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Fire command and leadership conversations for B Shifters and beyond (all shifts welcome)!
B Shifter
Bruno's Hierarchy of Engagement for Chief Officers
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Read Terry's article here: https://conta.cc/4bVfldV
This episode features Terry Garrison, Nick Brunacini, and John Vance.
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This episode was recorded June 11, 2024 at the Alan V. Brunacini Command Training Center in Phoenix, AZ.
Firefighter Training and Memories
Speaker 1you do hi ho. This should be a hook when we get a parent for his shoulder army, arty, army, arty, army. The old mate that you always gotta. Hey, where'd that old guy go?
Speaker 2what's the pirate's favorite letter? No, it's the sea he loves.
Speaker 2That's a Terry Garr a terry garrison all right we are into the b shifter podcast. Welcome, it's john vance, nick brunicini, terry garrison, and today we are talking about bruno's hierarchy of engagement. It kind of goes along with a companion to an article that Terry just wrote in the B-Shifter Buckslip, so we thought we'd talk about that. Hey, one of the things we want to acknowledge. We have completed three years of podcasts with this podcast, so this is an anniversary podcast for us as well. We've come a long way, baby.
Speaker 3Congratulations, vance, congratulations to all of us. So we've. We've come a long way, baby. Congratulations, vance. Congratulations to all of us. So one. So we've done about a podcast. You've done a podcast a week for three years. Yes, that's over 150. Yeah 150.
Speaker 2We. We have, uh, about 140 000 downloads so far. Tremendous, and we're trucking.
Speaker 3And our first guest was Don Abbott. Don Abbott, yep and the Abbott Project. Yes, yeah, the Maydays. Yeah, and Don, he's gone to the big dorm in the sky.
Speaker 2And we weren't even in this building yet. We were in the old building. Yeah, we were. We were audio only and we weren't even in, uh, this building yet we were in the old building and, yeah, we were audio. Only we weren't on youtube yet yeah, well, it's baby stepping.
Speaker 3You've baby stepped all the way from uh, just voices to now images just think if don could have done that village, he had what was that called that we're abbottville.
Speaker 1Yeah, but what? Yeah, abbottville could have done that on this with the oh, he would have held our attention.
Speaker 2You know my my favorite don abbott memory was we were doing the uh conference at notre dame and he and he and he had a class in there and somebody goes you gotta go see what abbott's doing and he had a helmet on with a red light on top of it and a headset and it was some hazmat class or something it's like. Yeah, he might have lost it, I don't know yeah that was the same one that we thought vinnie dunn died.
Speaker 2But we couldn't find vinnie dunn for like two hours vinnie dunn went missing in indians, indiana. He was taking a post-lunch nap, but we didn't realize it.
Speaker 1Yeah, that would have been my first guess, since I do that a lot.
Speaker 2Well, we knocked on his door, we looked everywhere, we just couldn't wake him up.
Speaker 1Maybe he had Don's earphones on. He borrowed the helmet, thanks, for the helmet.
Speaker 3Don? You know, the first time I met Abbott was at the training academy and they had hired him to come in and do Abbottville Right, and so he's got this whole diorama set up in one of the classrooms at the academy and one of the scenarios he had back then what Abbottville was is he would recreate firefighter line of duty death incidents, is he would recreate firefighter line of duty death incidents and then he would play all the key characters that were affiliated with that incident. So, anyway, I'm a captain and I come in and our company's there doing company training. It's Abbotville. So we're doing our thing and you know, we're all standing there watching and listening to them and you know it's the first time I've ever seen this Models and I think, well, this is kind of neat, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he says, okay, we're going to run some scenarios and okay, who's going to be the IC? And so somehow I got pushed into the front. I was going to be the IC. Let's get the chiefs kid, we'll see here. Okay, great. So we come in and we're doing our thing and it had to do with a railroad accident, with a fire truck and some other stuff.
Speaker 3So anyway, you're the BC and you get there and you're doing your thing, and Abbott had his railroad train hat on with his whistle, and first he had been like a cop or something and he had given you the facts you needed to do the next part of the exercise.
Speaker 3And then he disappeared and he comes back out and he's wearing his conductor hat and blowing that wooden train whistle running around and he comes up and he says he keeps just chattering at you and you're trying to do like you're assigning companies to do stuff, and he won't shut up. And I asked I said please be quiet and stand right there, and he would do it, and he won't shut up. And I asked I said please be quiet and stand right there, and he would do it. And he'd stand there for like 10 seconds and then he blows whistle and starts screwing with me again. And so finally I said okay, mr Train Conductor, is there a police officer here? And he says yes, as a matter of fact, he's right here. And he takes some guy who had been previewed to play the cop and he says here he is. And I said okay, officer, I want you to arrest this man.
Speaker 3And I was like now and they're dragging him off his boat and so so we like with him being gone over five minutes, we were able to finish the whole drill. You know that was supposed to go on another like four characters. So that was the first time I had met Don Abbott.
Speaker 2I did Abbottville in like 2002 and he played the abusive mayor. So he came in with a mayor hat the hat said mayor on it. And he's like I'm going to fire you unless you talk to me right now, and he was that kind of mayor.
Speaker 3He was the authority-having jurisdiction, mayor these are the people in my neighborhood.
Speaker 2What a great guy. He had fun.
Speaker 1Oh yeah, he did Remember when we had the CTC going and we had the cubicles and they were playing a role and he wanted to smoke it up and make it loud and heat them up with heat lamps and thank God we were able to shut that down.
Speaker 3We came in yeah, and we had already started training, so it had been open for a few months.
Speaker 1Yeah, it was open for a while.
Speaker 3And I come in, you know, because the shift commanders did all the training there, so it was kind of our training grounds basically. So we'd come across the street and open it up and turn the lights on and fire up the computers. We're getting ready to do the thing. And Abbott is in. The locker room is where all the sector kiosks were Right, and they were just like modular furniture with high, like bar style seating, and you sat at a kiosk it's like a voting booth almost, and it had three sides around it and they had the monitor and you're doing your thing.
Speaker 3Well, on the top of it it he had cut plywood to fit and he was put mounting that up and he was going to hook, uh, heat lamps to it. Yeah, in fact he had heat lamps already hooked up and so there's like eight heat lamps in this. It looked like you were going to electrocute people and I said, don, what? What are you doing? He says, oh, we're going to use these heat lamps to simulate the heat. And I said, well, no, the heat's implied. And if you're going to make, if it's going to be like flash over hot, just put a message on the screen that you're unable to operate too hot and he says, no, we're going to turn the heat up on him. And I said, well, when does the plumbing come in? And he said plumbing. I said, well, are you going to squirt water at him next, then through, like the screen maybe? And he went, oh yeah, that would be great.
Speaker 2I said no, we're not going to do any of that.
