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The Silverbacks on Supervision · B Shifter

• 0:48
  Speaker 2: So it's like the question the other day about the.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: We're talking about the OSHA thing and small versus big departments and you're like well, no, you're, oh, I'm a volunteer, I can't do this, so the volunteer fire service will go away.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: You think, well, maybe they should.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: If they can't do this form of training, they shouldn't be firefighters.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: You know, it's such an opportunity for fire chiefs when OSHA came out with that to go to their elected officials and say, hey, here it is.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: Let's do it.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: I've been telling you this.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this justifies everything I've been asking for.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Well, we had one of those I was telling you.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Kevin Roach came in and did a work study for us and justified everything City manager goes.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Nah, I don't really buy that.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Took the book and threw it over there and never showed it to the politicians.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: Well, that's why, if you can get the council to adopt a service level objective for the fire department where you spell out what the effective response for should be, both for structure fire, medical, call everything and the and the intended result, like you were saying on our last podcast, where you know do you want?
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: Do you want to hold the fire to the room of origin, the building of origin or the block of origin?
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: What's the council going to say, yeah, they want the room of origin right, yeah, but they want to pay for the block of origin.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: you can't have a both ways.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Years when I was in glendale he was trying to get that staffing trying to get that staffing I went through, found an old document from from a previous council.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: It was called uh shit, I can't remember, it's called city something, city scope or whatever and it said right in the document they adopted that they wouldn't decrease service levels in the fire service.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: And so when I pulled that out there on his desk, oh he got.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: So it was part of that document I put together and I said here you go, if the city adopted this level of service, you can't, as a manager, you can't just decide to do that.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: Man, I could just see it coming.
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: He didn't even know that document existed.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: No.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: They have their own agenda.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: All of them do, every single one of them.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: That's when he was done with me.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like well, now I'm going to have to fight with you, now I'm not going to be able to get the.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: Well, just the fact that you agree to be part of the Automatic Aid Consortium, you have to have four person staffing.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: You can't go back.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: He didn't like that.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: That's the whole thing.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: Well, no, I can't manage the way I need to.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: That's why they wrote all this.
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: So you can't manage the way you want to.
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: In the year 2024, there should not be new fire departments popping up.
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: And it's a trend right now and I think it's part of the political bullshit that's going on.
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: But the trend is people are breaking out of fire districts and contracts and starting their own fire department because they believe they can do it cheaper.
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: And they really can't.
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: I mean, at the end of the day, you can't.
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: I mean it's way so expensive.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: It's a consumer department.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: It takes a lot of money.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Man Whoop, there was a sound.
• 3:49
  Speaker 3: Well, we have a question.
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: Let's get to this question, see if we can answer this.
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: Okay, this guy, gabe, wrote in to us.
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: He's 23 years old and a firefighter.
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: He's a seasonal wildland firefighter, he's completing college, he wants to be somewhere that's progressive, that uses blue card, that looks at the customer the way that we talk about here on B-Shifter, and he wants some advice from us Because he's finding places that really aren't that progressive and don't really have the same values as he does and wants to have as a blossoming firefighter.
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: So it sounds like his heart's in a good place, but he's having trouble finding a place where he really wants to land.
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: So what advice do we have for Gabe?
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: Nick.
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: I was looking at a document the other day.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: How many blue card fire departments are there now 3,000?
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: 3,300,.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, something like that 3,300 fire departments that practice blue card.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: There's a start, but you know it's interesting and you know everything you said about Gabe there, 23 years old, wants to do a good job, wants to work for a good department, which really everybody does when they're starting off.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Nobody wants to work for a good department, which really everybody does when they're starting off.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Nobody wants to work for assholes, right?
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: And he asks us about it, thinking we might have some insight on that.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: First of all, we were extremely blessed, privileged, lucky, whatever you want to use to work for Bruno for 30 years as our fire chief.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: So yeah, we were there, we were lucky.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: But what I would advise him to do is because I've worked for a few departments and every fire department has its own personality.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: Every city or every jurisdiction, like Nick likes to say, authority-having jurisdiction, has its own culture, personality, and I think he needs to.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: What I would do if I was a young guy like that is I would think to myself where do I want to live?
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: What part of the country, what part of a state would you want to live in?
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: Maybe look at the benefits of a retirement system where you can move from one department to another and stay in the same retirement system.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: And then I would go visit fire stations and I would talk to firefighters.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: I would talk to just regular old firefighters and ask them how things are going around, just watch them, spend some time with them and you might get a good sense of because I don't think firefighters are very shy about talking about some of the issues that are taking place.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: And if you visit places and you see that they have issues that don't revolve around what we've been talking about is the work, the customer service, support of the firefighters, those kind of things then I'd move to the next department and I would look.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: It may not be the last place he may.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: He decides to stay because he sounds like he's a pretty sharp guy and I think these younger individuals they don't have loyalty like we did to the department and I don't think they should.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: I think that's a positive thing.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: They have loyalty to the position of firefighting, to be a firefighter.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: They have loyalty to the position of firefighting, to be a firefighter.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: But they're not tied to an organization like kind of some of us old heads are.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: So he could travel around and try one, make a decision and then, if it's not, you know the last decision he made isn't the last decision he'll make.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: But I think you ought to get out and visit and talk to firefighters and ask people how they like working in the organizations they're working in.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: You may be surprised with some of the honest answers he gets.
