All Blog Posts Tagged 'service' (19)

As 2015 draws to a close, it is a good time to ask yourself where you stand in terms of your personal attitude, accountability and the action you take on your own health and fitness.  As a member of the fire service, it is probably the one thing that you can improve upon on a personal level that has the most influence on every other part of your life and all of the people that are a part of it.

Your impact is more powerful than you may think.  Every day,…

Updated November 17, 2016

I hope what you’re about to read upsets you.

• Annually, on average, there are between 80-100 line-of-duty-deaths (LODD).
• Annually, on average, approximately 50% of LODDs are due to sudden cardiac events (SCE).
• Annually, there are also between 800 and 900 non-fatal yet high-impact SCEs reported. This figure is believed to be drastically underreported (Smith, 2015).…

Several years ago, I was having conversation with a friend of mine who is a seasoned Company Officer from an agency I use to work with.  I was inquiring on how he always seemed to be calm, cool, and collective on incident scenes.  I was always impressed by his demeanor and command presence on any incident, but especially on those significant ones.  His was reply was simply I’m a “Duck on Water.”  I looked at him with a blank stare and said what does that mean?  He said I make myself stay…

Individual commitment to a group effort – that’s what makes a team work.

~Vince Lombardi

Firefighters are athletes.                                       

                                                                                                                                                                            Specifically, we are tactical athletes. With that…

               This may be the most important blog I have ever posted. In order to make the greatest impact possible I have decided to also keep it short.

               When I was younger my parents never let me quit a sport once the season began. Their philosophy was "Finish what you started. If you quit when things get hard you'll quit anytime you encounter adversity in life." I will forever be grateful for that…

Are you a self-proclaimed leader? This doesn’t work (sorry to all the self proclaimed leaders out there). Sure, you can think your leader material, but if you’re the only one who thinks this way then you’re in for a big surprise.

So you’ve taken a few leadership classes, you attended conferences and heard experienced fire service members speak on the various topics surrounding leadership, and maybe even read some books written by experts. Are you now a leader? You may want to…

I was recently asked to speak at the East Brandywine Volunteer Fire Company (Chester County, PA) 2015 Officer Installment ceremony. As Fire Chief John Edwards explained when he first contacted me, what began several years ago as an informal gathering to recognize newly appointed fire officers has evolved into an…

For those of us who have been around this business for a while, it can be easy at times to look at the rookies and wonder why they don't do it like the way we did when we were coming up. This, being a very broad statement, is nothing new to the old guys thinking they do it better than the young guys (at least in their minds) for each generation that comes through. Technical rescues, an EMS patient, or attacking fires can be accomplished in a multitude of ways and still yield the same…

Every organization has a culture. It is either created by design or default. Creating a culture of customer service does not happen by accident. Buying into the concept of layered leadership (the need for leaders throughout your entire organization) is especially important when it comes to customer service.

Helping others seems to be part of the DNA of most firefighters. Creating culture; however, goes beyond just being a good person. There has to be a clear and focused objective or…

I recently attended the IAFC-VCOS Symposium in Clearwater Beach.  It was a tremendous experience filled with great course content, lively discussions and debate about how to move the fire service forward in a unified fashion, and awesome networking with current and future fire service leaders from all across the country.  As you might expect, one of the most talked about topics was the ongoing UL/NIST fire behavior research.  It’s important stuff, to be sure.  In fact, the underlying theme…

What would you like people to say about you when you’re not in the room? In particular, what would you like them to say about you as a leader? Pretend you’re a fly on the wall and you get to listen in on real conversations taking place about you.  These conversations are between firefighters at a station you haven’t visited in a while, or maybe from your peers that you work with every day, or possibly your friends and family at a summertime get-together. Take a moment to write down 3 things…

A few times a week, I get phone calls or emails from people trying to find out why they have yet to be promoted or hired (if from the outside applying for a position). Either they failed the recent promotional exam or they did not score high enough to get promoted and they seem to want to blame everyone but themselves for their misfortune. Most of the time, when people ask my advice, they usually start off with something to the effect of "what more do I need to obtain in the way of…

                I started my fire service volunteer career in 2005. Bright eyed and bushy tailed, I remember walking in to the fire station across the street from my high school looking for a way to help people and make a difference. I look back upon that experience and I can still smell the food that was cooking on the stove. When I opened the door to the station, I had no idea what would be behind it. I can recall the stares I got as I stood in the doorway lost and waiting to be invited…

Over the years, I have had others try to tell me how to blog and what to blog. 

What they fail to understand is that just like anyone who writes, you develop a style that becomes distinctive and that differentiates you from others who engage in that type of writing, because let's face it; blogging is writing.

With that said, it has also been suggested to me on occasion that I shouldn't blog about politics at a fire service website, because it isn't about fire service…

Yeah; it is used to suck the smoke and heat from structures, but it’s also used to suck any promise that many future leaders will offer new perstpective to the old hard-line ways of a traditional fire service.

I read on fire discussion boards about concern that the “old guard” isn’t passing it down to the new guard. Along with that come complaints that the new guard isn’t interested in old stuff. They want new stuff; that is, unless it deals with the same old approach to…

I have been in the workforce full time since I was 19 years old and now, I am 58.

I have been fortunate for almost 40 years to change jobs at my own volition. That is to say that circumstance dictated that a change was wanted/needed and I made that decision.

The same held true with my fire department. It was always my decision to change it up, move up and finally, to move on. I didn’t feel any pressure to do so; in my mind, it was time to change my focus, so I went from fire…