Command Training at CTC
Speaker 3Don. I said we're going to take all of this shit out of here right now. Oh no, nick, we're not. I said oh okay, don, we're not. I said oh okay, don, we're shift commanders and you're not wearing a shift commander shirt. Take this out now. And so I went outside with them and said you can't do this, they're gonna kill you. Is we just saved your life? Is I can guarantee that you know none of this? And it was. I remember when we were building the place and putting it together, the fire chief had hired Abbott because they were old buddies, and so he said we're going to do command training and you have a lot of experience with this kind of thing. Well, he was of the mind that we were going to have models everywhere and it was going to be Abbottville recreated. Well, we had been teaching tactics for a long time and it was all digital and it was like simulations that we created and you could have different conditions and then which you really can't do with models I mean, you have to. It's a whole different thing.
Speaker 3So the guy with the whistle yeah, exactly, you thought no, this is like high school drama theater and that's what we're we're doing. Ic1 is who we're training right now. So, uh, I remember there was a lot of back and forth with that for a little while, while the system was being done and Abbott had actually him and Bev had moved in and they were remodeling the building as they lived there.
Speaker 1Yeah, I remember that.
Speaker 3Yeah, so Abbott would get up and he would start building models and things. Well, we were able to get him and he wanted to do this anyway. He built an exact replica of our command van in the simulation floor, which was perfect, and then next to it you had that cut down Suburban that we use for IC2. So, and then IC1, we're in the kiosk as mobile ICs. So once all those guys could come in and they could figure out what we were doing because Abbott had had a ton of models already he had like downtown Phoenix Belt and it took like most of the training floor to put it all out there and you thought there's no way we're going to be able to use this because you're going to need fire trucks and hose lines and this is like army and you couldn't get enough people around no, you couldn't, it was classroom was limited by size
Speaker 3but you know, and those things, those kind of diorama style simulators, are great for a mixed responder audience, where you get the pissed off mayor and the police chief and the public works person, so they could all, because it shows them the scope of the thing. So when you say, no, there's 400 victims over here and there's this over here, and oh, how are we going to? You know, so then they, they can really start to make sense of it. Well, what we're doing is we're simulating a bunch of stuff that we're all very familiar with, like house fires, small commercials, stuff like that. It's like no, we don't. If you don't understand the standard actions that we take to to do away with the standard conditions, you shouldn't be coming into this building.
Speaker 1And ours is more about decision making and communication. Yeah, like the big things Exactly, and then it wasn't the tactics level and you know I guess we had some conversation on where you might park.
Speaker 3We didn't change our Terry since we worked there, we didn't change our tactics two degrees in our whole life. All we did is sequence order reporting and then building effective incident organizations. Because I think throughout our career is because there's all brand new command system when we started. Well, and there's a use, so it's. It's always a work in progress, but at that point I mean it needed to be revised and so it got revised throughout our career.
Speaker 3And the last time was the Southwest supermarkets where I mean that's where it really kind of blew up all at once. You know, oh, oh man, this is. You talk about a house of cards with this thing. We can't do this anymore. So in fact that was really that was the most uniting thing that ever happened during my career in the fire department. Southwest Supermarkets, I mean it was a love fest Like you could have got. Southwest Supermarkets would have settled the middle east kind of thing, but the effect that for two years, like you couldn't tell the difference between the union president and the fire chief when they talked about strategy and tactics and we talked about it before, and really the reason why it didn't take a crazy right or a crazy left is because fire chief had us all visit the site.
Speaker 1Oh yeah. By the way, everybody was on the same page, because that could have went in any direction.
Speaker 3That was the most profound after action thing I ever did. No, was that walkthrough that changed. In fact, that made the next really well five years. In fact, that made the next really well five years. But the two years following that is really where you were able to do a set of things that they couldn't unwrap 20 years later. They couldn't unwrap but you're never getting rid of on deck. It's just not going to happen.
Speaker 1Everybody shared that foxhole together. Yeah, that's what happened.
Speaker 3Well, and then like true supervision and entry control with division bosses and just kind of the way the system is really kind of designed to do your business. So God bless Don Abbott man yeah, he was, he was very helpful.
Speaker 1He was part of the solution.
Speaker 3I mean we were all crazy, I mean just different ways. So you just had to figure out what the whole group, how much crazy they could eat at the same time and kind of stay on track. That place was unique in the fact that the best ICs came out of that experience and they were the chiefs' aides. And that's where we made the decision as an organization to say we're not going to have safety officers, a traditional safety division anymore. It's the safety officer rides with the battalion chief, they're the battalion chief's partner, and so that's where the safety truly got embedded on that task level of the thing. And so that's where the safety truly got embedded on that task level of the thing. So, but we would, we trained at the CTC and we figured out the schedule after about the first session or two, Right Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So once a week each shift commander had a morning that they had to teach at the CTC.
Speaker 1Yeah, so instead of going to my job site at the fire station, we go there. You get your gear ready, but you go to the CTC and then the other guy would hold over. John Hentner, you or I would hold over and the other guy would go directly to the CTC and teach there for the day. It worked. So Tuesdays, wednesdays and Thursdays, you were reporting to the CTC and the same thing happened with the companies.
Speaker 3Well, and then what we did is we said the afternoons we can't do. Afternoons, afternoons suck. As an instructor, you could not make sense of what you said in the morning and what you said in the afternoon, so you never knew if you were coming or going and you thought, no, no, no, we're going to do one session and this ain't a race. We just got to get the whole workforce on the same page about the way we're going to fix these things. So we went from like going five days a week morning, afternoon to three days a week morning this became the schedule week morning afternoon to three days a week morning this became the schedule. So what we like?
Speaker 3Terry said the oncoming shift commander, so it's every shift. There were three, I want to say three safety officers, chiefs, aides, whatever you want to call them, who were coming off duty on a shift would report to the CTC overtime and they would become facilitators for the simulator, right? So the captain, safety officer, chief aide, became the simulator at the command training center and it was all digital combustion. It was hooked up in a control room where you could actually change sims on the fly. You could make them bigger or smaller, you could add frames. You had more capability in that CTC than we got in this one today. Truly, as far as being creative with what you're going to demonstrate with people, it took two years to go through that each function.
Speaker 3It was about a five-year process to get through the whole thing.
Speaker 1But when we first started remember we tried to do it. Was it five years?
Speaker 3Yeah it took us five years. We completed all eight functions of command over the five-year period. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1Well, we were getting ready to certify people and that's when the fire chief retired and all the fallout happened Because, remember, we started, we tried to do it in a quarter and the next quarter we do the next function. It's like why are we doing that?
Speaker 3It was dumb as killing us.
Speaker 1We were trying to get the schedule to drive the curriculum and said, no, let's not do that, let's develop the curriculum, figure out how long that takes and then adjust the schedule to meet the curriculum and the timeframe. We were doing it backwards, like we do most things backwards.