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: You know, here working here, there were 25 fire departments that all worked together, so you could.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: It wasn't unusual for people to start with one fire department and end up with another fire department.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: So and I mean, that's kind of the hierarchy of, okay, this is the premier place to work, and then there's these other places that we'll try.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: And so it was common for people going through the testing process to take multiple tests and then for a while they were even combining tests for organizations and then there was a lot of.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: For a while it became a little political, because people go to work for other fire departments and then they would, when they could, they would transfer over to a different fire department and then that would piss off the fire department.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: They left because that wasn't the first time that had happened and we put all this time and effort into training you, and now you have this opportunity and you leave us, and so that kind of created a thing with the fire chiefs here at the time and I remember the well the Phoenix fire chief said no, the people can work wherever they want and that's the way this works, and if they're leaving your department to go to work somewhere else, maybe you ought to look inside to why that's happening.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they wanted to charge these people for their turnouts.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: If you're going to leave.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: It's within a two-year period or whatever, and I get it.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: You know the smaller departments don't want to be the AAA for the larger departments, but you treat them well in the smaller departments.
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: Well, the opposite happened.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: A few years later is now there's people leaving the big departments to go to smaller ones.
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: People are going to Frisco Texas like crazy because they're paying, well, they've got a lot of money, great resources.
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: There you go, frisco Texas.
• 9:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: Well, and the other part is a lot of places you work now it's like no, you have indentured servitude period.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: You don't get to go home anymore because of our staffing.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: We're going to call you and you're going to work six days in a row.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: People are like no, I'm not Goodbye.
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: So there's a lot of issues fire departments need to fix.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: And you hear it.
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: It's more and more common to hear people say we can't test enough people to have quality candidates based on the numbers we're hiring.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: And you're like well, welcome to America today.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: That's the way employment works, is there's fewer workers.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: America today that's the way employment works is there's fewer workers and that's the population's dwindling.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: But the needs of the elderly are expanding.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: So that includes 911 response.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: You know what you said is I hadn't thought that a checklist would be nice, like the things that are important and mandatory overtime.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: If I was a young firefighter would be on the top of my checklist, because that is problematic for a lot of people.
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: Oh, especially if you have a family.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: I mean it's just.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's untenable for a lot of people.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: You can't go to your you know the bar mitzvah because oh no, we don't have enough people, you have mandatory overtime.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: So make a list of kind of some of those things the leadership, safety, how they treat the customer, of course, pay and benefits.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: But I remember a guy in the last department I worked for and he had a girlfriend in Southern California that he wanted to get serious with.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: She lived there and he lived here and he left the Glendale Fire Department to go to a Southern California Fire Department and within six months because I mean he's going to live on the beach, things are going to be great and within six months he came back and his, his girlfriend relationship was real strong and that didn't suffer.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: But he said, no, I'm not, I can't work for this department.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: They're like, they're just not nice to each other.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: They don't value all the things that that glendale valued.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: And he was back and I remember it was kind of a big deal because the fire chief is like what do we got to rehire him?
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: And the city manager I go no, no, six months he's coming back.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: We're just.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: Why would we do that?
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: Why would we put the guy through this?
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: So we took him, him back in and he's happy as can be right now.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: It's not uncommon.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: We have a house where the instructors stay when they come to Phoenix to do trainers.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: The next-door neighbor to that house is a young couple and the male is a firefighter in LA County, and so he disappears for a week or two, goes to LA to go to work and then he drives home and he lives in Phoenix.
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: So I mean that is a common thing.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: Hell, when we were young kids there were LA firefighters who owned a plane that lived in Phoenix that would fly back and forth.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: So I mean, firefighters are very ingenuitive people and so we have been traveling to work for a long time, so that's normal.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: So, you have a lot of options, especially if you're young and if you're really qualified, fire departments want to hire you.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: I mean.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: So it's very competitive for you and you will find a job wherever you want to, typically, I mean you have to.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: Typically I mean you, you have to stay committed to it, but I'm and you said it, nick, from the other side if you got people leaving your department, get a mirror out and look and see what's happening in your department.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: You got some leaders in there.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Somebody is not being nice because what bruno used to say is people quit their boss, not their job.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: And uh, culture, right, culture is absolutely important.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: But you can tell.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: I've been to departments where you know you visit them and just within about six hours you go.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: Okay, this, these guys don't even like each other or just the opposite, man.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: These guys are having a wonderful time.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: You can see they they look forward to going to work.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, man, it's a big country.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of different ways they're doing it out there.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and once again, you can get into a state and then move from a department.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: Do a few years, see if you like it, and if you don't like it, don't feel committed to that department.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Maybe you can stay in the same retirement system and move to another department, that department, Maybe you can stay in the same retirement system and move to another department.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: If I was 23, my advice to Gabe was exactly what you guys said Check places out.
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: There's some indicators there If you can go and talk to people right along.
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: But South Metro Colorado is like a 35 or 45 station fire department.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: They have resources, they have upward mobility, they have different units and they seem to be very progressive.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: Big metro.
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: I mean there's a lot to do there, A lot of stuff going on Even small volunteer places.
