suggested reading list, would you mind? No, would you mind throwing a couple of those our way, because I'll tell you right now, my fire department has been influenced by you. Because of Simon Sinek. Start with why? Because of just culture, you know Malcolm Gladwell and Anders Erickson theory of 10,000 hours. I mean, we. We talk about all that because I got it from you, this atomic habits. On my office wall, I swear to God, it says 1% better every day. I bought it. I bought a piece of art that says that I'm going to, I'm going to will it to somebody at the fire department when I leave, because I want them to keep getting 1% better every day. But anyway, what other books do you think are out there? Or what other, just a you know? Some inspiration for training officers or people that are in training, would you offer?

Speaker 2: 19:18

You know, I think I will be honest. I think the first one I would recommend reading would be start with why with Simon Sinek. And if you're going to be a training officer, you need to be able to identify your why. There are those that are volunteer to go into training and then there are those that volunteer to go into training that have a passion. If you want a successful training program, you've got to have somebody that's passionate about it. They're not having to be there, they're choosing to be there. And if you're choosing to be there, you've got to understand your why. You've got to understand what those things, what those values are within yourself that you're not going to compromise. I've been very lucky and blessed enough that over the years that I've really tried to fine tune that and hone in on that. Simon Sinek, start with why would be a good one. I love leaders eat last. But the infinite game is probably one of my favorite from a training standpoint, because the infinite game is really is really what I see as the biggest problem in the fire service, and he breaks it down into really. The world exists in two games finite games and infinite games. And finite games are the games that you and I all recognize they have known players. Right, you've got known combatants. If we're good talking about a football game, watching the football game last night, we're watching Denver and Buffalo play. We know it's four quarters of football. We know that one team has to have more points than the other for the game to end. It's all. Denver kick a field goal with the last second. Another walk off this weekend. I think that made six walk-off kicks To win games this weekend. Those are those things that you're looking for, those finite games, established players, real time. When you start looking at infinite games, those are the ones that happen in perpetuity. They don't stop. You don't have described players, you don't have this idea of when this is going to stop. And the fire service, I think, approaches training with a finite mindset. We approach it like hey, we've had some wrecks on the. You know Driving our apparatus great, let's put a driving program together. Wonderful, we put a driving program together. Everybody goes through it. They all get their names checked off the box. We're on to our next issue. Well, if we don't back that up and we don't reinforce that over the years, all those principles and habits are going to wash away. Everything we acquire in the fire service is perishable, so that infinite game says, okay, this is going to happen in perpetuity. We're not just going to do a driver training program for this one time to roll out and solve the problem. We're going to put a program together that we're going to do over and over and over again so it becomes normalized part of our operation and it makes us better in the long run. So that's another one I would recommend.

Speaker 2: 21:51

I will say I'm a big fan of Bernay Brown. She's got some great writings that I would recommend to anybody. Malcolm Gladwell, if you're a young officer, he's got some great ones that I would recommend. I will put those up on the show notes so everybody can talk about it. I will be honest and say that a lot of I Try as hard as I can to find inspiration and Answers to questions that happen inside the fire service from sources outside.

Speaker 2: 22:20

The fire service is uniquely Capable of producing the exact same things it's been producing. You know any system is going to produce the exact same outputs if you don't change the system. So what I'm looking for are Solutions to problems that have existed in our culture, in our history, in our tradition for years and find ways to come up with Creative things that allow us to improve in ways that maybe we didn't see it. So putting books like atomic habits on it on a promotional exam well outside the world of the fire service, but it's. It's serving our people well and we've got folks that are actually having conversations about it and it's working pretty well.

Speaker 1: 23:00

All right, well, we'll put all those in the show notes. I didn't mean to put you that's okay, I don't mind. I know you. You're always a source, though, for great reading material and great inspiration, so I knew you would, off the top of your head, be able to answer that one, no worries.

Speaker 1: 23:14

So, as we kind of round round, third headed for home here, what advice do you have for new training officers? You, you know you volunteer to be in the training division. You got the promotion, you're on your way in. What would you tell that new training officer and what resources might you say are out there or Methods to identify how to run your division?

Speaker 2: 23:37

Wow, there's. There's a lot in there. I think, first trying to, what I'd recommend to a young training officer that's coming into a position is Take the time to understand what's going on. They're in my mind and I will be honest and this is one of the things that I love that we get to do with blue card there is something, there's something in my mind that's very admirable at serving those who serve, taking care of those who are out on the front line doing what they're doing. It's not recognized that way. It's not viewed that way in most organizations. It's a means to an end. So have that sense of pride, that sense of honor in the work that you're doing and know that it has tremendous benefit. The big thing that you're going to have to do is you have to start trying to quantify what's going on in your organization, whether it comes through after action reporting or you're starting to gather information and gather data. You're using that data to drive what's happening with your programming. That becomes a big piece. A lot of people will say I think this is a problem or this is a problem with our folks, and the truth is is that might be situational and if you look at it globally across your organization. You might have one or two other problems that are much bigger. Use that information, use those metrics to guide what you're doing and training.