Speaker 3Yeah, but we were. The beauty of it is, I mean, this is just the way we've worked forever. Is we fixed it as we said? No, we don't like this, we're going to change it to this. So you know, kind of, the leadership thing we're doing is kind of the same deal. It's like no, why do you have these stupid rules that constrict what you're going to do? See, the beauty of it is all the audience understood this is we all grew up together and knew one another. So all the captains coming in to be trained are like, okay, this is going to be interesting. Let's see what the new Yehoos do. Well, they saw what we were doing and thought, oh wow, these guys are like actual B-shifters. No, this is in fact. We may have to be careful. They may hurt us eventually here.
Speaker 1There was a point where they said if these guys can do it, anybody can.
Speaker 3Well, and there were people that thought that they really did. So when it all stopped and a new group took over, it was really fun to watch.
Speaker 2You thought, ok well the lesson learned as an outsider who was visiting during that time and correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was to have a small group of people who are going to lead that training. So the three of you guys were the leaders of all that. You were able to work with each other and then push the training and the subjects out, and there wasn't a lot of other convoluted people involved, right?
Speaker 1Well, you had to keep the consistency in there because if you and kind of like what you're doing with blue card now, you got a very selective group of instructors that do the turn the trainer. So back then we had there was three of us that were very we were on the same page, we were teaching the same thing, we weren't deviating or going out of that you know who I got with me was hobo.
Speaker 3Hobo would come down. He was the only other shift commander that would. He was the south shift commander. We were north. He was the only one of the south guys that were interested in what we were doing.
Speaker 1He was d'Artagnan.
Speaker 3And he was. He was the perfect Pete the A-shift. He could do it. He was the coach of the softball team. A-shift would follow that guy anywhere, and so he says, no, I want to be in the room when you're talking tactics. So he had some things that happened and he ended up on B-Shift and so it worked out pretty well.
Speaker 1Did a great job.
Leadership Development and Focus on Work
Speaker 3But like you said, vance, that's true is you had a small group of people that actually kind of figured it out and then see the curriculum was there because it was all the fire command book, and so that became what drove it. And then hooking it up to simulations and R, volume 2 and all the other stuff, so you had this. I don't know, it was lean and mean and it was not a lot of people, but it had. It was like having a real big lever that you could use because the whole workforce bought in on it. So, like you would do training and it wouldn't be, as an example, like mandatory training, was EMS training right? If you lost your EMT or paramedic certification, you're off the truck, you're not there anymore. So early on we had a lot of patients with people that would lose their cert and the department helped get them back. At some point they just put a line in the sand and said no, you're a responsible adult, you've got to keep your cert up. If it goes away, you're fired. Basically there's nowhere for you to work. You got to be a certified medical technician to work on this truck. Uh-huh, yeah, you do. That's the way it goes.
Speaker 3So command training was never mandatory. It was like an alternative, voluntary. That's where it fell into the the food chain is. They didn't make it a mandatory thing at the time. So, as such, if you did training at the academy company training and you got over 50 percent attendance, they said that's 100, there's no makeup, move on to the next. At the ctc, we were getting about 85% attendance and if a company officer was off, some of them would interrupt their vacation and come into training. I mean, it became that important to them so it became a high-value thing for people. Well, there were certain individuals that didn't take that very well, because you had a lot of juice teaching out at the ctc as people wanted to show up and learn.
Speaker 3Okay, what are we going to do? It was, yeah, we became pretty pigs because it was. It was 100 operational and it was either put up or shut up. This is what we're supposed to do for a living and this is how we're going to do it, so you can have like actual intelligent conversations about how fire attack leads the way and everything else is support, and then we do certain things to eliminate hazards and you search behind and all the rest of it. Well, it gets everyone on the same page and there's competing opinions. But at the end of the day, you're like no, we can cover our differences with a ball cap. Between what? All this thing, even the lunatic ladder people. They're like, no, I'm going to pull a vault to the roof before the ladder stops and cut. Well, you could get them tethered back a little bit where they're actually like semi under control, that you could actually do something with them.
Speaker 3So, like anybody that wanted power within the organization saw that as a threat, especially because the fire chief's getting ready to retire. So they're like okay, who's going to take over and who? Who will the troops listen to? Well, at the CTC we didn't fall into the new group of leadership, we were the old guys. Basically we were the newest old guys because we were all brand new shift commanders, because it was a new position. But they thought, no, you got to get those clowns out of there because they're driven by the work and not really kind of by the whatever drove those assholes. But anyway. So when the old man retired, the first thing they did is they stopped all training across the fire department. Well, they had to reorganize and get control of the fire department as they saw fit. So that's just kind of what the new administration did. So you thought, ok, we're, so that was administration did. So you thought, okay, we're, so that was. But leading up to that period it was command training had an extremely uniting force.
Speaker 1Yeah, I would say well, and remember how we did it too is is pretty awesome is that we would start with the function of command, so you get everybody in there, you kind of teach about whatever that function was, you would go through a simulation, you talk about that and then the conversation would kind of shift to whatever the current events that were happening that matched that, but matched all firefighting and all operations. So people missed something. It was almost like you missed a real important part of the organizational conversations that were taking place. So we were actually changing things as they were going and Bruno gave us the ability to do that, but people showed up for the conversations that took place after the training and the learning that took place after that.
Speaker 3Well, you would continue with after-action reviews of incidents that had happened from one session to the next. So if there was major lessons learned in those things, that's where they would get hashed out. In fact, like with Abbott, as we told them, no, don, there's no actors in this. The standard conditions are the screens, and if we need to prompt them with something that they need to find out, it's going to be a visual cue on the thing, but mostly they're just reacting to the conditions and based on those conditions, there's my actions.
Speaker 3Well, what Abbott started doing is he started giving the news nationally about okay, this is what happened. So if there was a line of duty report, so, like the last three years, abbott became and they look forward to it it's like there were times he wasn't available, somewhere else is out of town. Where's Abbott? Well, he's not here. Well, we want to know what the hell. You know what happened in Charleston last week or whatever it was. So like we had to fill in when he wasn't there to bring him up to the news, and it was just so. Everybody's role became like integral to the ongoing thing and, like Terry said earlier, there was fewer of us and so there weren't any conflicts between the instructors. In fact, that was between the three of us is it didn't matter who it was is you were going to get the same basic tactics based on whatever the conditions were, and it was now.
Speaker 2So that worked out pretty well focused on the work focus on the work well, and it's important to note that abbott was a big part of that. So salute to don abbott for, oh, exactly, yeah, we can tease him about the light bulbs and the whistles and stuff but.
Speaker 1But everything he did was awesome and man he put in seriously. He put his heart and soul into everything. He lived there in the building while he was working. He was in the plane while he was flying there, wasn't he?
Speaker 2Talks about the work and it's Bruno's hierarchy of engagement and really discussing what is a big deal versus what's a little deal. So let's talk about big deal versus little deal and how we can focus in on what really matters. We say it's the work, but how do we even focus more on the work and also shed those things that are little deals, that really a lot of times leadership gets hung up on but it's inconsequential?