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of stuff you can do in them because they rely more on a single training officer person to do that stuff.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: So, depending on what it is that you want to do in your career, there's.
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: Minnesota's hiring like crazy right now because there's so many departments transitioning from combination to full career.
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: The Bloomington fire department there, which is a great fire department, just got another safer grant for six and a half million dollars, so they're going to be hiring another 16 or whatever.
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: So I mean there are opportunities out there at some of these growing places.
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: It's kind of fun to get on the on the bottom floor, you know, when you're entry level.
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah, um, when you know these places are starting to grow too, because there's some, are we keeping you?
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: No, like I pulled a vacuum apart of my brain, it was.
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: But there's some cool stuff going on, like you guys said.
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: So I think Good luck to Gabe, but at least he's asking.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: He's not just going down to the corner and going to the first place to hire him.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: Sounds like he's probably going to be a pretty good asset out there somewhere.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: So first of all, the great news we just talked about a little bit about entry into the fire service.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: Right, we got a young guy who wants to enter into the fire service and we probably remember that everybody.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: We have a single level entry program in the fire service.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: It works out really well where everybody comes up from firefighter and then they promote to engineer or paramedic and then they get to supervisor level.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: So most people that are supervisors everybody knows who they are They've already developed their own characters.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Right, I mean, you're not going to make a supervisor, a fire captain or a lieutenant and do a 180 and just change everything about yourself.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: You may say you're going to do that and you may do that for a few months, but you're not going to do that.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: So I think supervisors need to start early in their career developing their character, because I think you, what is it?
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: It's character and performance and relationships.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: Those are kind of the key areas there and I think those are the best supervisors who think about it as they're moving up into the system.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: I think for us we were fortunate.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of people in our system who the reason we became supervisors is because we didn't want to work for that guy who's taking the test and we were fortunate enough to score high enough on a test that we didn't want to work for that guy.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: But we knew that guy, the organization knew that guy, everybody knew that guy.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: So we had a department that part of the promotional testing process was not just a written promotional test.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: Promotional testing process was not just a written promotional test, like, unfortunately, in Houston.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: It's so large with 4,000 firefighters that the promotional tests are pretty much you memorize it and then you go in and you test and the highest score gets moved up.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: That's very difficult for them.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: It's hard for them to do what we used to do, where you do a written test and then you could do a— what are you doing?
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: I'm citing oh, you do a written test and then you could uh, you get interview product, you get interviews and you actually ask the guy questions about leadership scenarios and what his, his or her strengths and weaknesses.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: So that's important I think it goes sleep again next no, it goes back to the kid's question.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: As you know, the supervisor supports the work.
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: Well, if you want supervisors to do that, the top supervisor in the organization who's the fire chief, has to have that philosophy and outlook on life, and if they don't, it don't make a shit.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: What you want to do underneath and a lot of cases you can do it because you're just going to have more energy, you're going to be closer and you can outperform the system a little bit.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: So I deal with a lot of officers throughout the course of the year and some of them work for dysfunctional fire departments, which is normal because the fire chief is more of a politician than an operational presence.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: And they all say the same thing, especially if they're chiefs.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: They say my battalion, my battalion, my machine, my shift, I take care of it.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: So what they've done is they've become the training, the operational, the personnel, everything is that BC is going to reflect what their battalion looks like, because everyone has abandoned them above for any support they need.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: There's no support to do that within some of these organizations, so that makes it very challenging.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: It's really difficult to change the fire department from the bottom or the middle.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: It's got to come from the top.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: So if the fire chief, if the union president, if the AHJ are more about keeping the good order and maintaining at certain economic levels and this is what this looks like and service delivery is the very last thing on their agenda I'm going to go back to the young kids question I would not go to work in that organization.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: Now, the trap is when, like you, have a fire chief, that is that way, and then they leave Because now they can be replaced by some mouth breather that is going to gut it, to make a look what they want it to look like.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: And I think you did a really good job of describing the entire system from the top all the way out through the firefighter.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: I was kind of focusing a little bit more on the actual supervisor, who's right there with that work.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: And we talk about that, how that guy supports that guy at that point in time right, and that's important too.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: And they could still do that even without the goofy.
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: Even with the goofy leadership, they can support their members on the crew, but it's going to be more difficult.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: That's like the battalion chief, though they're like no, I put up, see, and the problem was when push comes to shove.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: And see, now that BC's got a problem with one of their captains, one of their company officers, and so they start to process that.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: Well, now they're kind of going to expand that outside of that BC's power structure.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: So, depending on how the other forces come in the union, the BC's boss, the BC's boss's boss, and how all that congeals is, that can turn into a real shit show in a lot of cases, and then what that does is that sends the message to everybody watching it when it's dysfunctional, that no, don't try to do the right thing.
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: Here You've got to stick with this checklist of nonsense that's generated by a group of people that have different goals than the rest of us do.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: You know, and Bruno, it's part of the blue card right, it's part of the incident command piece is you've got to keep this strategic level, tactical level and task level aligned and if it gets out of aligned anywhere in that process, because I've seen it where well, we had a great fire chief 30 years.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: We always talk about that but we had some knucklehead tactical level bosses coming up in the system.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: That, oh my God.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: Thank God Bruno was there at one point in my career because I had a tactical boss that wanted to do some goofy stuff.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: It's like it went up to Bruno Bruno's like no, knock it off.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: So it needs to be aligned all the way through the system, you know.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: But even then.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: What you just said is we worked our whole careers with BCs that were not very good at being strategic level managers or tactical level supervisors.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: They just didn't have that competence.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: They missed it in their career somehow.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: And it wasn't until we were going through the recovery after Southwest Supermarkets and then we standardized the way you were going to be in IC on the fire department.
