A grizzled, old veteran told me that your first day as a battalion chief is a defining moment in your career. That day is when you make your first impression on your crew. It’s the culmination of years of study and preparation.
On my first day as battalion chief, I visited every fire station in my battalion, as we all should on that first day. During those visits, I gave “The Speech.” My audience ran the gamut from rookies to seasoned veterans who could smell BS a mile away. It was, indeed, a pivotal moment in my career.
“The Speech” is one of the better traditions in the fire service. There is an implied expectation that you share information about yourself, provide expectations for your crew, and give your view of yourself as their boss and the fire chief’s representative. In that speech, we express our “Command Philosophy.” A command philosophy is who you strive to be as a leader and the methods that you will employ to reach those goals. The speech and the philosophy should accomplish two goals: Define who we are and who we want our subordinates to become.
Prepare the troops
A command philosophy is utilized by military officers in all branches, at all levels. It isn’t unheard of for noncommissioned officers to do the same. In 2020, the website dodreads.com published an article on the subject called, “The Guide to Military Commander’s Philosophy + 24 Examples,” by John Laney. Laney pinpoints the crux of the command philosophy when he writes, “It must be the one document that answers the one thousand other questions.” The fire service mirrors the military in so many ways. We have companies, battalions and divisions, and we adhere to strict discipline.
As much as you might want to be, you won’t be there always for your subordinates. They will face situations that prevent them from seeking your direct input. At emergency incidents and on the fireground, they will face the unknown, and we rightly expect them to respond. Those moments are why you must develop and share a command philosophy. Challenges come hard and fast in the emergency environment, and in split seconds, safe and effective decisions are difficult, at best, to make. The command philosophy provides company officers with the unspoken guidance that the crews need. It opens the door to you as a leader and to your core beliefs.
Incident management also is a type of personnel management. Management isn’t and can’t be micromanagement. Chief officers who attempt to address every possible contingency are fooling themselves and setting their subordinates up for failure. Company officers make a lot of money to make decisions. There is an inference that they garnered the requisite skills and experience throughout their career to do so. Our job, as chief officers, is to foster that and provide the tools for them to build on those skills and experience. We want them to make good decisions. We want to empower them. Micromanagement is a recipe for disaster.
Put it in writing
The problem with “The Speech” is that our target audience usually forgets most of what we say in about five minutes. So, how do we get them to remember? Easy. Put it down on paper.
Force yourself to sit in front of a blank sheet of paper. Limit yourself to one page. The average word count for a page is 250–500 words. You have no choice but to squeeze everything that you believe into this small space.
Furthermore, do you want to grow as a leader? Put yourself out there for all to see. This one page will define you and force you to align your actions with your words.
Why should you limit it to one page? Attempting this as an epic tome is folly. You’ll lose them after one page. How many of us have read or written policy documents that stretch on and on? One example I recall is a document on a specific type of common hazard that’s faced by firefighters. It was 43 pages! Any bets on how many people, other than those who study for promotion, actually read that document?
Your command philosophy must be purposefully compact so as not to be a burdensome laundry list of dos and don’ts. If you can’t say it on one page, you won’t be able to say it in five.
Your command philosophy must build the necessary trust between you and your subordinates. That trust is sacred. It’s the bond that determines your success or failure as a leader. Trust is more than you having their back and vice-versa. Trust is each of you knowing that the other will do the right thing. That trust is the coin-of-the-realm in our world. Your expressed standards and expectations in the command philosophy are the bridge to that trust.
As fire service veterans, we’ve all given “The Speech,” and we’ve all heard it. If you haven’t given it as a leader, you must. Some speeches are memorable, most aren’t. Your command philosophy is that speech and then sharing that speech on paper. Doing it right will help your subordinates develop into the leaders of tomorrow. The fire service faces daunting challenges over the next few years. The command philosophy is one way to navigate some of those challenges and leave it better than we found it.
Make it count.
Jim Ruiz
Jim Ruiz has been a member of the Los Angeles Fire Department for 34 years. During this time, he held the ranks of paramedic, firefighter/paramedic, captain and battalion chief. Ruiz worked in a variety of field and administrative assignments throughout his career. His current assignment is in the northwestern region of Los Angeles. Ruiz holds a Bachelor of Arts in liberal arts and a Master of Arts in theology.