Hierarchy of Engagement and Leadership
Speaker 1So I think a good place to start is to kind of back up a little bit and kind of show where this fits within our program. So if you look at the Silverback Leadership Program, we say there's eight functions and the first function is where you just focus on the work. Everything else and all the other functions are going to focus on the work. So when we talk about the hierarchy of engagement, that is actually in the third function. So the first function is the work. Focus on the work. That's kind of the most, not kind of it's absolutely the most important part. Then the second function is the inside-outside customer service, where we kind of introduced Mrs Smith and we talked about how we treat our firefighters has a direct impact on how our firefighters treat our customers. And then the third part is where we're really starting to get into the leadership piece. And that third function is personal effectiveness. So how can you be effective as a leader? And we're talking about leadership from the fire chief down. So and we all, you know we all have an example of what a good leader and a bad leader is. But we're using and just to kind of summarize it, one more step is we're using Bruno's notes, right.
Speaker 1So this entire Silverback leadership program is based off information that Bruno used throughout his career. So it brings us to his hierarchy of engagement, which he wrote. I didn't change much of it. I think I added on that article, I added critique or after action review, just to the bottom of it, just to complete the circle, but it's pretty much the quotes and a lot of the phrases that I use in that, in that article. I didn't come up with with those as much, as I stole them right out of bruno's uh notes, napkins and knowledge, as we say so. So I took that from him. And then then, um, if you just look at that, he kind of, I think, throughout his career and and you can jump in Nick but throughout Bruno's career he saw leaders, so many leaders throughout his career, good ones and bad ones, and he identified what good leaders focus on and what bad leaders focus on. And that's what this engagement list is is if you can look at a leader and identify why is that person ineffective? You know they got to that position somehow, so they did some right along the way. You know they had some. Are they resting on their accolades or did they just quit somewhere along the way and you just look at it like, what are they focusing on? What I found is the ineffective leaders focus on goofy shit. At one point they had to be effective in their position, hopefully. But they get to a position of leadership and it's almost like they reach that we talk about in the article, the Peter principle they're still focusing on. They're trying to be the best fire captain or the best firefighter. It's like no, you're a fire chief.
Speaker 1Fire chiefs shouldn't spend a lot of time talking about thinking about uniforms. Uniforms are pretty simple. It doesn't take a lot of brains to figure out. And Bruno says it. The uniform should be recognizable to everybody on the crew or everybody in the department. Mrs Smith should know what a uniform looks like, but she's not measuring your trousers or looking at how dark your socks are. It just gets goofy. She doesn't care if your hat's on right or wrong, she just worries about the customer service that you're providing them. So if you look at that hierarchy of engagement, bruno breaks it down into ready, get set and go, and the ready part is the appearance part. It's like yeah, it's important, we talk about that, it's important to have the right uniform on, but it's not the most critical thing that's going to happen that day right.
Speaker 2Well, the big deal versus little deal, and I think we see it a lot with brand-new fire chiefs. They get the fire chief job and the first thing they want to do is we're redesigning the badge or we're redesigning the lettering on the fire truck.
Speaker 3The patch.
Speaker 2There's a new patch. And then a whole new uniform standard.
Speaker 3Dress up man.
Speaker 2It's dress up and Bruno talked about appearance is just. We should. We should appear as firefighters. I mean people should understand like we don't work for orc and pest control, we work for the fire department. But beyond that, what you know, we, we go, we do all this stuff for us. You know the jewelry that we wear, our adornments are for us, and my advice to new fire chiefs when I talk about them, is don't worry about any of that stuff, at least for the first. Your problems, or your issues, are a lot deeper than what your patch or your badge looks like. It should not be the first order of business.
Speaker 3My dad used to talk about. They don't send you to fire chief school. There isn't such a place, so you have to learn this all on your own. And he said generals he used the military as a kind of a similar example. He says the generals have military school they send them to, and he says we need the same. And he says they found out the generals. Most generals lose their jobs over two things they start having sex with their secretary or they spend a ton of money redecorating their office. And he says both of those is the end of a career for a general.
Speaker 1And he says so. They just know not to do it, you know. So these people that spend a lot of time focusing on uniforms, and they, I just it has to do with something about their own self-esteem and their own self-worth, them about their own self-esteem and their own self-worth. That, like maybe the ones that I've heard, is is how are they going to know who we are if we don't have our uniform on? How are they going to know I'm the fire chief if I don't have a?
Speaker 3the bugles and the that's what they make business cards for, right, or how about you?
Speaker 1act a certain way, right. Why don't you act like a fire chief and worry and go out and worry about the things that are important, not worry about uniform. But I think you know the way people are dressed is important. We talk about that the way people but it's not. I'm going to tell a little story here, my head's spinning because I wrote that article and I'm thinking about all the things I can say about it. When you think, about it?
Speaker 3No, your best story was in the article yeah, about him when you think about it. No, your best story was in the article yeah.
Speaker 1But I remember being at a fire and after the fire I was sitting in the Suburban. I was a shift commander that day, but I was the incident commander. I was actually the support officer because Sid Norwood was the incident commander and a guy comes walking up to me from an engine company and he comes up and he's an engineer on one of the companies. He comes up, he's got a full beard and he goes and he walks up to the I'm in Phoenix and he walks up and he goes, he goes.
Speaker 1Hey, terry, how's it going? I go fine. And he goes I'm doing fine. I said how's things going? He goes fine. How's your wife? My wife's fine. Hey, you did a good job on the fire. Thank you very much. Hey, do me a favor, send your captain over here, will you? Okay, and he's very nice. So he gives me a little high five and he walks back. Captain comes up. I said, hey, your engineer's got a beard. I didn't want to say anything to the engineer.
Speaker 3I wanted to see the story.
Speaker 1This is going to unfold, man, and I'd never seen the guy with the beard. I'd known him for 20 years. All of a sudden, this day he's got a beard.
Speaker 3Wait, he would be the only member of the operations division wearing a beard that day too.
Speaker 1Listen to this. So he comes up and his captain goes. I said, hey, your engineer's got a beard and it's like 8 in the morning, so he had like a full-ass beard yeah, full-ass beard. He grew it on his two days off.
Speaker 3Well, come on, terry, so he hadn't shaved.
Speaker 1No, nick, you could grow that beard in two days. It'd take me a month, but it was a full. It wasn't a non-shave, it was noticeable, it was a beard and he goes. Yeah, I saw that.
Speaker 2And I said what are you?
Speaker 1going to do about that. He goes. Well, when I get him back to the station, I'm going to make him shave it and I said, okay, yeah, that'd be a pretty good idea. He goes well. You know why he's got the beard I well, you know why he's got the beard I go.
Speaker 3Oh, there's a reason why he grew a beard. Yeah, he's in a band. He's just joined a band.