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: And once we figured out these are the holes that our system has had, that we've all grown up with and we need to fix those.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: And then we're going to proctor this program in a way that everybody has to do it, to proctor this program in a way that everybody has to do it.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: And that's kind of what happened.
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: And I remember incidents in the command van where, like at 3 in the morning, the cell phone would ring and it'd be like a shift commander on another shift and you're like why is he calling me?
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: And it's like they're listening to the radio and saying, hey, man, did I just hear the right thing out of Battalion 5?
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: Are they your North Division?
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: Uh-huh, why are you calling?
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: Is there homework with this?
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: And they're like no, you guys win.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: What are you talking about?
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: Battalion 5 on B-shift just did manage the division beyond their scope of control.
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: They can't, they're not supposed to operate at this level.
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: Well, no, it's the training we've been doing for the last couple of years.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: I think your point is well taken is that if you focus on the work as a supervisor, don't get caught up in all the minutiae, bull crap and uniforms and the silliness and your ego stays out of the way.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: If you focus on, like, how did you perform the work, and that's what bruno I mean I'm going back to bruno all the time that's what he did best is the situation I had.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: Bruno said well, what was the outcome?
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: Like did it all worked out?
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: Because I was empowered to do something.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: But you know when?
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: Know, when I was in that Oceanside, the city manager wanted me to write up a firefighter because he took a patient to the hospital in the engine company and we talked about this before but it should have never happened.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: No, he saved the patient's life.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: The young kid survived because his fire captain made a decision, a very well good decision, but it wasn't lined up with the and that engine wasn't licensed by the state of Arizona as a transport vehicle.
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: How could you?
• 24:18
  Speaker 4: do it.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: And it worked out well.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: Tell the family that.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: So they can't do the right thing for the cause.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: The cancer deal, where the state said cancer for firefighters is occupational.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: The city you worked at here Now it's it comes in the first firefighter with cancer.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: It needs your help.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: What's the first reaction of the city?
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: No, exactly.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: When did the first reaction of the city?
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: No, exactly, when did the city change?
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: their mind when the lawyers and the cameras the media shows up and we're going to get all this shit.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: It was the young media girl that just.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: We're going to get it on us and we're going to look bad.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: So now it's oh for us not to look bad, we're going to address this, and now it's look what we did and you're like, no, you're the wrong person in the wrong job.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: That statement of supervisors.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: Support the workers, then.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: Support the workers by helping them do the job they got to do, not getting in their way.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: So many supervisors want to get in the way of their workers because they want to show that they're the bosses, right I?
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: Want to show you that I'm in charge here, so I'm going to get and hold every.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: I'm taking the captain's test, so I get to get and hold every.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: I'm taking the captain's test so I get the nozzle.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: I order you to give me the nozzle.
• 25:54
  Speaker 4: No, that's not You're supposed to be, you got the I remember walking in.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: Here's the one that Bruno helped.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: I walked into a bowling alley I was a paramedic with another paramedic on a rescue and a woman is is I think it was a woman who's having a heart attack a patient, a patient, yeah, customer, I can't remember yeah and uh, and so I look, and I looked out the patient and I and the other paramedic goes to work with his job of um getting ready to set up all the equipment.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: I, I go over and I start assessing the patient.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: The little captain there, we can cut that out too.
• 26:33
  Speaker 4: And I said you guys don't have to say the names.
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: By the way, he may be dead, yeah, but it means something to us, Because now I've got like seven stories that I'm stacking and loading them in.
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah man, I'm going ladder 12.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: Those rotten son of a bitches so anyway, here's what happened.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: So this fire captain, he says here's the clipboard and he puts it right in my face and I'm trying to talk to the lady.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: And I didn't disregard him.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: I go hey, captain, I'm going to talk to her.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: And he goes here's the clipboard.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: And he put it in my face and I said I need to talk to the patient.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: She's in trouble.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: I need to talk, take this clipboard.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: I said just a second, I need to talk to the patient.
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: You better take this clipboard.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: So I took the clipboard out of his hand and I go boom.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: And I dropped it and he went ballistic and I treated the patient.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: We all went to the hospital.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: Get back, there was a battalion chief waiting for me at my fire station ready to write me up whatever they want.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, they wanted to throw the hammer down because I disrespected his authority.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: And so we go through the whole process.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: And it gets to bruno.
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: And what'd you do?
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: And I said I took the clipboard out of his hand, like he wanted me to do, and I dropped it on the ground and I treated the patient.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: He goes.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: And what happened?
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: What happened after that?
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: Nothing happened.
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: You know what I did.
• 28:00
  Speaker 4: I can tell you what happened is I got, even for you.
• 28:02
  Speaker 4: Here's what happened.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: They wrote me up because the battalion chief wanted to write something up.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: Here's what was actually written up, because I just thought of it.
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: Thank you for asking.
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: Terry Garrison will work within the personality of Captain so-and-so.
