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Creating a Culture of Safety · B Shifter

• 0:47
  Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to the B Shifter podcast Today.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: John Vance, here along with Nick Brunicini and Pat Dale.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: Pat is a recently retired fire chief who had a couple of careers right.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: We always like to say Pat failed at retirement, right?
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: So the last place you were at was Redmond, oregon, and you were there as an interim chief, but it was a long gig, wasn't?
• 1:14
  Speaker 3: it.
• 1:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I like to run these interims long, so I started as interim and ended up there two years.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: All right, and then, before that, you were in Graham, I was in.
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: Graham Washington, a fire district, started out as interim and I was there five years.
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: And prior to that, olympia Washington as the ops chief right Correct.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: And prior to that, kent Washington for the first 17 years.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: And longtime Blue Card lead instructor.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: So a lot of you may have met Pat either at one of our conferences or you've had a class with him or something like that at some point or another right.
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: Very true.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: How long have you been doing Blue Card?
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: What is it?
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: 14 years, 2010?
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think 2010.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Great, yeah, well, we're looking forward to you being at the conference this year.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: The Blue Card Hazard Zone Conference takes place in Cincinnati Ohio this year.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: The Blue Card Hazard Zone Conference takes place in Cincinnati Ohio this year.
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: You can go to hazardzonebccom and register for that.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: September 30th through October 4th.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: It's a pre-conference this year, so we're doing some certification labs for folks who want to come and get certified by Blue Card lead instructors.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: We're also doing a Mayday Management Workshop and then the general conference is going to be October 3rd and 4th.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: You're teaching a class there.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: What are you teaching this year?
• 2:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm teaching, gladly teaching a class that's going to address creating and sustaining a culture of safety within your fire department.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: And what does that look like?
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: What does a culture of safety look like?
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: How do we even establish that?
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: So I think the way I'd like to start the conversation is with a couple questions.
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: One is ask ourselves and ask yourself can you make a connection between leadership and I'm talking about upper level leadership, not supervision at the company level, but upper-level top brass leadership the connection between leadership and firefighter injuries?
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: Can you make a somewhat direct connection between those two?
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: That's a question.
• 3:17
  Speaker 3: Secondly, as a question, should we add to the list of what I think of causes that you hear of PTSD or if we call it PTSI, now whatever it is those cumulative PTSI, post-traumatic stress injury?
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: I've heard some people say Okay, Injury instead of a syndrome yeah, I've heard that or disease, whatever it is.
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: But the cumulative effect of the calls, or what we usually talk about, the tough calls and then you kind of quickly go to calls that involve kids seem to be a type of call where kids are injured or have problems.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: Those seem to be traumatic to our workers and they add up over years and they are the source of PTSD or that sort of injury.
• 4:08
  Speaker 3: Well, should we the question?
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: Should we add leadership as a cause of PTSD to our workforce?
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: That's a question I would ask ourselves and each other in the process here.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: And does that have to be leadership, as in the front office leadership, or does it go down to a company officer, a battalion chief, division chief, what are you calling?
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: How would you define that?
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's leadership at all levels.
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: Really, what I'd like to focus on the conversation is the upper level leadership Chief of department, top brass, that level.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: So like the senior staff Senior staff yeah, so that would be.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: I would call that executive level leadership.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: Those are the executives.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: You got the fire chief and then all their staff who runs the entire organization, all the different elements of it.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: You could also put the union in there, because they play a major role in all that.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, I mean, that's the people that direct what the fire department is going to do.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: So they're going to have the yeah, they're going to have to be involved in whatever you do.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: As far as reducing on-duty injuries and the stress, firefighters putting their bag in line up Right right Now, that's, see, I think, the PTSD or whatever we call it.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: I believe that that comes from a loss of control, something's out of control and that just causes you the stress for whatever.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: So I think you get the control back of.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: It is really because you said it is like the calls that people have trouble with.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: Well, I had a full career and we saw a lot of different calls and those weren't the ones I had trouble with.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: My PTSD came from other calls that you couldn't do anything about.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: So the calls where you could take effective action, those were I don't have an issue with any of that and those are the.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: You said it, they're the worst ones.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: I mean just hamburger people.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, basically it's the uh, it's like the cmi's, the chronic mentally ill, like the people.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: My wife described this the other day.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: She said I'm driving down the street, I'm out of light pedestrian.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Basically, a street person gets halfway across, drop to their knees and they start fake scrubbing the inner, the, the crosswalk, the light turns and nobody can go.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: Well, what do you do with that person?
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: They call 911, we show up and it's like, okay, put them back over here.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: They're going to end up over here.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: Those are the ones that cause me stress.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: I don't have a solution for this.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: Quit sending me on it.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: I hate this.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: I'm going to kill somebody, them, you, whoever it is.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: So then, during my career in the stations I worked in, the leadership was us and we said, no, we're going to do something.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: So we would, I don't know, we'd capture them and take them to the hospital, or we drop them off at another fire station, or you would find something.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Now, sometimes you couldn't do anything and you would get stressed over it and you think, well, god damn it, the world turned against us again today.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: So it almost was like we're going to see if we can outperform the bureaucracy of society to get these crazy people what they need in the spaces they need to go.
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: Exerting some sense of control over it Exactly.
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: I love that you're talking about the lack of control causing the stress.
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, If I could make the jump back over to the executive leadership.
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: That's the level I'm talking about, exactly, Nick, in the department.
• 7:54
  Speaker 3: I think it directly moves over to.
• 7:59
  Speaker 3: When I came into these couple of departments that you asked about, John it was Graham and Redmond I came in and I met with all the crews in what I call listening meetings and I heard from crews they felt undervalued from the executive level it was the administration, executive level leadership.
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: They felt unnoticed, undervalued, in fact, towards resentful and hatred towards them.
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: They no longer wanted to even go on that side of the building or the top floor of that building.
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: And they told me when they did, they had a physical reaction.
• 8:36
  Speaker 3: Their heart rate went up Stress they became angry, stress.
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: They had a physical reaction to the stress that was caused because of that, those negatives.
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: So I'm looking at the negative aspect of the way they felt towards their executive level leadership.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: And I'm going to guess that they felt that way for a reason, but it wasn't all true.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: So much was true as wasn't.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: So.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: There was a huge communication thing between the group which is yeah, man, this is of course but, but I would submit too, because I worked with some people that are consultants and one of the consultants that I that I know, went to a department and he went to the city manager and said I am not leaving here until you do something about the fire chief.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: There are people bringing guns to work because they think they might have to shoot the guy someday, and this guy was an egomaniac.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: He ended up getting chief tattooed on his arm and would roll up his uniform sleeve so everyone could see chief.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: He would have a probie with him that would light his cigarettes.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: It reminded me of like the Jackie Gleason character on Smoky and the Bandit.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: That person made the workforce feel unsafe.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: Recently in Minnesota you had a department that had some similar issues.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: I don't know if they were physically threatening each other, but the consultant came back and said this is the worst environment I've seen in 18 years.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: So you have those cases where they're trying to be professional departments.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: Things don't get communicated right.