Speaker 1No, because the captain on the shift that they relieve has a full beard. I go the captain on. I can't remember which shift I was working in. I think I was a C shift. The captain on B shift has a beard.
Speaker 3Yeah, I would have said that probably If that was going to be a beard.
Speaker 1he's got a full beard, I go okay, yeah okay, I'll talk to him.
Speaker 1I'll talk to my relief well, I'll talk to their relief. So I think, actually, smut grew a beard and really, and somebody just just to challenge somebody, you know, because he could grow one in an afternoon, right, okay, and then one of those and it's like, oh god. So I mean, when you see something that's really out of the sort, take the time, correct it. We're not saying that uniforms aren't a critical part. We're saying leaders shouldn't focus and spend a lot of time worrying about uniform.
Speaker 1In fact, how many out there in the do you have a uniform committee? Do you have something going on right now where somebody within your department is doing something with a uniform? There's somebody within your department takes the lead. They want to get a new badge, they want to get a new patch, they want to change the color on the fire engine on the fire engine something that has nothing to do with the work itself, and how much time and energy do you really spend doing that? And you'll have 10 to 12 people within a room spending 6 to 8 hours. If you just looked at the cost of that, it would be remarkable. And that's where they want to focus. You want to take those same people and say no, go to training, no uniform lunch.
Speaker 3What's that? Uniform lunch? Oh yeah, yeah, there's your story. I mean, we'll put a sword through uniforms now. This is it, yeah, so no more talk after this on uniforms. Yeah.
Speaker 1So here's the deal I go. I I'm in a department and same thing and same thing. I hear a lot about uniforms, I hear about baseball caps, I hear about T-shirts, I hear about Class B uniforms. You can't wear a skull cap unless the temperature hits a certain degree. You can't wear a baseball hat inside. One guy couldn't wear a baseball hat inside although he had cancer on his head and the lights hurt him, but the rule says you can't wear a baseball cap inside. It's like, really, have you ever been to a freaking baseball game?
Speaker 1they're inside they wear hats yeah so anyway, um, I'm all kinds of uniforms. I do not want to start my career in this fire department talking about uniforms. I don't want to talk about it. So I come back to phoenix for whatever reason, and I'm mean with bruno. And whenever I come back, I Phoenix for whatever reason, and I'm meeting with Bruno, and whenever I come back, I would have lunch with Bruno or breakfast this case it was breakfast Then I meet with him and I go oh, bruno, he goes, how's it going, chief G?
Speaker 1And I said shake my hand. I go hey, can we talk about Unifo? I need your help. He goes, let's talk about some other things first. So we sit down and we eat and we talk. We're there for an hour and a half.
Uniforms, Readiness, and Firefighter Training
Speaker 1Right, my ass is numb. I've sat there so long and we talked about everything. Well, I completely forgot about the uniform issue. I was just happy to be there and he counseled me on everything else and walked me off the cliff on a few other issues. So I was getting up to leave, he was paying the check and he goes and I said okay, thanks for everything. He goes, hold it time out. He goes, don't you want to talk about your uniform? I go. I forgot I sat back down. He says to me he goes first of all, how was your food? I said man, it was delicious, thank you very much. He goes and how was the service? I said it service. I said it was awesome and she did a great job. He goes. And what was she wearing? I said I don't know. And he goes uniform, puts his thumb up uniform.
Speaker 1That was my uniform talk love it that's uniforms yeah, that's, that's it, yeah focus on the work, focus on how you treat people. Mrs smith does not care if somebody's t-shirt is not quite blue enough. She cares about the service you deliver to her and her family, and that's it. That's a true story, that man. I tell you what. The light bulb went boom. Thank you, Bruno.
Speaker 2On a more important side of that ready issue is readiness, and that's something that I took from him and we used to say battle ready and we had a bunch, but it's making sure that the crews are ready to go, the equipment's in the truck, that needs to be in the truck. We've got fuel, we've got water, we're ready to render service. So let's talk readiness and how that should just eclipse anything with uniforms and some of the other stuff that you get involved in.
Speaker 1It's much more important right. This is where you actually form work groups and work on issues to make sure that you're ready to do the job. You can include training in this. I mean this is where you can. We didn't list it on our list of hierarchy, but that's where training would fit. You want to be ready to do the job. You want people to be capable to do the job and in our organization, readiness always also focused on kind of there was all with bruno is kind of interesting, because whenever you would, you would talk with them and I it took me years to figure this out there's also there's always a conversation about readiness, about training and the customer, but then there's a little bit thrown in there that took a little while for me to understand.
Speaker 1There was also about character and he would slip that in on you. Like how you deliver the service to Mrs Smith, how you. Later it was obvious, be nice. That became such a critical statement. But even early on, like you deliver the service, what's it take to be ready? You know that's. I thought that was really important too. But no, I think readiness is an important part of that hierarchy, but but there's even a level higher than that or a level more critical than that.
Speaker 3Well, it would be the added value piece. So, like the readiness, see, like talking about the, you've got to have an EMS certification to ride a fire truck that delivers EMS. So that's part of readiness. Well, in most fire departments, the fire department has all the systems to keep you trained. You have to have the uh I don't know what you even call it maturity to go through and say, okay, I have to maintain this certification as part of my readiness, and if I lose this I can't do this anymore. So that would kind of be a bigger issue one. But you know, that goes all the way down to having your turnouts on the truck, make sure your SCBA's got air in it, all those other things that I can do my job as I need to.
Speaker 1You know, as a fire chief, I spend a lot of time talking with city managers and county elected officials about readiness, getting the firefighters ready to do the job, and I think if I would have spent a little more time talking about the actual work, because I spent a lot of time talking about we need to have apparatus that allows us to be ready to do our job.
Speaker 1We need to have equipment and turnouts that gets us ready to do our job.
Speaker 1We need to have training that gets us ready to do our job, and all that takes a lot of resources right, that's the front end stuff that you need to take care of so you can go out and deliver that job.
Speaker 1So there's probably a lot of fire chiefs that spend a lot of fire chiefs and that spent a lot of conversation, spent a lot of time having conversations about readiness, and my advice to them is if you could tie that readiness conversation quickly into providing the service, then those elected officials who really don't have a clue what firefighters do, regardless the way you think they could sit and not at you city managers and elected officials and pretend like they know what firefighters really do on a scene, but until you break down an incident and talk to them about what a firefighter actually does to perform their work and why this is all important for them to perform their work. I think we've talked about it before where a great way to do that is with some sort of program where you take the elected officials in to a training session and they do the crawl down and get them helmets, get them turnouts, go ahead.
Speaker 1Put them under heat lamps, but actually show them what it takes to do the job, and this is why we need good physical training programs. This is why we need to have physicals once a year. This is why we need good physical training programs. This is why we need to have physicals once a year. This is why firefighters get sick. This is why firefighters get injured because they're doing all this type of work. So if you tie the readiness conversation to the work conversation, I think it pays off. I believe so.