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: No, terry Garrison will work within the realms of the personality of Captain so-and-so.
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's excellent.
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: That's the best.
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: That's the start of a novel.
• 28:27
  Speaker 4: That's what he said.
• 28:28
  Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, I'll do that, because I got.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: That's the best.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: That's the start of a novel.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: That's what he said.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, okay.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: I'll do that because I got ways to do that, did you ever?
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: Well, nevermind, no, no, I got back at him.
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I don't know how you would get back at him.
• 28:40
  Speaker 4: There's better ways.
• 28:41
  Speaker 4: I was his boss later.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but I wasn't being spirited.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn't being spirited, but I wanted to be.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: So I guess the work I was trying to do the work.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: Get the hell out of my way so I can do the work.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: Support the guy doing the work.
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: That's all I had to do is say, terry, and part of that work is that basic empowerment that Bruno talks about, right, empowering the firefighters, which isn't done at a lot of places.
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: Let's talk about that empowerment and what that means.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: Well, what the captain was trying to do was get you to do his job.
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: That's all he said.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: No, you take the form, I don't have to fill it out now and we're going to leave.
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: That's all he wanted to do was leave.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: It was such a loud bowling to allow bullying ally.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: I didn't.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: I did.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: I needed to get down and actually hear what she had to say.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: But here's the deal with empowerment empowerment doesn't come without trust, right?
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: So trust is the big factor in empowerment.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: There has to be trust and I think that's the key.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: And bruno trusted us to do the right thing and and he didn't create.
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: Well, how many rules do we have?
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: Ten rules and some.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: I don't know, not very many.
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: Twenty to do and five not to do or something like that.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: It's one page.
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: I mean, we did an article on them, you could yeah.
• 29:58
  Speaker 3: And his quote on that was God can rule the earth with ten commandments.
• 30:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we should be able to manage a fire department with 20 rules or something like that.
• 30:07
  Speaker 4: Yeah, a couple dozen rules.
• 30:09
  Speaker 4: We shouldn't need many more than that.
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: People create rules for every little bitty infraction that occurs, and then a rule comes out.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: Then a rule comes out and you know, here's the difficult part when you have a supervisor who wants to and I've had this as a, as a manager and a fire chief it's like, well, I need to know the rules so I can enforce every one of them.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you ever meet people like that they.
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: I want to choke those people.
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: Not to use any more names.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: So here's the deal.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: Why don't you practice leadership and support and communication, and then you don't have to know every single rule?
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: there is, and it's very well those are personality types too that maybe just their personality, the way they were raised and their indoctrination to the world doesn't lend themselves to any leadership role, because they're they're so rigid and so analytical with everything.
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: There's no gray area in their world.
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: They can't live in that.
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: You know and yeah, everything.
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: There's no gray area in their world.
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: They can't live in that, and there's no gray.
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: I find when we do our blue card classes, once in a while we have somebody that doesn't succeed and they're the people who are so rigid.
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: They want an absolute answer for everything and they don't see that the fire ground's dynamic, just like life in the fire station's dynamic no-transcript.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: But in leadership there's a lot of gray areas where you can, and that gray area is that empowerment card, that's that whole gray area to support the customer.
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: He used to ask the questions on the empowerment card Is it right for the customer?
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: Is it something you can do with your level?
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: Is it legal, lawful, nice, nice.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: If so, do it.
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: And then See, all fire departments have the same cast of characters.
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: You guys would know You've worked for there.
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: There's the same 10, 12 people that work there, that make up the fire department.
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: The difference is who's in charge of the different elements of the fire department.
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: Basically, so if you got see, like we knew all the fire chiefs at the time you replaced the one fire chief well, with so far three different fire chiefs and there was a different effect with each one of them, but they were not as good as the first one, right?
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: yeah it just didn't work, for whatever reason.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: So what happens is like you have this deal where you readjust the lineup of who's in charge of shit and so that's going to have an effect on empowerment, on how you do your job, on how people are held accountable or not held accountable for their performance.
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: So the goal is to get the right people on the fire department and then to get the right asses in the right seats to align the thing.
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: So, like you say, you worked with this ladder guy who kept trying to give you the form.
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: Well, that's fine with the ladder guy.
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: We need to retrain him or do something with him so he does his job.
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: So, like the top half of the forms at least filled out when you guys get it.
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: But so those are easier things to fix because those are just those are almost like one and done problems, like you're not filling the form out, right, this is what this looks like.
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: So if the BC, instead of saying no, you quit pushing the medic that's doing treatment and just start filling the form out is what he should have done, well, the problem is both with the company officer and then the BC.
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: They're both douchebags, right?
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: Well, they are.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: I mean they shouldn't, but what happens is they have a ceiling that they hit.
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: They can't go do too much damage because above them you have adult supervision, and so what they do is they keep everybody from killing one another, essentially, and they keep us all pointed in the right direction.
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: To use one of your sayings is we're all looking at the right set of things, we're not looking at a bunch of nonsense that just fills our egos up.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: So I think that becomes the key in the thing, and that's difficult because we don't pick a lot of times.