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: Mountains are made out of molehills.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: I get that.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: But I also think there's a lot of agencies out there that there's just malpractice and malfeasance among the people who are in the front office and they're running it like their own personal boys club and they really do not care about the workers.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: So I think there's two different platters here that we can look at.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah Well, there would be a couple reasons for losing control.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: So the asshole that you described is you never had it because that person was not going to relinquish any at all, being the top.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: That's the problem with it.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: Like we talk about the example I used with the CMI, who need to be institutionalized, they don't need to be on the street, it's not a good place.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Well, that happened when Ronald Reagan was the president.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: When I became a firefighter, there were places for those people to go and be housed is what they called it at the time Facilities.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: For Reagan became president and said we're not paying for that.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: I'm going to jack up the military and I'm going to do this and tax cuts to the wealthy and what you know, kind of it's a political thing.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: So that's the road we went down.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: Well, I think we've gotten to the point where we have and it's been it connects straight back to then, to 1980, with him, and you're like no, this is.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: You know, we all live here.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: This shouldn't be competitive, is we need to all figure out the best way for us to cohabitate together?
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: So I think that's a lot of it's just trying to get to that point.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: That's like the consultant comes in and says, no, you can't cohabitate because the chief's an asshole.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: This guy's a lunatic.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: The chief needs to be in a mental institution, because they're nuts.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: Vladimir Putin is destabilizing the world because he's an asshole, basically.
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: He's unstable.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so we have a big-ass army for that.
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: Well, that's not the most effective way to do this, but that's the way we do it.
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: I guess Can I jump in with the reason I got interested in this climate of safety as well.
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: I'll get to is while I was at Graham I was interested in measuring the engagement of our members.
• 12:34
  Speaker 3: So I chatted around with a few friends and they said, hey, go to this group in Drexel University, philadelphia.
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: They're doing some work and they have a what's called a FOCUS survey Fire Service, occupational Culture of Safety, culture of Safety.
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: So they developed this group of academics and their organizational psychologists and epidemiologists that they develop a survey tool that's used in other industries previously, like construction and health care mostly, and they, with this survey with very specific questions, will measure the climate of safety within your workforce.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: That sounds fascinating.
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: So we did it, got a 70% return on the survey and when I got the survey back, the group from Drexel was going to go.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: This was during COVID, so I'm going to go over virtually with them the results.
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: Got the survey back, the group from Drexel was going to go.
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: This was during COVID, so I'm going to go over virtually with them the results of the survey and the organizational psychologist scientist that I met with I didn't even know there was such a thing.
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: He says, well, you're the poster child for our theorem here at Drexel on leadership as it relates to Because your survey results from five years ago are.
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: I said, wait a minute, what do you mean?
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: The results from five years ago?
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: He said, yeah, your department did this on a beta test five years ago.
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: Oh, wow, here's the results compared to now.
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: I didn't know we'd gone through it.
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: It was like a golden egg that we had to compare.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: So their theory is with these scientists.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: They say that as a workforce feels supported by their supervisors and a commitment towards their safety and well-being, when they truly feel that from the executive level, leadership, that there's a greater affinity of the workforce towards following policies, procedures, best practices and so on, that's kind of remarkable.
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: When they feel that level of commitment to their safety and well-being, they have an affinity towards following policies and procedures, which has a downstream effect of reducing near misses and close calls and eventually line-of-duty deaths reducing near misses and close calls and eventually line of duty deaths.
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: And in addition, those are kind of the traditional metrics for improving the culture of safety in the workforce, right?
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: The non-traditional things that it also improves, they say are engagement, job satisfaction, retention, burnout goes down, job satisfaction goes up.
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: So with the results of the survey in comparison there was this substantial increase in those areas based on the same employees in the survey, and an increase of so much would have a big increase in job satisfaction, big impact in lowering stress and burnout, and engagement went up.
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: When those things go up, there's a reduction in firefighter injuries and line of duty deaths, of course.
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: So then I had our HR pull the data over those five years of our injury reportable injuries, long-term injuries and reportable injuries.
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: Five years previous it was an 18% reportable injury rate and now today's injury rate was less than 1%.
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: Now that's pretty huge when you talk about that culture of safety affecting the downstream.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Budget and research is going to recognize that.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: I have to admit.
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: Nick, I had HR do some work on quantitative what's the dollar savings?
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: So I could talk to my board because they're all interested in hundreds of thousands of dollars In a small department, in a hundred person department, yep, with reduction in long-term injury.
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: Now my board is going what?
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: Who?
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: So that's what got me interested in how does back to the questions can you make a connection between executive level leadership and firefighter injuries, both physical and behavioral?
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: Now you start to make a connection there.
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: And the second question is should we add leadership to a causational factor, however, you want to say that to this behavioral health injuries of our members.
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: It's a leading question, of course.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: You talked about engagement, the old administration.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: The engagement wasn't there.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: Well, it was there.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: The problem is it was toxic.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: So I think really what you're talking about is the strategic executive leadership showed the workforce.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Love is what it is, as you're showing them love and patience and kindness as it relates to being a firefighter and delivering service to the community.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: So you know, garris, and I have been talking about this.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's the whole silverback thing.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: As you follow ugly kids home, you find ugly parents.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: Well, you inherited a fire department where they were pissed off at the administration because they didn't care enough about them and they minimized what they did.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: And we're in charge, and you signed up to do this and you go do your job and quit bitching to us about it, and so that's what it is.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: It's like a marriage.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: It's the same things true in marriage.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: If you're on the rocks, you go get therapy and then you communicate better so you can show the love to one another in proper ways and off you go.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: So that's.
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: It's right on Nick and it is silverback leadership.
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: It's the same thing In a word trust what I worked on 100%.
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: What I worked on every day was building trust and it was, in those ways, just something as simple.
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: As you know, I'm coming in from the outside, so I'm going to go to a station and meet with the crew at the station and I don't know who they are, but I, I, I pull pictures out of our files and I put names by their pictures of who's on duty that day and I study their picture and their name and when I go inside I use their name when I talk to them.
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: Do you think it's a?
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: Does it sound man?
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: I'd be suspect if I didn't know.
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: You came in and knew everybody.
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: This guy's gonna he's gonna tell us asphalt here in a minute.
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: He's a wizard.
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they knew.
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: I mean, eventually, they knew I did it.
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: But yeah, you know, it's dale carnegie.
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: People love hearing their names yeah, I drank that, so I'm gonna do that man it's something as simple as that.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: They felt oh god, this guy's listening that's why my dad put names on the uniforms.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: He said I put them on there so I would know who I was talking to.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: And he says and then it's just nice that the customer knows who everybody is.
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's okay, that's right, I, you know you talk about the people.
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: I took over from our HR director.
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: She said well, the previous chief used to say you know, when there's tension, well damn it, I don't work for them, they work for me.
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: And I said, diane, hold on to your hat, because you're going to see something totally different here.
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: Now I'm here to work for them, the firefighters, and that's a big change.
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: I believe that.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: I think about the days that some culture poisoners that I've worked for as chiefs worked for an older chief that used to say the golden rule, he with the gold rules, and you'll do as I say, and there was no conversation about it.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: Now that's a generational thing as well.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: It is, but it created a lot of stress and I think it created a cultural impact that sticks with that organization even somewhat today.
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I relate to your years previous, so I started in 1980.
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: Just what a couple of years after you, nick.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: I was 82.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: 82?
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: .
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: Also I startedary of 80 okay, I started volunteering 80 and career in 82 and back then the leadership I would describe as command and control style.
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: Right, paramilitary, paramilitary, yeah cop light right.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the way it was.
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they wouldn't fire you for smoking weed, but yeah yeah, well, try that nowadays with the workforce and it just doesn't resonate with the workforce.