Speaker 2The Fire Ops 101 that the union does is it's like a home run you know when they do that, that that you'll get support from your elected officials they understand. You know they forget you gotta do it every couple years so skipping ahead to, uh, get set you know we're talking about some things and get set. One of the things you talk about is adherence to routine, and then you get into some effectiveness stuff. So how is that important with the adherence to routine and how does that tie in?
Speaker 1with effectiveness. That probably is where I'm talking. Training too, I think that kind of rolls right into that. Right, ready and get set, they kind of roll together in there. What did you say, nick, when we were talking earlier? You used a different analogy rather than ready, get set, they kind of roll together in there. What did you say, nick, when we were talking earlier? You used a different analogy rather than ready, get set and go.
Speaker 3Ready aim fire.
Speaker 1Yeah, so if the get set part is, it's not in the article, but when Nick, kind of when him and I had a conversation earlier today he used the aim part for the get ready.
Preparation and Behavior in Leadership
Speaker 3See, because what happens a lot of times is they'll do ready fire, aim. Yeah, you know, that's the fast, aggressive thing is we don't stop long enough to figure out okay, what should we do here? Right, and you know, once you do that, you think, okay, this is what I need to do, and then you're you can do it and you're done. Where the ready, ready aimed fire.
Speaker 1Where the other you're going to have to redo, redo, you're just it's going to take longer to get your whatever objective it is you want to. You know, whenever you're accomplishing anything, that that get ready part, or get set part, is really important, right, whether you're running a race or playing a sport or doing your job. Is that that middle piece is absolutely critical, and I think that um and Bruno thought that leaders could spend a great deal of time within that area. Right, and and that's what we were talking about is right in that area, where the sweet spot where you got to get them ready to go.
Speaker 3Well, if you look at it like um Shift change, and starting your shift is get ready, and that's where you put all your gear on the truck and you make sure everything works. So now I'm ready. Then you get dispatched on whatever call. That's where you aim and think, okay, we're going on an EMS call, we're going on a fire call, we're going on a multi-unit response call, so the engineer knows where they're going, everybody's belted in. If they need turnouts, they're turned out before they get on the truck, that kind of stuff. So you're ready and then we're set, we're going, so we're aiming and then go is when they set the air brake and you're doing your thing.
Speaker 1Then, bruno, identifies behavior as an important part in that. Uh, get set right people's behavior, their actions. You know, how often do you hear people say we talked about it here on a show before, but you know, I can't. How do you manage attitude?
Speaker 3and you say yeah, okay, well, accidental, it's a stupid call. What am I doing? Attitude, what kind of bad attitudes you have? Well, he shows up late. Well, that's not an attitude.
Speaker 1That's a behavioral issue. What am I doing? What kind of bad attitude does he have? Well, he shows up late. Well, that's not an attitude, that's a behavioral issue. That's an action. You need to fix that piece. Well, he doesn't check his equipment every day. He's got a bad attitude. He doesn't turn his bottles on in the morning to check his air bottle. Well, that's not attitude, that's behavior.
Speaker 1So that behavior on that get set part is absolutely critical because that's going to lead into the next piece. So people start getting really lackadaisical about that. So, as supervisors I mean I've seen the best supervisors that I've seen are the ones that do that with you They'll get out there with you in the morning and make sure you check all your equipment. The best battalion chiefs are the ones that show up at your station and ask you what do you need to get ready and get set right? What do you need? Are you ready? What can I do for you to help you get set? And then they make sure they take care of you and they're more to support. I think for a leader that's a really a pretty important supportive position. Right there is helping somebody get set prior to go.
Fire Service Unity and Culture Routine
Speaker 3Well, and I think you put, like the critique after action review in as the final loop of that, and I think that's where you validate all the get ready, get set, go piece of it. So, as an example, you do an incident operation, you had burn victims and all kinds of stuff Happens during a non-standard time and the first company there was a minute and a half way. They were driving by when the call got spit out. It wasn't their first do, but at the end of the incident you had I don't know four victims all transported to the hospital. The after action review come out. Okay, we had this house burning. It was rocking and rolling. We had four victims burning. It was rocking and rolling. We had four victims. 20 minutes later we got fire control all clear and the fourth victim was being dropped off at the hospital. That's ready, set, go right there. We did what we said we were going to do. We showed up and did our jobs's and so I mean that's, there ain't nothing better than that juice right there. That's.
Speaker 3We said well, we, we're pirate b shifters, this is, we're good to go you know it's its own reward at that point I mean it's like a tonic, almost like a vitamin to do that, and it brings everybody closer together, all the ranks, it's like no, we're all part of the same thing. It's not us and them, it's us, it's just us, there's no them.
Speaker 1You know you talk about that root adherence to routine. When I saw that and I didn't put it in the article because the article can only be so long but you think routine, the routine that the organization, the membership kind of adopts, that becomes the culture. Right? The best definition of culture I ever heard are the way things are done around here. You can see that in a crew, you can see that in a battalion, you can see that in an organization. But the way things are done around here, that's where you're actually describing your culture. Way things are done around here, that's where you're actually describing your culture. So if your routine becomes this is the way we care about the customer, this is the way we care about our fellow firefighters, this is the way we care about ourselves in that routine part, you can really start developing some bad habits in the routine that are not going to change when you get in the hazard zone. Like if people aren't checking their equipment every day, every day, every day and this is just an example or a battalion chief's not having conversations about culture every day, every day, every day when they get on a scene, they're not going to be able to change that. You can't kick somebody's ass right then and right there to get them to do the right thing. That has to be created through that routine and that culture that you develop over a period of time.
Speaker 1And so when I was a fire chief in the departments I worked in, I would come in and I would look at the routine and I would start to have conversations about what do they think is important. If you're a new fire chief, go in and just listen and have people come in and talk to you and say, ok, I want to interview my executive command team and see what they're talking about. What are they really talking? And you know what. Sometimes they're talking about uniforms, sometimes they're talking about budget, sometimes they're talking about how screwed up they think the labor group is or whatever. And you say, ok, what do I really want them talking about? I want to talk about Mrs Smith, I want to talk about firefighters, I want to talk about training, I want to talk about safety.
Speaker 1So the routine becomes the typical conversations and fire chiefs are going to have a difficult time over the next five months keeping their members focused on the job and not on the politics of the country, and they're going to have to say we've got to turn off the TVs. We can't have conversations like that because that's going to become the routine and the routine is going to become mean-spirited back and forth and then somebody is going to get hurt on a fire ground and you're going to feel terrible about it because you know firefighters, it's always funny. You'll argue with somebody and hate their guts across the table over politics, but you would save that same guy in a fire 13 minutes from now. So why would we treat each other like that? So fire chiefs need to get a handle on that culture. That's going to take and it's probably already taken place. You just left your fire chief.