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: One of the things we were talking about the other day is like the trifecta AHJ Fire Chief Union and they bought up a department that we know the fire chief of and the city was going to run this guy out because he's very enthusiastic and he does a lot of customer-centric stuff and I think they were just tired of him and you know he always needs help doing it, but you know his heart's in the right place, so he's always going in the right direction and what happened is, once it got to a certain level, is the local got involved and the union's like no, we like him and he cares for us and he keeps us pointed in the right direction.
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: He's a little goofy in some ways, but he doesn't want to hurt us.
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: And so they got together and they went to the authority having jurisdiction.
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: They said, no, you're not getting rid of him.
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: And they didn't.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: He's still a chief.
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: And I mean he was on his way out and the union stood up for him and said we don't we, he's our boss, we need him.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: I think a couple of those people on the board that wanted him gone are no longer there.
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: That's what happens.
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: I mean, that was kind of our whole leadership.
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: That's how, silverback, you said it Empowerment and trust is.
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: So now those two the fire chief and the local and their staffs are closer together because of that and they bonded.
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: The union's got more juice because he's going to give them more running room.
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: They saved his ass.
• 36:00
  Speaker 2: He'll do the same thing for them next.
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: I mean, so that's, you know, that's really kind of what we do is we deescalate and, like within, is we protect ourselves from outside forces that try to come in and do damage and they may be well-meaning, local authority having jurisdiction, but still it's like no, you can't.
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: I think that's the fire chief, that it ain't easy being a fire chief because you got to stand up for the fire department.
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: I don't work for the mayor, I work for the people and the fire department.
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: Sidebar if you're a fire chief that's negotiating the contract for the fire department, you're in a bad position?
• 36:38
  Speaker 4: Oh no, I know man.
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: And there are fire chiefs out there that are negotiating on behalf of the city and you've lost the fire department.
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: If you are listening to this right now and you're in that position, run because it's nowhere you want to be, and that was always because I came from a state where it wasn't uncommon for the fire chief to be involved in those negotiations and I was like nope, I don't want to have anything to do with that.
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: Now, if there's consultation on management rights you know change in shifts, deployment you know that's a discussion for me to be in.
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: But as far as the working, you know how much they're getting paid.
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: That's between them and the city.
• 37:20
  Speaker 3: I'm always going to advocate for the firefighters and the city manager needs to know that.
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: Right, like I'm here to advocate for them, I'm not here to advocate for the city budget so I can cut money for you.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: No, I tell you what, when I went to Houston, I was so blessed because the mayor got it and she wanted to do something with the firefighters pension and she was hiring me.
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: I was an outside fire chief, the first one they had since 1989.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: And I said, okay, mayor, there's a couple questions I had, and one of them is what are conditions?
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: Not even questions.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: Ok, mayor, there's a couple of questions I had, and one of them is what are conditions?
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: Not even questions.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: Because, hey, I was unemployed, I was happy, I was riding bikes, I didn't need to go to Houston.
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: I said I can't, when you talk about the pension and go after the firefighters pension, I can't be next to you, beside you, behind you, around you.
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: I want nothing to do with that.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: I said, or else we're not going to be successful doing what she wanted to do, which was actually to decrease the loss of life of firefighters.
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: That's what she wants.
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: She goes I'm tired of firefighters dying.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: I said, well, I think we can make some progress in that, but I can't do that.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: And she's like, OK, never did.
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: Next fire chief follows me that poor guy I don't know what kind of conversations he had with Mayor Turner and I can say it was a different mayor.
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a different mayor who he took that guy and that.
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: I don't know how you run.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: I don't know how you do that.
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: Now there's a city in Chula Vista, when I was in Oceanside, and when they enter into a contract, the first thing the firefighters do is they file a no confidence against the fire chief.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: What, right off the bat?
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: Why?
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: Because?
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: that's the way they've always done it, and I don't think they're doing that anymore.
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: I'm talking, it happened, it's factual, but it's 10 years ago.
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: There's no trust or empowerment there.
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: I mean they have a confrontational relationship.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: They can't even tell you why at this point, Like seven fire chiefs ago and three union presidents.
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: I'm hoping they quit doing that a long time ago, but that's the way they were doing it in 2009.
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: Well, there's a couple of fire departments we work with that they've ran their fire chief and ops chief and others out and it's the.
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: The union then kind of reflects on it going.
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: You know, maybe we should stop this, because now, no, now the candidates that come in aren't really the candidates they would want, because they have a reputation yeah, it's it, it's dysfunctional when you're in a fistfight and you got your head down and you're swinging your arms or something, you're not watching what's going on.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: And really fire chiefs and union presidents need to watch the work and support the work and not fight each other.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: And I'll tell you what.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: I think city managers and mayors love it when fire chiefs and union presidents go at each other, because then they just sit back and they watch the wrestling match and they wait and see who the survivor is and then they go out.
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: Well, and they can't necessary.
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: When they're going after each other, they're the.
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: They're not going after the resources from the city anymore.
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's like no, we can use this and put this over here and do this and we can cut your staffing.
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: And X, y and Z, we talked about the partnership last time and yeah there's no partnership and the city's like, oh, I'm going to be okay here for the next until they quit arguing.
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: They're not over here.
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I had a great union president.
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: When I first got to houston, uh, jeff canaan, great guy.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: Second, I walked in the door, uh, we started working together and I think the only way that I lasted the amount of time there on the beginning of that trip was he, he was.
