How’s the water in your pool?

By: Robert Avsec

I can’t remember the first time I heard this phrase, and I couldn’t tell you how many times I heard it since, but it’s one I never forget.  Perhaps you’ve heard it, too?

Employees don’t leave the company.  They leave their boss.  Author Unknown

Delta (Vancouver, BC, Canada) Fire Department welcomes its first female officer.
Battalion chief says he’d follow Madeline Lamphier into any blaze.

One of my mentors in my Fire & EMS career was Deputy Chief (Ret.) Jim Graham of the Chesterfield (VA)Fire & EMS Department.  Learned most of what I know about leadership and management and Incident Command from the man (Though he’s probably forgotten more than I ever learned).  One of Chief Graham’s leadership mantras was, “Nobody in the fire department has more influence over the greatest amount of the department’s resources than the Company Officer (First-line Supervisor).”

I’m thinking that probably holds true in Fire & EMS departments across the USA—heck, around the world!  Company Officers have daily management responsibility for:

• The majority of people who work for the organization;
• The majority of the organization’s vehicle fleet; and
• The majority of the organization’s fixed assets, e.g., fire stations.

I recently came across two articles on the web that I found extremely interesting and I think you might find them interesting as well.  The first is, How strong is your workplace?, by Gretchen Rubin, bestselling author and blogger, www.happiness-project.com.  Here’s a “taste” to whet your appetite:

They came up with a list of twelve questions. Those employees who answered “yes” to them and were happier in their workplaces, tended to work in business units with higher levels of productivity, profit, retention, and customer satisfaction – which shows that there is a link between how employees feel and how they perform.

I found the second article, CEOs Who Are Active On Social Media Boost Employee Morale And Their Company’s Image, by Cooper Smith of Business Insider to be just as interesting.

A new study from Weber Shandwick indicates that 76% of managers and executives believe that a company appears more innovative if their CEO uses social media. Moreover,  52% of respondents said they feel inspired working for a CEO who uses social media.

After I read Cooper’s piece a second time I realized that there was a pretty good “connection”—at least in my mind between the two articles.  We frequently hear and read about problems in Fire & EMS departments that are attributed to what I refer to as “management disconnect”.  You’re probably familiar with the concept as well because you hear it in phrases like:

• “The chief has forgotten what it’s like in the fire station.” (Firefighters talking)
• “The firefighters have “no clue” what it takes to get the nice shiny trucks that they want.” (Fire Chief talking)

I could list many more from each perspective, but I think you get the drift.  So where’s the connection between the two articles?

In the last 10-15 years many departments across the USA have started doing Customer Satisfaction Surveys to find out what the public they serve thinks about the service they are getting.  Gretchen’s piece provides us, as Fire & EMS managers, with a real set of objective criteria for assessing the health and strength of our individual work unit, e.g., a fire station, the Training Center, Administration, etc.  A regular Internal Customer Service Survey (Allow me to paraphrase the words of Gordon Graham, “Your organization can’t do excellent external customer service until it’s doing excellent internal customer service.”).

Now, back to Cooper’s piece.  If CEOs are seeing some really positive benefits from using social media and blogging…why wouldn’t that work for a fire chief?  After all, aren’t they the CEO for their organization? Take a look at this table from Cooper’s post:

Source: Smith, Cooper. CEOs Who Are Active On Social Media Boost Employee Morale And Their Company’s Image. BusinessInsider.com (Click on image to enlarge)

Seems like it should work, shouldn’t it?  What do you think?