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: They're not going to work with them, and there's people that still have that mentality, to your point still today that are trying to get into that chief level leadership position.
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: I wanted to jump on something else before I forget that you mentioned too, nick, early on, and one of the places I focused on was, of course, listening to the members as I came in.
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: And something I have to say as a place to start building trust is with labor.
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: I mean, whether you agree with me or not, this is my experience, which is all from the West Coast.
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: I've come to say after my experience in a few departments that, as a fire chief, if you can't figure out a way to work with organized labor, one, you won't survive and two, the organization is going to feel it too.
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: They're not going to be a healthy organization.
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: Opposite of that is that if you can find a way to build trust I'm not saying to suck, lick their boots or do everything they want by any means, I'm just talking about be able to have trust with one another, with organized labor, and have conversations and include them at the table.
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: That's how I describe finding a way to work with labor Then the organization is going to thrive.
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: I think that's a place to start and that's one place I put investment With my time.
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: I just show up.
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: You know, I came into and it was so similar in both departments.
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: I said, so, I come in.
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: How often does labor and management meet together?
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: And pretty much they said, well, when we have something we have to meet over and it's really just to argue over something.
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: So I said, well, we're going to start right now meeting weekly at the coffee shop so that we're neutral ground and we're just going to do it so that we start building trust.
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: Facetime You've got to be present to do that and over time I think that was really helpful in building trust over five years and two years.
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: That's an important, I have to just say it.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: That's an important part of a healthy, behavioral, healthy, healthy, healthy organization is if labor and management is distrustful, everywhere you look and it's contentious and they're just argument of, so goes the whole organization.
• 23:15
  Speaker 3: When it's built on trust and and value each other's opinions and we work together because most of the time our interests are similar, then so goes the organization.
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: That's a pretty key piece.
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: So I developed this sort of mantra.
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: I guess that I even put up posters in the fire stations.
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: I said loudly our executive team puts our members first and not everybody, including some of my board members, at least one, didn't like that.
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: Well, the real goal of that is customer service.
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: The performance of the way the workforce serves the customer, I think, is the highest level of performance comes from a workforce that feels supported by the executive leadership and commitment towards their safety and well-being.
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: I think they're this workforce that delivers the best level of service.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: You know what it is really.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: The simplest way that I would break it down is this is kind of what we're building right now is the work.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: It takes place around the work.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: So effective leaders understand that.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: So you could be the fire chief in a brand new place.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: I'll use Garrison as an example.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: He shows up to Houston, texas, third biggest staff fire department in the country.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: If you put the work first and say this is what we're going to do work-wise, and then you all your decisions are based on that, it's us as an organization going out the door and delivering service to the customers.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: That's what this looks like.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: This is what I expect is the top ranking person of this organization.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: And then you get everybody around the table labor, whoever, the whole group, the new firefighter, it doesn't matter, see, because you can verbalize and talk about this.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: Now you can show what it looks like and say, when they call 911 and we show up, this is what this looks like.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: This is what our interaction and the service we provide to the community looks like.
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: I think you get into the asshole realm where you start tattooing five bugles and the word chief on your body.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: When it's not about the work, it's about.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: I'm in charge and this is what I'm going to say you're going to do, and that's why you're going to do it.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: And then that causes stress in people.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: It's like, well, who are you?
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm Oz or I'm whatever.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: No, you're just the clown that's the fire chief the next two years.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: What's that have to do with me delivering service?
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: That's why we're all here.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: Well, if you don't get that, see, I worked in a big system and you could tell the difference right away.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: It's the chiefs that said no, the uniform, this is the way you inspect the troops.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: And you're like they don't understand the work.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: I've stood in after-action reviews where the battalion chief the latter company cut a vent hole 150 feet away from the seat of the fire, around three corners of a long wing, and the BC said that was a great work on the roof.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: And you're like, jesus Christ, if I wanted to burn this building down, I ought to cut a vent hole right there and just not put water on it.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: So the man's a fool.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: But because they have the highest rank, it's like you said, we have to lick your boots.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: No, see, the boss of our organization said no, it's the work.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: If you can justify what you do around the work.
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: You're golden.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: Nobody between me and you is going to get to screw with you occupationally.
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: Well, that is a pretty strong system to have to patrol then, because you, you authorize the workers to lead the way.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: So that's where they all would say, well, you turn the prison over to the inmates.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: And he said, well, who else would I turn it over to?
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: They're the ones that run the place.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: That's what happens.
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: Here's a place where it gets hard.
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: I think, when you talk about this at the executive level, leadership is I need an executive team, and I'm talking in departments now that I'm talking 100 to 150 people.
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: Nick, it's not 1,900 people.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I know that.
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: But I need the executive team to be on board with members First and leadership philosophies and I can talk all day long about that.
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: And if the membership sees that I got an asshole on my executive team, I'm not going to build trust right out of the chute.
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: So I took action in both those departments pretty quickly to deselect a person from the high-level executive team.
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: I'm not saying that was easy, that was hard.
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: I had sleepless nights doing it, but I had to do it because they weren't.
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: I heard it and then I watched long enough to see that that person is not treating our workers like I need to have our top level leaders treat them Not just I mean with respect, and that they're not working for us, we're working for them.
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: I need you to be on board with this.
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: And when they weren't, I took action, and that's not easy.
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: But if you don't, you will not build trust.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: No, that's again an action, it's just talk.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: They say oh, talk's a good game, it's all rhetoric, yeah, uh-huh.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but when it gets right down to it—well see, it's almost—the example we would use is like the attendance is the late person.
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: So somebody shows up late to work, what are you going to do?
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: And they'll give this to a group of people that are just the top of the company officers list.
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: So the next group that are all going to go off and be company officers.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: So some chief will come in and say, ok, we're going to do this exercise.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: You're there and your engineer's late.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: Well, what are you going to do?
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, I find out why they're late blah, blah, blah.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, a lot of them jump right to.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: Well, you can't be late because it lets me down, it lets the crew down, it lets the customer down.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: We're letting everybody blah, blah, blah.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: So when they get in, I'm going to be kind of an asshole and, you know, drill this into them.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: Well, it turns out that the person that was late is the engineer that's worked there for the last 30 years.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: He's the best engineer that's ever lived in the history of the fire service, most conscientious, takes the best care of his truck, and the reason he was late is because his mom's dying of cancer and he got hung up at her bedside before he left for work that day, and so now all the captains candidates are crying that they were assholes.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: I can't believe I did that to him.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: He said, yeah, exactly, you don't overreact, man.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, I'm going to help him.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: I'm going to okay.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: Well, let us know if that's going to happen so we can make arrangements.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: And maybe you need to be off the rest of the day if that's the case.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: So you kind of do that.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: Well, then you come back from lunch and say, okay, we're going to do another one.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: This guy shows up late.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm going to be very supportive of him.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: No, this guy's drunk all the time.
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: He shows horrible.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: He never has a uniform.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: What are you going to do?
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: Well, that's a different story.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: I said well, there's a different set of critical factors of why they're late and kind of what they are as an employee and where they need to be.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: So you're going to have to craft a solution for each one of those that are different.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: So it's well, the SOP says this Well, stick the SOP three feet up your ass.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: We're the ones that get to implement that.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: The guy, that who needs a hand, we're going to give a hand.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: The other one needs a hand in a different way, and we're going to do that.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: This one is going to flourish and I'm going to try to take the captain's test, this one may end up getting fired later on because they have self-destructive behaviors that they need to outperform to remain a member here.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: So I mean, that kind of becomes the thing.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: It's all in effort of the work, though.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: See, the work is the finish line for it.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: So it's like we're not being nice just to be nice to you and read you bedtime stories.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: You're a firefighter, you're a fighter.