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: He didn't want to fight.
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: He's like I don't want to fight, let's you're.
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: You're the outside guy yeah, I don't like it.
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: I wish we had an inside guy, but you're the outside guy that they picked, so let's work together and I think we were able to do some things early on.
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you get more working together.
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, throwing stuff at each other.
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so hopefully they're not doing that in that southern California city, no more.
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: But oh, that was when I heard that I was it's like wow, why would you even want to be?
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: In fact, we know a guy who got the fire chief job there and then decided against it.
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah well, you hear that yeah, we're old enough that we know guys that have gone.
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: Oh, I got my dream job finally, and three months later you see them and they're.
• 41:43
  Speaker 2: They don't work there anymore.
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: You thought what happened?
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: It wasn't a dream job, it was yeah, they're.
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: I was warned and I did it anyway.
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: I thought I'd be the one guy.
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: Well, that's the other thing.
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: Is a lot of them think, oh, I'll go in and fix it.
• 41:58
  Speaker 2: Uh-huh, yeah, there you go.
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: All right, you guys ready for Timeless Tactical Truth?
• 42:02
  Speaker 2: Bring on the music All right.
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: Timeless Tactical Truth from Alan Bernasini, pulled from the playing cards that are available at bshiftercom in the store.
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: This is the Nine of Hearts and it says having a cool head is an important capability for the IC.
• 42:27
  Speaker 3: Having a cool head an important capability for the IC.
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: We talked about getting the right leaders into place.
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: I guess the ability to remain emotionally under control is one of those.
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: Huh.
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: I worked with a guy who knew as much about working on a ladder as anybody in our fire department and every time you showed up to a working fire with him he would go batshit crazy.
• 42:52
  Speaker 2: He just couldn't help himself.
• 42:54
  Speaker 2: I don't know what it was, he'd overdose on adrenaline or whatever, but he was, he just wouldn't keep it.
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: So I think a lot of you said it earlier Vance is, there's people, and this guy was like an architect.
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: It's well, almost an architect.
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: Well, almost an architect.
• 43:12
  Speaker 2: He was close enough, and then he would tell you that about every 10 minutes.
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, hey, did you know?
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: I was an all-state football quarterback?
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: My name's Art Vandele.
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly About every three minutes, pal.
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: So and I think what happens is is, for whatever reason, they just melt down, whatever it is, and because they have these routines, these very complex, add driven routines of how I'm going to conduct myself and do this, whatever this procedure is that I've made.
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: And then you said it is, something happens and it derails, that they lose sight of the critical factors and what they're supposed to be doing there, and then the whole thing, they're just like, oh, it's too big to command.
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: They throw their hands up in the air and ah, you know, screaming into the night.
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: We had a group of BCs when I worked over on the east side, and so we had like a new one every 18 months, and they were all we wore them out.
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: Oh, and you would just shake your head and they sent one and this guy had been a captain paramedic, that was what he was known for and I mean he's a nice guy, but he wasn't known as a firefighter.
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: He never burned any piece of his gear.
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: I mean he just in fact I don't know if his gear was ever even dirty and so you'd think, okay, he's coming over, this'll be interesting.
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: He was the best IC we ever had that I ever worked for.
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: He just was, and it's because he was, he did not emotionally vest himself in that.
• 44:51
  Speaker 2: And he says, no, it's somebody else's emergency, not mine.
• 44:54
  Speaker 2: And he says this is what we typically.
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: He says, right, you put water on it to make the fire go out.
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah, you're a paramedic, yeah, boom.
• 45:03
  Speaker 2: So we got along the best with him and he wasn't a tactician, but he was the best tactician that we had worked with up to that time and I think his whole deal it's because he just didn't get.
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: I remember, uh, I see him on an ambo once and he was a captain and we had a guy, gunshot, wound, self-inflicted guy, stuffed a 45 in the front of his pants and took a step and then, boom, blew the lefty through his thigh.
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: We get in the back of the ambulance.
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: This guy's.
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: He's not doing well, he's starting to fade.
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: Was he in a guard shack?
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: no, this guy was this was he was, he was going into his house, so I mean, so you're on the street and, and so you're sitting there and so his partner cuts the guy's pants off.
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: And I remember, don't looks over.
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: He cuts the guy's pants off and I remember Dote looks over, he looks at the guy and says that really looks like it hurts.
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: And the guy just kind of went ugh, he was done, he went away.
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: Wherever you go, when you figure out I blew my junk off, and I remember looking at Dote.
• 46:04
  Speaker 4: He's looking at me like mm-hmm, yeah, that just happened.
• 46:08
  Speaker 4: You're like, all right, I'll be the ambo guy, you'd be the paramedic, and yeah.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: But yeah, don't ask me to touch anything back here, pal you know, there's probably a couple reasons why people lose their cool.
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: Some of them lose it like I said, they fire for effect yeah, they like to see what happens.
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm a tough guy.
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: This is the way I go into it.
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, challenge me now.
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: I lost my cool.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: And then there's's the ones who may lose their cool because they're incompetent.
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: They're uncomfortable.
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: They just freeze up in that situation.
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: I think those are the two.
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: So one of them needs to be kind of taught out of them the guy who's maybe disciplined out of them where, don't lose your cool and the other one needs to be taught to do their job and build confidence in the position.