Speaker 2Well, it's so distracting. It really is, and I saw it, you know, starting a few years back, and that's why we started putting ESPN on the TV and saying let's stay. We talked to the officers about that because we know where it's going. We know where it is and you know, when I started in the fire service in 1991, they didn't talk about politics at all at the firehouse. I mean, I don't remember we did all the time.
Speaker 3I didn't 1980. We didn't talk about it. I mean we were heavily unionized and it was mostly local. And how it affected the fire department. It's as far as, like national politics, we were all over the page. I mean there was more second amendment people in a fire department than there are first amendment people it's just kind of the way it's set up.
Speaker 1I asked an old salty dog, ted undercheck once. I said hey, because he came on and he's a a Vietnam era guy and came on in the 60s Best fire captain I ever worked for. And I said what did you guys like all the politics and everything that's taken place? I said what did you guys, what did you talk about when you came on? He goes oh yeah, we had some serious battles. We had some serious FUFU battles. I said what about he goes? Are you about a bass fisherman or trout Hunting?
Speaker 2fishing Ford or Chevy, you walk a stream.
Speaker 1No, I sit in a boat and drink beer. Those are the two kinds of that's what they've been arguing about.
Speaker 3There was a paramedic duo, see, because these problems have been with us Not even problems, they're issues. It's just people are different and they have to learn how to get along together. One of my least favorite bosses I ever had, who just wasn't very good at his job, had been a paramedic and his former partner had transgendered from being a man to a woman and quit. So we blame that on him, that you yeah, you're so bad at it that look what you did to him. So, anyway, but I mean this was in the late 70s when that happened, so it's not like this just occurred. I mean it's been going on forever and, like Ted said a lot of times, it is your second family. In fact, for some people it was really their first family.
Speaker 3In fact, I was reading some tactical truths from somebody wrote one day and he talked about don't let your personal life screw up your occupational life. I thought I wonder who wrote that? Anyway, or vice versa. Yeah, well, I knew where he was going, but nonetheless it's.
Speaker 3It's so a lot of times we're learning together and having to process this new information and new cultural phenomenons and that's where, like the, the, the older generation doesn't like the younger generation, who doesn't like the older generation, and that's all bullshit. I mean, you're all people and you know if we're all in a room together and you're like an infant and every generation's represented. That's the beauty of our work is you set a fire in there and it's going to kill them all just as fast. We're talking the other day about these like smoke jumper schools they have and that they honestly believe that somehow they're immune to smoke that regular people aren't. But you never stop being a biological unit and cyanide and carbon monoxide kills everybody equally. So we're all the same like that, but somehow we don't think we are at the end of the day, so it becomes confused. Well, and if people start to daydream that they're like a snuffleupagus instead of a captain on a ladder truck, that's going to create some issues in service delivery at some point.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah I only need to breathe five times a minute yeah.
Speaker 1So if you're, if you we talk about ready, get set, go. If your get set level of routine, adherence to routine focuses on the go and that becomes your primary object Because, think about it, that's the whole get set of every sport or whatever it is, when they're in the blocks. Right now we've got track and field. I love to watch that because I can't run. I ran once A guy caught me and beat me up.
Speaker 3I quit running.
Speaker 1But if you see that they're getting ready because they're getting set, because of what they're going to do, so the get set part focuses on the go part and actually doing the work will be so much better. But a lot of people's routine focuses on something that has nothing to do with the work, focuses back to the uniform, focuses on, like when you have a you, when you have a, a fire department that is more worried about the political landscape. And I think the unions are very important and they play. I've had great union partnership but you can't get caught up in the political piece. That the union gets caught up. Let them do their political piece and you manage the fire department and work together within that.
Speaker 1But a lot of fire chiefs get too caught up in the political part too and they lose focus to the organization and then it's live or die based on who the next politician is who got voted based on. I don't like that at all and I don't think fire chiefs should get involved with any kind of politics, any kind of any of that. You have your own opinion, you vote, they seal those envelopes for a reason. Keep them sealed and mail them in, but nobody needs to know how you feel about that as a fire chief.
Speaker 3Between the set and go, there's things you do to propel yourself. So I was like a company officer responding. The first engine gets there and keys up Engine 13 clear. So you know they're getting ready to give an initial radio report. You're looking at the second world war on the horizon. I mean there's shit blowing up. It's going crazy and you're starting to get jacked.
Speaker 3For me it was to be ready as I had to calm myself down, so I would close my eyes and take three. I control my breathing, do breathing exercises and then like, took 15, 30 seconds and then you're reset, you're not jacked anymore, you can actually feel your pulses drop. Okay, now I can think clearly this isn't affecting me, I'm going to do whatever is going to be the best for all of us. So I promote to battalion chief and I think well, I'm no longer a ladder captain, so I don't have to go off and do Kung Fu, to fire and all that other stuff we did.
Speaker 3So you're responding and they clear alarm and you think, jesus Christ, they put some water on it Sooner than later. Oh, it's getting bigger and they're screaming. It's so distracting to them and I'm like okay, let's close my eyes, take three deep breaths. They're like I just don't give a shit anymore. This is going to go well For me. It was having to disconnect myself from whatever I was getting ready to respond to. So it's like no, you can't. Your ego, whatever, wherever that is inside, you got to take that out and you're just going to be the captain who reacts to uh stimuli you know the other thing to say about that.
Speaker 1Uh, get set. And the routine piece is how many people out there that are listening work in a fire department where if you have two battalions, you have two different departments, if you have?
Speaker 2three shifts and two battalions.
Speaker 1you have six different departments In Houston. We had 22 divisions on four shifts. That would be 88 different departments in the city of Houston. You ain't going to get much mail delivered there. So I think it's important that the leaders in those type of organizations and all organizations their primary focus is trying to get consistency throughout their entire organization. Now, that's hard. In Houston it can be done and I think everybody wants it done. Who's in that system? Let's say 98% of the people want it done. There's always those people like to throw bricks. You know what Brunner used to say one brick thrower can outperform 100 brick layers a well-placed brick thrower.
Speaker 1But I think most people in that system. So trying to get consistency throughout that and that was what we back to your comment early on about why was there such a good a small group of instructors at the CTC is because we were trying to get how many battalions did we have at the time? Nick, ten, ten battalions on three shifts, nine or ten.
Speaker 3If you take the airport out, you had nine.
Speaker 1I would have said seven. That's why.
Speaker 3I looked at you Well, because it kept going up, we Well, because it kept going up. We had three shift commanders at one point. But, I mean, that was at the end of the golden years, but the key is to get that all.
Speaker 1So, as a fire chief and a higher level executive, if you can get that consistency and the best way to do I mean I found the best way to get everybody on the same page is through training.
Speaker 3Terry. That being said, you were a paramedic. You worked with a lot of paramedics. Standardized training program.
Speaker 1Yes.