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: You're going to go out and you're going to punch things in the face and get punched.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: You're not going to always have control.
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: There's going to be some stress there, but we're going to support you.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: We don't want you to get beat up too much you know injured and lose time and the rest of it, and we'll put in these other strategies for dealing with the emotional piece of this thing, which I find is like the after action review right there.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: And then so the stuff you're talking about hamburger people, dead children you know the sad song calls.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: I found that you do an after action review with those and you say, ok, based on this set of critical factors, here are the available actions we have to take.
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: We did everything we could do, we did our part of this.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: We held up our end of the bargain, we showed up and we delivered the service that we are paid to deliver and you did that very well.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: But we didn't make the world man and every dead person that happens in our community we will attend.
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: The fire department will be called unless it happens in a hospital and they go straight to the ME.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: But if there's death and destruction we're usually there for it.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: So this is the routine to kind of wash that off of you.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: So every time I had a shitty call like that, that's what I did as a response chief, and even weeks later you were having no ill effect.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: There were still some effects, but you were processing them in a positive way and everybody was at work doing what they needed to be doing.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: So they all recovered from it, I mean, but it all went back to the work again.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: This is the work we do After we're done, doing nasty work we talk about.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: Well, this is what it is.
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: Sometimes we would get together at a fire station Like we had a flock of drownings for a while, so you would end up with dead kids floating, bring them back to the station.
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: You have a 10, 15-minute talk and say, okay, that was nasty.
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: Do any of you want to leave?
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: You know we can take a break and you know, never, never.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: While I was at B-Shift BC, they looked at me and said you are crazy If you think I'm going to leave here to go home and deal with this.
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: I'm staying here and we're going to just continue to be B-Shifters and go on calls and do what we're supposed to do and we'll be fine.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: And sure enough, I had a deal once.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: In fact it was so good I wrote about it and we had a drowning.
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: Shit happens so.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: And the next shift there were multiple victims, kids.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: The next shift, half of the family bought in a cake.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: You know, thank you guys for responding, and so you know we're sorry for your loss.
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: Blah, blah, blah.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: But little brief deal.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: They leave.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: Uh, everybody kind of comes back into the kitchen and looking at each other like the hell brings a cake.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: Ray comes out of the bathroom, said what the hell's going on here, what the cake?
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: He brings a knife.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: He's cutting it and we told him he says this is dead kid cake.
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he took it and he just threw it across the room in the garbage can.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: Hit the wall.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: We had fun cleaning it up, it was good.
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: We went back to what we were doing and it became a deal.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: You'd see, ray, hey Ray, how you doing Pretty good Chief.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: No dead kid cake for us.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: Off you go, man.
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: It was just the way you did your business, so well, if you have an environment, so that's a good environment that you're talking about, because you had a fire chief that was customer service focused, took care of the troops, all of that.
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: So you were empowered to say go home for the shift or we're out of service for two hours, or whatever it was.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: There's chiefs out there top down that do not do that.
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: In fact, you would be punished for sending somebody home.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: How do you identify that?
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: The culture is like that?
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: And then are there steps that we can go through through your Drexel work and some of the metrics.
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: I mean, is there any way to fix this?
• 35:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I have some thoughts about that.
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: It's you know, it starts with listening, of course, to your members, I think and then it moves to another level with the work that under Dr Jennifer Taylor and her group of academics and scientists are doing with the focus survey, because they're doing that level of scientific work and then they've created the questions carefully and then the data that they get when they share that with the leadership, that's data that we can use on what the workforce needs.
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: It's interesting I want to say this is not only my opinion.
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: Now I read from last year.
• 36:01
  Speaker 3: It was a survey done nationwide by Fire Rescue One what do firefighters want in 2023?
• 36:09
  Speaker 3: Maybe you saw something and the top two stressors to firefighters of a couple thousand they interviewed was number one, was staffing and then just one percentage behind was leadership the two greatest stressors in their work.
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: So I go back to when I, in my experience in an understaffed both departments that I worked with which I think represents a big body of the American Fire Service that are still responding with two people on fire trucks, which is just getting insane.
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: I mean it's untenable, but it's what I was dealing with.
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: I took over, I was wide open agencies that had.
• 36:50
  Speaker 3: Now I'm responsible for sending two people out in a fire truck.
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: That's the way I looked at it.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: That's an ambulance staffing model.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, on a fire truck it's insane.
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: It's what it is.
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: So that takes adding staffing.
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: Okay, that's a.
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: That's a big deal to the workforce that now they're going to feel supported from an executive team that wants to add staffing because their job is it's the most physically demanding blue collar job in North America that I know of, and that's an opinion I have.
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: No, that's the day.
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: Just did a survey on that.
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: Okay, the average weight that a worker lifts the firefighters at the highest, the peak by like a factor of four of the second place position.
• 37:32
  Speaker 3: I hadn't seen that it's the hardest physical job and the most dangerous, precarious positions that we work in.
• 37:39
  Speaker 3: And now I'm asking people to do it with two people on a fire truck.
• 37:43
  Speaker 3: I'm going to sit in this seat, I'm going to take responsibility.
• 37:46
  Speaker 3: We got to add staffing.
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: Okay, what does that take?
• 37:49
  Speaker 3: Funding I don't.
• 37:50
  Speaker 3: These are the non-sexy part.
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: But at the executive level, these are two big deal things strategic executive level that I think fall right in the lap of.
• 38:01
  Speaker 3: If I'm going to sit in that seat, then they're my responsibility.
• 38:04
  Speaker 3: We need to increase staffing and it's my work to get the funding to do it.
• 38:09
  Speaker 3: So that takes working with your board, your city council, through your mayor, city manager, whoever you work for.
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: But it takes heavy lifting, it's not easy and it takes time and investment and, I think, contemporary leaders, I think we need to use data that provides evidence of these needs of the workforce, and this work from the focus survey helps provide that data and metrics is also what you want to use when you talk to your board or City Council.
• 38:45
  Speaker 3: But this is additional metrics of the work and the workers, that what they need to deliver the service at a high level is more staffing.
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: So we need to come up with ways to find funding, and that's my responsibility, so we increase staffing.
• 38:59
  Speaker 3: Those are two, two big deals of executive level leadership that I think once a workforce sees that you're committed to doing that heavy lifting and hard work and then hopefully you're successful with it over time, that's a tangible strategic level executive move that shows your workforce you're committed to their safety and well-being.
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: Those are two big deals, john, that I'd start with.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: Well, john, the deal that you asked before.
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: Like you were, I worked for an empowered fire department, so we had those as tools that we could use.
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: But the problem is that is not most of the fire service, isn't that?
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: And in fact a lot of the fire service is managed.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: We said a paramilitary, which is the same way they manage police departments.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: As shitty a call as I've ever been on was one day there was some police officers shot, right.
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: So we go to that and it's the typical thing that you would see there was multiple police officers that had been killed and it was.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: So we were about an hour or so on the scene screwing around with this thing.
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: So they get the cops, they transport them to the hospital.
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: Once we figured out what was going on, I went to the hospital to kind of manage our people there.