Speaker 2: 24:57

The next little piece that I would offer that sounds kind of strange is and it really. I will give a hundred percent credit to my wife, tracy. I feel like I am the luckiest person in the world, not only because I married somebody who is as incredible as my wife and we've got our wonderful family and our beautiful daughters and everything else. I've also watched her be an educator for her entire life and now an administrator running a school, running Trinity Lutheran School and one of the things that I've heard her talk about over time was this idea of horizontal and vertical alignment within the school that everything that happens from kindergarten all the way to eighth grade, that there needs to be alignment between each grade, that one can't be operating completely independent of the other, and the same thing with horizontal alignment within each grade, that everybody's got to be on the same page. We need that in the fire service. There needs to be continuity of program that goes from your probationary firefighters or your new member firefighters all the way to your probationary firefighter, to your AO programs to your officer programs. There needs to be some consistency of messaging of values and everything else that goes all the way up to the fire chief and the same thing across all the different stations. That's one of those things that I think is so important is making sure that every station is doing the exact same things. You know, when we go through this day four that we're about to have on Thursday with these, these folks here in Phoenix and we're going to talk about the Tarver fire some of these things we talk about come up over and over.

Speaker 2: 26:24

You had talked about having a department that really wants to train and you embrace that. One of the first things on the slide is they have an organization that embraced a culture of change. That's awesome in the fire service to have a group of people who recognize our job is to get better, our job is to evolve, our job is to be the best version of ourselves so we can evolve and serve the community as the community evolves. So those are the things that I would look at with an organization Create alignment with your programming. Create continuity of message with your programming. Make sure you know what your values are. Find ways to measure and capture the metrics of what's going on and use that to drive. Don't drive training anecdotally. And the only other piece that I would offer is to attempt to synergize programming.

Speaker 2: 27:13

You know we have a lot of folks that will go out there. We're going to go out and drill Wonderful, go out and drill. If I'm going out and drill and I don't have a purpose for it, it doesn't do any good. We'll talk about again. We'll defer back to a football team. A football team is going to practice all week long. They're going to watch film, they're going to break everything down so they can get prepared to have a game on Saturday, sunday, college or pro, whatever you're looking at.

Speaker 2: 27:35

We need to focus. The same way, we need to say okay, we're going to do some of these drills here, we're going to do some of these scenarios here, we're going to do this here and we're going to build toward a multi-company event that we're going to have in six months, where we're going to take all these things, some of the drills we've been doing on the fire ground, some of the incident command training we've been doing in our command training center. We're going to synergize all these together in a singular event at the end of the process. That's how you build chemistry, that's how you build the teamwork. That's how you build that cohesive group that's going to be successful together. Those are some of the things that I would offer to some young folks that are coming in into this position.

Speaker 1: 28:10

Awesome. Anything else that you want to add, or anything about training officer that we haven't talked about yet today?

Speaker 2: 28:16

I'm sure that we'll probably have some folks that might have some questions, and if they have some, I'd be more than willing to answer them. We can put that information in the show notes. But what I would tell you is you are embarking on a wonderful career. You have the opportunity to make a difference in people's lives. You have an opportunity to change the trajectory of an organization and sometimes, through training, you can do it without the overt knowledge of hey, we've put out a guideline, we're moving this direction, this is what's happening. We can subtly change the dial through training, where over time, we've become something completely different because we've embraced it through our training process. So it's a wonderful opportunity. It's a noble profession. I wish them the best. And just man, identify those values, build those values into your programming and just continue to get 1% better every day.

Speaker 1: 29:15

Jeffrey, awesome. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. It's been really good talking to you, your source inspiration for me. You've helped me out tremendously when I go back to my organization just from hearing your words and knowing where your wells are of inspiration. So I appreciate you passing that on to all of us today.

Speaker 2: 29:33

Thank you for the very kind words. I mean that is very touching and I appreciate it, Thank you.

Speaker 1: 29:39

All right, man, we'll talk to you again soon. Yes, sir, appreciate it. That's Jeffrey King. He is the professional development manager for Blue Card and also training officer at Spring Texas Fire Department, and if you'd like to contact Jeff, his information's in the show notes as well as his reading list. Don't forget to sign up for the 2024 Hazard Zone Conference. We have a link to that here and we have early bird specials, so if you're watching this relatively soon, you'll be able to get in on that Until next time. Thank you so much for listening and watching to Be Shifter.