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: And we've seen that early when we were doing it Well, you always talk about it when we transitioned from the district commanders into the response chiefs, how those guys got more and more comfortable as a position of an IC after they watched their driver, the fit of their aid.
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, A few months later they were ready to do that and they but early on they were uncool sometimes.
• 47:20
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: Because they felt uncomfortable, they didn't, they weren't in control of what was happening.
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: And then later on they they gained the capability to kind of of do the job and they felt more comfortable about it.
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: You know, and I think part of it is like, you know, doing the work and managing the work and supervising the work, and people make it a lot more complicated than it really is sometimes, and I think what happens is people that just aren't as familiar with it see that and they think, no, this is, this isn't what it should be, and I can't wrap my head around it.
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: And then they watch people who are good at it and think, no, they make it look too easy and you're like, well, that's because it is.
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: You just have to.
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: You got to, I don't know, you got to soak a bunch of shit in and then figure out how the cause and effect works and I don't know, know you get to it at some point.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: Derrick johnson told me, we love derrick oh tremendous human being.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: He said that he told a girl once he was driving and she got a little fast.
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: And uh, he was driving fast and she got a little scared and he looked over and he said hey, just because you're not in control doesn't mean the situation's out of control.
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: That is a great quote.
• 48:37
  Speaker 4: He was a great supervisor and leader.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: I've used that on my wife over the years, and now as I start to say, hey, babe, just because she already knows where I'm going with it, I get the F you.
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: Do you sleep on the couch those nights, terry, I, I'm going with it.
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, I get the F you.
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, do you sleep on the?
• 48:52
  Speaker 4: couch those nights.
• 48:52
  Speaker 4: Terry, I don't negotiate with alligators man.
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: They're going to eat you.
• 48:57
  Speaker 4: You don't take on the wife.
• 48:58
  Speaker 2: That's sad.
• 48:59
  Speaker 4: F around and find out, find out, that's it baby.
• 49:02
  Speaker 4: But that's how?
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: at that point, they lose their, they kind of lose their mind.
• 49:14
  Speaker 2: You know it's really not worth it.
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: Losing control I mean you get jacked up over certain things.
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: You know we've all lost control at times and you're like why did I even care about any of this?
• 49:24
  Speaker 2: This is just ridiculous.
• 49:26
  Speaker 3: There was a guy that I worked with that you could tell when he hailed dispatch whether it was going to be a working fire or not.
• 49:33
  Speaker 3: He called can I fire 441?
• 49:35
  Speaker 3: It's like, okay, this is a working fire, before he even got the size up out.
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: So then my goal was I was you weren't going to know it was a working fire until I got to the point in time where I'm saying and this is a work.
• 49:51
  Speaker 3: And I was blowing people away after that Cause they're like I didn't know it was a working fire.
• 49:53
  Speaker 3: Until you said it was working, your voice sounded the same as it normally does.
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: We got a fire fire.
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: Sometimes I'd yawn before I'd asked for a second.
• 50:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess I'm a sound alarm.
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: Now.
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: My wife rode with me one time.
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: She came by to drop something off and we had a bee call.
• 50:15
  Speaker 2: Bees out here kill people right, oh yeah, killer bees, killer bees.
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: We don't need no sticking patches.
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: And she wanted to ride with me on the engine, and she never did that because she wasn't too thrilled about my job.
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: But anyway, Nick took command.
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: We're on the scene of an incident and we have a large bee attacking everybody.
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: Be careful.
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: To this day my wife goes he's nuts and I go.
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: could you just?
• 50:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they gave him an open tactical channel to share with the world.
• 50:47
  Speaker 4: Baby, be careful.
• 50:48
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that was cool command.
• 50:48
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that gave him an open tactical channel to share with the world.
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: Baby, be careful.
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was cool.
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: Command yeah, that was very cool.
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: Sometimes we were too cool.
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: What are you going to do with cool command?
• 50:57
  Speaker 2: What are we going to do with it when the leadership part's done?
• 51:01
  Speaker 2: We're going to publish the book behind it.
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: Maybe that's a good way to finalize this.
• 51:04
  Speaker 3: That was my favorite part of Bruno coming to class was when he would do the cool command, because I think it's necessary for ICs to understand how much the way that they project will affect everybody else I have it on my desk.
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: I was just looking at it before we were coming in here.
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: I was going through some documents and I saw the cool command folder I was going through that it's like, oh, this is great.
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like senior advisors.
• 51:28
  Speaker 2: Well, it's IC see stuff.
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: But if you're a senior advisor that means you train ics, so that is kind of the teach them the skills exactly.
• 51:39
  Speaker 2: And this whole silverback thing is really designed for a fire department.
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: Now it's going to work across the board and other occupations it really will, but we're focusing it for the fire department and that's what it's going to be for.
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: So it will support blue card and that whole process and then, like I say, there will be other industries that will tap that, I think at some point.
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: But yeah, soon, yeah.
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: So I probably a year before the Silverback's done and then Cool Command's basically written.
• 52:10
  Speaker 2: It's just us getting it desktop published and then putting the book out.
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: Well, that wraps up this B-Shifter podcast.
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: Thanks so much for joining us.
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: We'll see you next time.
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: Thanks guys, Thanks guys, We'll see you next time.