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: So the firefighters are coming in, they've treated the officers, dropped them at the hospital, so I'm kind of there, got the crews in a different area, you know, kind of adjacent to the ER, but they gave us a conference room off to the side.
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: So we're sitting there kind of shooting the shit, and it just kind of became your typical sitting around talking to everybody at the hospital because we've all spent hours at the hospital.
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: Because we've all spent hours at the hospital I mean, that's where firefighters hang out after you drop patients off.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: So we're doing our typical thing and you kind of forget why you're there for a little bit.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: But then the families of these officers start showing up.
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: Well, now you're starting to hear the emotional piece of this showing up.
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: Well, now you're starting to hear the emotional piece of this.
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: There's wives crying and screaming and just it has turned into no wonder.
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: I'm in a room with probably 16, 20 other firefighters and for 10 minutes none of us even talked.
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: We just sat there and just it was shit.
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: I mean you can imagine.
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: So we get done.
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: The ER is finished, they've done what they're going to do.
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: People are leaving.
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: So now the cops are leaving.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: There's a sergeant I know.
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: I walk over and say, hey, man, you know you give them the whole thing.
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: So what are you guys doing?
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: He says we're going back, and so I'm watching these cops get in their cars.
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: You're going back.
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: Where he says we're going back on duty, that's what we do.
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: And they all got in their cars and they all went and they were cops for the rest of their shift.
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: I'm like man, this is not a good time to be pulled over by the police in this zip code.
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: If you're going to yeah and it was and you're thinking yeah and it was, and you're thinking this, you, this is criminal.
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: What you were doing is no, stop it.
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: And they didn't even think of it.
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: I mean it was.
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: What else would we do?
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: It's no man, you guys can't.
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: You got to go to counseling or something.
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: You don't have a bunch of crying cops getting back in their cars.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: I can't, no, yeah.
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: That's horrible and, on a risk management level of things, you are setting yourself up for that next incident to possibly happen that day and that's the last thing those cops needed to be involved in.
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what advice do we have for somebody who's a middle manager and they?
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: They lack the control because they're not in the front office?
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: I mean, what?
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: What can they do?
• 42:57
  Speaker 2: I mean, what is their tools out there for them?
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: Or at least any, any mechanisms you have for them to at least start to draw awareness to this problem?
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: Middle managers yeah, I was focused largely on the executive level.
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: Let me tell a story that might help with mid-level managers.
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: A couple different instances.
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: I had deputy chiefs, ops chiefs, that as I listened to members, I would hear about an apparatus.
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: That was the tender.
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: Okay, I heard stories a number of times about the tender.
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: It's old Well it was a jalopy but it had this problem with the brakes and this problem with the lights and this problem with the radio.
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: And I asked and you've written that up, yes, we've written it up and it was a response.
• 43:50
  Speaker 3: We stopped.
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: Did you write it up again?
• 43:53
  Speaker 3: I guess we stopped writing it up because we don't get a response.
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: They're growing resentful, unheard, undervalued.
• 44:04
  Speaker 3: Okay Cause I heard that more in another agency.
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: It was the GI, this, this government Jeep rig for a while.
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: Then I got heard the same stories.
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you got to drive it with your fingers out like this because, annie, when she was doing it it got tied up in the wheel and it's unsafe.
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: And see, the rig is still in service.
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: So I went to the ops chief and I said have you heard about that?
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, we don't.
• 44:25
  Speaker 3: We can't afford it.
• 44:26
  Speaker 3: I said pull it out of service.
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: And you have to.
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: That can't become white noise to us as leaders when it's unsafe.
• 44:34
  Speaker 3: We can't leave a vehicle in service because we don't have another to replace it.
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: It's unsafe period.
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: We'll work on what we put in service to replace it and I need you to be on board, middle managers.
• 44:46
  Speaker 3: So, john, I guess I'm thinking of the middle managers that I needed to.
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: I tried to work with them to say, hey, we need to.
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: You know there's chatter and then when you hear something that's important like that, you've got to listen and take some action and that shows the workforce and I would support an ops chief middle manager doing that, so that advocate they do that.
• 45:11
  Speaker 3: Listen to those things that become white noise and take action and I'll support you because if you don't, then the workforce just grows, they're unheard, undervalued and become resentful and firefighters know how to band together like hornets man.
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: When they're feeling that way against.
• 45:32
  Speaker 3: It was us versus them, it was tension, they hated admin and when it's us versus them, nobody wins.
• 45:42
  Speaker 3: I hope within that I talked about some middle management style that I think I can advocate and support and I've seen it kind of time and again when it feels like a dead end road.
• 45:53
  Speaker 3: We don't have money to address it.
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: We'll figure that that part out.
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: But we can't allow unsafe you know equipment and practices to go on when we're aware of them, when we're aware of them, to become white noise and not address them, because that's not supporting that culture of safety and it's a, it's a good cycle.
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: When you do that, I'm telling you, the data provides evidence that when they feel supported that way, they have more of an affinity towards following our policies.
• 46:23
  Speaker 3: I want firefighters to follow good policy.
• 46:26
  Speaker 3: If the policy is effed up, we'll fix it, but once we have policies, then we want to agree that.
• 46:32
  Speaker 3: I'll work tirelessly to support you.
• 46:37
  Speaker 3: I tell firefighters, and be concerned with your safety.
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: And here's the deal If you'll follow the policy, yeah, well, it's like the sick leave thing.
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: The policy says don't be late.
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: Well, this guy was late for one reason that's easy to fix.
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: This other guy's late for a reason that he's got to fix Right, I need to help this guy.
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: This guy needs to help himself, so he keeps his thing.
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: I think for Vance's question, though, about like a middle manager if you have a chief who doesn't support it, you're screwed, because it's impossible to lead the department from the middle.
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: So why they call you the leader?
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: Is you point to where we're going there?
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: it is You've got to wait them out.
• 47:14
  Speaker 3: Well, that's what they say.
• 47:16
  Speaker 3: You've you got to wait them out.
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: Well, that's what they say.
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: You got to wait it out.
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: But I mean, that's man, if I have to wait a long time, I'm going to leave or I'm going to put a bomb in his car.
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: I mean, so we need to remove.
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: That's why the union blackballs people.
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: You're like no, you can't work here because you don't support the work.
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: It's not a.
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: We're not here to validate some broken fire chief every day who says I'm Buford E Pusser, this is the way we're going to do it, son.
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: No, you're not.
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: You're here to make sure the firefighter has what they need to deliver service.
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: That's what it is.
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: Spot on.
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: I don't mean to sound defeatist, but if you don't have that support, I want to advocate what I talked about with the ops chiefs and the mid-level managers.
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: They don't have that from the top.
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: The example I use all the time is you have a firefighter that dies in the line of duty and the fire chief comes out and says I wouldn't change anything, this is what our job is.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: We're the pillars of safety for the community.
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: No, you're not, because when that happens, you're not protecting the public in any way at all.
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: When you're killing the workforce, that's indicative that it's not a safe place to live.
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so, yeah, take that with your spoon of sugar, but that's kind of it.
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: So it's got to start with the fire chief, and if it doesn't, then that's why they keep hiring you guys.
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: You keep going places.
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, there needs to be.
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: I think that then the challenge becomes is so the fire chief takes it to the authority-having jurisdiction and says we have an ambulance staffing model for our fire department.
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: This is not effective.
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: It's not effective, it's not safe, it's not anything.
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: It's Bush League.
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: And this is why.
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: And the authority-having jurisdiction tells you to.