Speaker 3Same final evals. You had to do the same shit. Some paramedics you and I could both name probably the same people. If something happened to us or one of our loved ones, we would name the same four or five paramedics we wanted treating them and the two that we don't Exactly. And now that is the strongest system I've ever seen is the, the, the emt paramedic system for making those positions out of firefighters, and even that has its. So you have to have a lot of after action review and work to make sure that they can all start lines, they all interpret the data the same way, they do the same treatment protocols. So it's a full-time job just keeping all of them on track, let alone the stragglers.
Speaker 1And if you look back to that, nick, that is the medical equivalent to. You find standard conditions, you apply a standard action. You get a standard outcome.
Speaker 3Oh, Blue Card does the same thing for you tactically.
Speaker 1Exactly where I was going. That is why that is so important. But you want to get your organization on the same page. Bring them together, focus on the work and train to do that work. Have conversations about doing that work, find out who is not do that work. Have conversations about doing that work. Find out who is not doing that work similar to everybody else in the way you want it, and then you'll talk. I think that would be our function. Number eight managing boundaries within an organization and the silverback leadership that we'll talk about somewhere down the road. But really that's the key. That's why that adherence to routine is in there. It's so absolutely important.
Speaker 3Well, and Blue Card is old enough now and departments will come in and out of it that I've had people that have been doing Blue Card a long time that say I know my neighbors aren't doing CE anymore. I can tell it's after about three months. The radio traffic starts to drift in the wrong way and it's not as descriptive, it takes longer, you're not getting the information you need and you see it. The same thing would happen on the medical side. If you could let your medical lapse, most fire departments think, oh, we're medically trained forever, we're not doing it anymore. You think no, to keep your skill level ready, you have to be competent in these levels and that takes review of past incidents to keep it up to where you want it to be, to operate at a higher level.
Speaker 2Well, this is a great article and I really want everyone to read it. Look in the show notes. There's a link to it and remember.
Speaker 1This is, this is bruno's information that we pack, that we are repackaging up and adding a little bit of our own color to it, but this is information that he he learned and practiced for 50 years in the fire service and it's really good. And then, and then the last part is the go part, where you just uh, if you got everything lined up, you can focus on the go and leaders don't focus on Just because you're in the same uniform, and then you focus on that. That creates uniformity in the work. Right, I interrupted you but you were starting to make me uncomfortable with what you were saying about the article. But it's a Bruno article all the way.
Speaker 2Well, it's a great article. So look in the show notes, we have one more order of business before we adjourn for the day. Hey now, timeless tactical truth from Alan Brunicini when there is a problem, fix it, don't blame. When it is fixed, act. Look, talk happy, don't be unhappy. Just so people know you're the boss, be a happy boss.
Speaker 1Have you ever worked for a boss who you know doesn't like you? It's a terrible feeling. I didn't for bruno for years, but there was people with between bruno and I that I knew didn't like me. They were mean-spirited and it's like they. They look for problems and then when you because you want to make people, want to make their boss happy even when I was working for a city manager that I just could not agree with because they wanted to cut staffing to firefighters I still want he's my boss, I still want to make him happy and it seemed like sometimes, uh, when things didn't go right, uh, he stayed unhappy, even though I corrected the issue a very long time. I'm thinking now he's living with that Don't be that guy, because right.
Speaker 1Yeah, he spent a lot of time worrying about what was already fixed. I think that's for Bruno.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1Remember when Bruno fixed us a couple of times and then he went away. Bruno fixed people.
Speaker 3Bruno, he did not. I don't know. I'm sitting right here, buddy, not, I'm going to have to, I'm going to need a refund.
Speaker 1He didn't fix family, but if you were a fire chief working for him, he had expectations about behavior.
Speaker 1And if you did, not act in a certain way. He would fix you right there and then he would move on. And he did it in a way where the person that got fixed could move on very easily with it like we've been fixed or you can live with that like it's a tumor in you, but he forgot about it. I truly believe that he kind of went on past that and I'd seen people within the organization that got fixed and he fixed them, corrected their behavior and for some reason man years later it just tormented him.
Speaker 3He was more of an advocate and it's like no, you're doing like therapy almost. You keep stepping on this rake. Why do you do that all the time? So, but the water would flow both ways.
Speaker 3I remember it was very early in my career. I had like two years on and he was picking me up for some reason. We were going to go to some fire department thing. I don't remember what it was, but somehow he ended up in the dorm and I'm dressed, ready to go and my bed's not put away yet. So I just rolled my stuff up and stuffed it in the locker. It did not take five seconds. And he said what are you doing? I said, well, we're going to wherever.
Speaker 3Admin. He says no, you just unmade your bed. I said uh-huh. And he says you don't fold your blankets. I said no, they're first aid blankets. You know, they were made out of 100% unidentified materials. When you get up, you'd have little fuzz balls all over you. They've never been washed. Yeah, I said no, why would I do that? Because, like I'm going to come back next shift, I'm going to throw it down, I'm going to roll it out and then it's ready to go. And you could tell it pissed them off and the longer it went, and finally, like a month or two later, he says you know, I've been doing this wrong the whole time. We used to fold them, but it doesn't make any sense. Why wouldn't you just roll it up like that? And I'm like, yeah, you really have been thinking about this. Well, yeah, well, you must have all this other shit figured out to this level that it's just little things that your crazy children are doing that you're having to come to grips with.
Speaker 1Probably he realized. I don't know if this is true, but the moment you told him why you did it, he probably thought you were right and then spent a lot of time trying to figure out why you were right.
Speaker 3Yeah, exactly, but little things like that, just the simplest things, he would stop and sometimes you could see he was still thinking about it later and a lot of times he would just no, you're wrong and that's not right, but occasionally you could pull him in.
Speaker 2Is he talking about tyrant bosses though, too? Like the boss that you know they have to correct a problem, but then they come back and they're just angry all day. Oh yeah, it's the moody boss.
Speaker 1I mean, you know people like that. When you walk up to them, the first thing they want to say something negative to you All the time. And it to them, the first thing they want to say is something negative to you All the time. And it's just like the first thing I was like, really, you're going to wear that shirt, really, you're going to do your hair like Really, you just, I saw the way it's like there's just people that are like that and it's worse when they're your boss.
Speaker 3I think it's a personal issue with them mostly, and they just happen to be your boss too.
Speaker 1And you remember we told that story that Bruno said to that one fire captain when he was sitting there and he was looking all grouchy and everything and Bruno goes. Are you in a good mood? He goes, yeah, he goes really Because you're not smiling. No, I'm in a good mood. Well, why don't you tell your face?
Speaker 3That was my favorite.
Speaker 2Yeah, he could do that. Well, let's put a bow on it. Anything else, guys, before we go?
Speaker 3No, nothing, no, Vance. I strongly recommend cutting the whole last two, three minutes out. Leave me alone.
Speaker 2I'm angry. I don't want to do it anymore. Thanks for listening to the B-Shifter podcast. We'll talk to you soon. Yes, indeed, thanks for listening to the B Shifter podcast. We'll talk to you soon.