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: So what?
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems to work.
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: Nothing happened yesterday.
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: Everything seems to be going well.
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: No, I'm not going to do staffing Well, that's the deal In my system.
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: What happened and I saw this as soon as I joined is the union said oh, we're just going to elect a whole other group of people and within, see, that's where you get your time.
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: Within like five years, which was the election cycle for the entire city council, it turned over Once they figured out this is the road we're going down.
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: See, that's the advantage of being a fire department and working for a union and having a career that spans over 20 years is because you become an OG in that community and then you can manage things in a way that improve the safety.
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: So that's during my entire career that happened.
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: And then you had new leadership and they had different priorities and everything else.
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: Well, the city got away from that.
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: And so today in this city they have a nine minute response time because over the last 15 years there's been there's nobody.
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: That's how's the workforce feel?
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: Well, they're pissed off because there's a forced overtime march at least once a week, and then there's nobody.
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: It's like, no, we're going on 5,000 calls a year.
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: Next year we're going to go on six Help us.
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's just the way it is and we're trying, and you're like, no, you ain't tried for 15 years.
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: This is why it got this way, buddy, it's a full-time job.
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: Every day you had to put your boots on because you had to go, and sometimes the fire chief's toughest job in the whole thing, without a doubt, because you got the fire department here and then you got the authority having jurisdiction and you are.
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: And the union, that's yeah, yeah.
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great.
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I have the greatest career in the history of careers.
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: They know what I did, but it ain't easy, man, it's a tough thing.
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: Yes, I want to add on to what is so true, that's the accountability is that the union will run someone else on the board or council to support their.
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: That'll happen.
• 51:31
  Speaker 3: And here's something I found that I guess in the meantime the fire chief can do and I felt this a number of times because I would would go to a board, is who it was I worked for and they hadn't heard this before, and I believe it was because somebody was in that position that just didn't have the courage to go tell them that, probably because they felt like they needed to have their job.
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: Well, I didn't, that's about it because they felt like they needed to have their job.
• 51:58
  Speaker 3: Well, I didn't.
• 51:59
  Speaker 3: And I said well, I'm sorry you haven't heard this before, but I'm telling you this sucks right now and it's our job to fix it.
• 52:05
  Speaker 3: And some of them didn't like hearing it at all.
• 52:08
  Speaker 3: It was the first time.
• 52:09
  Speaker 3: So I call it leading up.
• 52:13
  Speaker 3: I'm going to do it and I told a board member more than once I'm going to lead this organization the way I think is best for the organization, for service delivery to our community, and if you don't like it, I don't need this job.
• 52:28
  Speaker 3: If they're listening to this, that's fine with me.
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: So that's something I felt more than once after I was after retirement age and I was in the position of fire chief.
• 52:42
  Speaker 3: I'm there to do that work.
• 52:44
  Speaker 3: That's on me in the seat that I'm sitting in To get funding.
• 52:48
  Speaker 3: That's hard to do because nobody wants their taxes raised.
• 52:51
  Speaker 3: I get it To get the staffing.
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: That's again back to what I was saying and that's dealing with the elected officials.
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's leading up up man, you said it before that.
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: The one word is trust is they got to trust you?
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: So the firefighters have to trust you, the fire board has to trust you and if you wrap it around, the work and say no, I represent the work.
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: I'm not collecting gold bars to hide my house or any of that.
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: I'm not a politician in this, as I am here to be the fire chief.
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: You pay me well for that.
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: That's good, that's part of the deal here.
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: And for that salary and the benefits you pay me I'm going to make this the best fire department that I could make.
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: It period and that's the only barometer in that is the service we provide to the customer.
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: Period.
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: That's it Now.
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: There's physical responsibility in the rest of it.
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: We're not going to spend $10,000 on Band-Aids tomorrow.
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: But I mean you're going to do all that within the normal acceptable management practices of being the fire chief.
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: But you have the choice as the chief, as I can support this over here in the form of the work, or it can be about my authority as the chief in charge of the whole fire department.
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: You're going to learn why there's five points on that badge and that that doesn't feel good.
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: If it's about you.
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: If it's the work there's, it's.
• 54:14
  Speaker 2: Well, and chiefs get put into really crappy positions.
• 54:16
  Speaker 2: A hundred percent Well, and chiefs get put into really crappy positions 100%, you end up with politicians that don't want to cooperate or have their own axe to grind.
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: I was a chief with a board member that was a former volunteer firefighter and he didn't feel like we needed any career staff and he did everything he could to fight that career staffing, including trying to impugn the character of myself and anybody else that got in the way.
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: You have to outlast that and I totally agree with your statement that you got to carry out that career as fire chief, like it doesn't matter if I'm employed here tomorrow, like if that's what they have to do, that's what they have to do Over time.
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: You feel like you want to do that's what they have to do Over time.
• 54:58
  Speaker 2: You feel like you want to make things safer as you get closer to retirement.
• 55:02
  Speaker 2: My wake up call to myself always was I thought of the cop in Florida, the guy that was a month away from retirement, so he never went in the school while the school shooting was going on, and I just equated that to my career.
• 55:15
  Speaker 2: It's like now I've got to be willing to continue on with the same vim and vigor I had when I was doing this job 10 years ago as I would today, no matter how close to retirement.
• 55:25
  Speaker 2: You are Because I have too many buddies that have had fire chiefs say look, I'm only in this position for three years, don't make any waves, I'm here to pad my pension.
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: I'm here to pad my pension.
• 55:35
  Speaker 2: Well, if that's why you're a fire chief, you're in the wrong business man, because you're going to create a culture within that fire department that is going to take the next person a long time to turn around and a lot of effort to turn around and you're letting down the basic promise anyway.
• 55:50
  Speaker 2: So that's my experience with that.
• 55:53
  Speaker 2: I love the fact that the title of this.
• 55:55
  Speaker 2: People are going to tune in, thinking that you know we're talking about the culture war that there is right now with safety.
• 56:02
  Speaker 2: And really this is where everyone should be focused right now that staffing piece and that leadership piece, because if we did those two things and I think Nick was saying it we're going to make everything a lot better for our people and those people that we serve.
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I have to say I totally agree with you.
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: Those are not easy things to do, no, no, and they can.
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: There is a safety component.
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: That's just part of our work.
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: That's safety, and it's like, not, it's not one or the other.
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: So these chiefs that say, well, it's one or the other, you're safe or you're unsafe, and you're like, no, you're not, or like we don't have a rescue culture anymore, what the hell are you talking about?
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: We showed up to the scene within five minutes of being notified.
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: We were fully protected.
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: We took a charged attack line inside, attacked the fire, knocked it down and then we saved anybody who was going to be inside.
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: That's the way we.
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: That's a professional operation.
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: You running in there like yelling and screaming we're going to save the babies without any kind of plan of attack.
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: Uh-uh, that's amateur hour.
• 57:06
  Speaker 2: Well, that goes back to an unsafe culture.
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: I'm going to run this off.
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: My emotions is what it is.
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: Well, if you think I'm the boss because I got the badge, that's an emotional response for you that counters the work.
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: And I would say that you have to cook what Pat said to start this, boss, because I got the badge, that's an emotional response for you that counters the work.
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: So, and I would say that you have to cook what Pat said to start this, the injuries physical injuries they take, and then the emotional injuries, as you have to consider that as part of the labor, that is just the hazards we face.
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: So when I do like, when I do an SOP for a forward hose lay, well, it used to be that the couplings, the three and a half inch couplings, would catch up on our hose beds.
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: They could about one every 40 or 50 times.
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: When that coupling caught is if there were three or four lengths of hose out the back and you're hanging on to the humat.
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: If you're not wrapping that hydrant, the right way that humat comes out of your hands, comes back around, and where your head was is where it's going to fly back towards the fire engine.
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: So we said no, this is the way you do this.
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: So this is the way you lay hoes to eliminate these kind of hazardous situations.
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: So you train recruits.
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: This is the way we do this Boom, boom, boom and you just cook that and everything, and then the strategy becomes a bigger deal.
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: Now we're talking blue card stuff.
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: But when I get there, your safety systems will protect you going inside.
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: And the offensive strategy we're going to be offensive.
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: If the hazard overmatches that, we're going to be defensive.
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: So there's different routines for that.
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: So we build the safety and what that does, the thing you talked about with focus.
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: We're looking at doing that.
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: In older blue card departments they said we started doing blue card.
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: We've been doing it 10 years.
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: Well, let's say five years before and five years after.
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: What does it look like?
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: Well, it's going to be better because you have incorporated the safety of all that operation within your SOPs as a regular, standard element.
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: See, and we took that even beyond where, like the safety division, we merged it back into the ops division and said, no, the chief's aide is a safety officer.
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: Now, it's so important.
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: We're going to embed safety on the tactical level.
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: So that's everything you spoke of.
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: We had a leader that understood that there's a physical hazard and a moral hazard that we deal with every day, and this is how I'm going to take care of that.
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: So the silverback leadership thing that Garrison and I are doing, that you two will probably be involved in before it's done that's what it is is.
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: It's just what we were taught growing up, being led by what they called the architect of the modern fire service upon his death.
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: So, and I mean, that's really all we know, and we're probably as good a group to do it as anybody now that he isn't here.
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah.
• 59:48
  Speaker 2: Pat, do you have anything else about the class you want people to know about if they're coming to Cincinnati?
• 59:54
  Speaker 3: You know, when they come to Cincinnati I have some more.
• 59:56
  Speaker 3: When I talked about it I had sort of a mantra of.
• 59:58
  Speaker 3: I led very publicly and loudly that our members are first and I explained that every time I said it, that it's really about customer service, about the way I feel a supported group of workers delivers the best service.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 3: That's one and I have a few others of those I'd like to share in the class that are sort of the to me, the strategic level of executive leadership that you can address to make your workforce feel supported so that it creates that culture of safety and that tide of now.
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 3: They adhere to policies more fewer injuries, higher engagement, they're happier, they're a happy workforce.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 3: Those are strategic level the members first, and find a way to say yes, that I encourage our executive team.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 3: I have more of those at kind of the tactical level.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 3: I'd like to share that leaders can.
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 3: I'll just share my experience and then the proof of how that affected the climate of safety and culture of the department.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: I'd like to share more of those in Cincinnati.
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: The focus thing Is that still available for people to do.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 3: Thank you, that's a great way to have more.
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 3: Thank you, Nick.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's through Drexel.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 3: It really came from the back in what year was it 2000?
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 3: And from the life safety initiatives from the National Fallen Firefighter Foundation, 16 life safety number one.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: The fire service should address the culture of safety within the fire service and focus on leadership supervision, and that was the number one life safety initiative of 16.
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 3: So then FEMA, towards addressing that, funded Drexel University in Philadelphia to come up with a plan to how to find a way to address that.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 3: So they developed this focus survey.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 3: So it's free.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: It's in like its third version now.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 3: It's free because it's funded by FEMA and it's a great staff to work with.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 3: Once you go through this survey.
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 3: They really encourage.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 3: In fact, I don't think they'll do it unless they get a sign off from labor if you're working with an organized labor department, and then it's free and they'll take you through the survey.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 3: They'd like to have at least a 65% return from your members and then they'll go over through the survey.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 3: They'd like to have at least a 65% return from your members and then they'll go over the results with you Excellent information that then you can use.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 3: Like I said, in addition to like standards that cover response metrics that show you need more staffing to address call volume, you need more staffing to address the workforce.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 3: That needs more workers so that they're not being injured and the work is performed better.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: There's data that provides evidence of that within the work that FIRST Center at Drexel University does in the focus survey.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: So they're doing fantastic work.
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 3: It's free.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: Here's a tip I would say If you're going to put your agency and members through this focus survey and I suggest that leaders do that, even if one is I think leaders should actually seek information that they don't want to hear.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 3: I wanted to know things I didn't want to know, and the survey might do that.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 3: Here's the tip If you're going to put your membership through a survey, have a plan on what you're going to do with the results of the survey, even if it is something you don't want to hear.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 3: So, yes, they're still revising and advancing the work that they're doing with the focus.
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: What were the things that you didn't want to hear that you heard?
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: Well, ours, by and large, was, I mean, just one example of something that was falling to that.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: Okay, so your staffing was those are big things and you get bitching about your executive staff.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 3: They beat people up in this.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 3: It's not open-ended, so not so much in that.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: But they have an opportunity to say whether they feel supported by their supervisors, which are company officers, or a commitment from their top-level management.
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 3: They're geared towards that.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 3: So if they're not feeling that way, you're going to hear that.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 2: I think an example of that, pat, was you were asked to redact information from the survey, right yeah, and you had to say no, you've got to have transparency if you want this to have credibility.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: Who?
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 3: asked to redact.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 3: Well, a couple of our senior staff members got beat up in the survey.
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 3: I get the results.
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 3: First they gave them to me and I went oh, she or her.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 3: So I put it out to the senior staff before everybody and right away.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 3: Chief, we kicked the door closed.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 3: You've got to redact these.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 3: I said I'm sorry, that must be hurtful.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 3: I know I encourage you to look in the mirror in the conversation also, but I can't do that because I'm here daily trying to build trust with our membership and those comments are shitty.
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 3: Some knucklehead wrote those, but I'm telling you.
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: I mean, those people had a long relationship before you got there and a lot of that personal stuff is going to come out in the wash.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 3: There's some of that and some of it is has some.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 3: I think we need to deal with, and the person that writes those knucklehead things because some of them are is also the person that.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 3: Oh, the survey is out, my comments aren't in there, foul, the whole thing's out of order.
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 3: Well then, the process is suspect, and now I'm not gaining ground or I lose ground on trust that I'm building.
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 3: So at the moment, it wasn't easy.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 2: I had a decision to make.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 3: Do I publish that?
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 3: And I had to publish everything the way it was.
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 2: You know it's going to be disruptive when you're doing it, but in the long run it's going to pay off to have that level of transparency.
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 2: And transparency is such a buzzword with fire chiefs right now, but it takes grit to be transparent.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 2: It's a tough road for some folks.
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: Well, it's almost like one of those deals like some stations hazing their probationary firefighters and they've been doing it for the last 20 years and then they do the next episode and it happens to just blow up in everybody's face and so it was one of those things.
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: When you go back to look at it they say, well, everybody knew about it, but nobody ever did anything about it.
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: So I think when you get to like individuals specifically those may be the ones that are identified in that survey are the ones that a lot of times people are waiting to leave.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: I mean that's.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: You know you did the survey to find the problems.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: I brought the problem down.
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: You know Gordon Graham does a thing where he would go out and do like a sexual harassment class.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: The AHJ calls him and says we need a sexual harassment thing.
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: Well, he knows the reason they need a sexual harassment is because there's sexual harassment going on.
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: So he starts the thing off and he says OK, he passes out three by five cards.
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: He says write down the top three sexual harassers of this organization and whatever else they all.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: They pass them all back when they're done and he's looking at them at the end and it's like the same three names.
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: And so whoever hires him picks him up to take him to the airport.
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: He says oh, by the way, here's your sexual harassment problem.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: It's that simple, I mean.
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: What do you do then?
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: It's like well, jesus Christ, I mean, I think the problem is there's nothing, there's no class that tells you what to do next.
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: It's like okay, I've identified this problem, what do I?
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: Because now you've got to fix it somehow.
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: So, like in the case of the sexual harassers.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: It's like well, if these people start coming forward and telling their story and it gets on paper, you are in serious hot water, pal, you will be ushered.
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: In fact, that's where people start to say well, no man, this has been going on a long time and there's at least 10 of them there that are all over a million and a half dollars at ease.
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: So then it starts.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: They think, oh God, we've got to fix it, but we're going to bankrupt ourselves getting rid of them with settlements and restitutions.
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 3: I don't want to end negatively, but to Nick's point.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 3: When leadership knows about those problems, I mean first, I think, is there organizational accountability?
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 3: Do we have a policy?
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 3: Have we trained them?
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 3: Do we have that in place?
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 3: And if so, then there's a point where I say put members first.
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 3: Sometimes that includes letting people go or demotions, and I've done those and that's part of putting members first.
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 3: That's supporting the membership by not having someone that can't get on board with my leadership style and executive team.
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 3: They'll be selection and demotion and that's part.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 3: You know, that kind of accountability is a word as a whole right connotation as well, but that's part of putting members first to me is is taking the action that we all, like nick said, we all know it needs to happen.
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 2: It's just my work to do it I love what bruno used to say, though he called it humane accountability.
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: You know, you, you didn't do things to get, even with people.
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 2: You did things because it's the humane thing to do, and sometimes it's the humane thing to do for the entire organization or the community to show those people maybe an alternative career that would be better for them than being in a leadership position within a fire department.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: Well, if you're sexually harassing the workforce, that is going to have a delirious effect on the service delivery.
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 2: You just can't do it.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so you know, and you got to do something about it.
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: I remember there was an individual in my department who was they were very good at helping get people hired on the job and they were very kind of active in that, very fit in the rest of it, and so people would come to him.
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: Well, this firefighter comes to him and pretty soon this firefighter she's getting ready to go through the academy has a meeting with the fire chief.
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: So she tells the story and says you know, this is kind of what's going on.
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: And he says no, that's not.
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: Please, thank you for telling me, I'm going to take care of this.
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: And no, you go back to work and you do what you were doing before this and we're going to take care of this problem.
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: So, humane accountability.
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: He calls in Captain, who he loves.
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, they have been together for 25 years, they've been Captain and he's like Captain, you dumb son of a bitch, because he's chief now and it's.
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: You can't do this, you're done, you're out of there and we're going to move you over here Now.
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: Today, some people well, he should have been fired.
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: No, it's my choice.
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: And no, he, he needed to be relocated and understand.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: This is unacceptable behavior.
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: So he understands that.
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: And the world went on and nobody was assassinated in the thing she did well, went, went off on her career, he left, he was out of her life at that point, which is what she wanted, obviously.
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: And then off they go.
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: So but again, being the fire chief, that is the toughest position in the whole.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: Not right there.
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: You're the, you're kind of the barrel of the gun, you're not the cylinder, you're.
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: You're the, you're kind of the barrel of the gun, you're not the cylinder, you're.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: They all go through you.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: So it's that that's yeah.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 2: I would sit at my desk and I'd go god, everyone wants to be fire chief.
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 2: Until it's time to do fire chief shit, yeah, exactly and then this is.
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 2: This is the hard part of the job.
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: It's right, uh, but you know we were the B-Shift never wanted to be the fire chief until it was time to do the fire chief's job.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: And then we thought no man, this is give it to us, while we're awake.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: They were smart never to do that, vance.
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: We promoted to the point we needed to.
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: I had gratitude every day that I was not an executive level member.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: I wore brush pants, t-shirts and rode around in a Suburban.
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: It was epic.
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 3: You know I told our board when we were looking to create a process to replace me.
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 3: You know the fire chief.
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 3: I told the board.
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 3: Here's how we should advertise for fire chief Make less than your direct report Stress through the roof chance of success is low.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: Apply here, yeah, yeah yeah only half of you make it through this, yeah the more you hate it, the more certain you're going to have to do it longer and longer they chuckled, but I don't know that I was chuckling oh I.
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: I remember my dad used to be like Garrison's therapist during the thing and finally one day Garrison goes in and he says I hate this, I can't stand this job.
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: And he just my dad's like what is wrong with him?
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: What is wrong with him, you are a lunatic, is what it is.
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: So, moses or Noah, we're sick of the flood and you're just getting started, is what it is.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: Oh no, this is the greatest.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: But he just he loved it.
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: He got his little spiral pad out and just started making more notes.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: Ok, but it was.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he screwed us all up, man.
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: Everybody that comes to this building is yeah the pope, god bless was yeah he screwed us all up Vance.
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 2: Everybody that comes to this building is, yeah, the.
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: Pope.
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: God bless it.
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: Yes, indeed, I'm glad it happened.
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: We painted him on the building for a reason, vance.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: You guys want to do a timeless tactical truth, let's do it All right.
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 2: Timeless tactical truth from Alan Brunicini.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 2: And this one don't think feel that allowing a worker to be incompetent will produce any gratitude.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 2: Wow, yeah, it's kind of talking about what we and I had no idea when we picked this one, really what this conversation was talking about man, that one.
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: right there is a double-bladed dagger.
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that do not have a flat edge on it, true?
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess it goes back to the work.
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it really does.
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 2: Well, and I've seen those incompetent workers before and they don't have any gratitude toward the fire chief.
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 2: The more you cover up somebody who is unwilling, unable, toxic, whatever label you're going to put on them, they're just going to keep using the system.
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 2: And that competency is really what?
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 2: To your point?
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 2: Pat is going to build people who are engaged, productive employees that love their jobs and look forward to coming to work every day.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 3: I bet that incompetent person knows it.
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 3: They're unhappy, they're not happy with themselves.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's Well that was a good one to wrap this one up.
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: Thanks guys, Great Thank you.
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 2: Hey, Pat Dale, thanks for being here.
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 2: We've been together all the time but haven't been able to get you on the podcast.
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 2: The last time Pat Dale was on the podcast we had no video.
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 2: That's why I told him to ignore the cameras.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 3: Crazy, it's because I have a face for radio.
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: No, actually that's the group of us.
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we have a thing, You're a good-looking guy.
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: Pat, oh, you are too.
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: Well, we'll talk about that at dinner.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: Okay, I grew another head of hair to cover mine.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much for listening to B-Shifter.
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 2: Make sure to check the show notes if you want contact information for Pat or any of us.
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 2: Until next time.
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: And you can put the Drexel stuff in the show notes.
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 3: Right on, we'll put that right in the show notes.
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 3: This is all with their sanctioning.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: Once you're done, click on the link if you're interested and go to it.
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: Man, awesome, yeah, exactly, great idea.
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: Take your union president to lunch and talk about it.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 2: There you go.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 2: That's good advice.
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 2: We'll see you next time.