I am a new company officer …
Let me start over: I am an old company officer with …
Let’s try again: I am a company officer who has more than 14 years’ experience on the job and more than seven years in the seat but am newly assigned to the company in which I reside.
If this sounds familiar to you, then we probably are similar in other ways: We were raised in the fire service, where being an officer meant that you paid your dues for 10-plus years as a “back man.” If you decided to, you promoted to engineer, and several years later, you became an officer who was near retirement, but you’ve been there and done that. You know well the area to which you are assigned and the guys with whom you work. That said, this isn’t the fire service that breeds fire officers who currently occupy seats on fire apparatus, myself included.
A concerning conversation
A “new generation” of firefighters and fire officers isn’t an issue that rose overnight.
Attend any weekend firefighter school and you more than likely will hear most mid-level supervisors complain about “the new generation.” The common complaints of these lieutenants and captains are, “We don’t know how to talk to them” and “They don’t know how to conduct the simplest tasks.”
These remarks fell by the wayside for me when I attended such a weekend event recently, because I typically push through to get to the base knowledge. After all, this wasn’t affecting me, and I didn’t want to get dragged down into the negativity.
Flash forward a few weeks to my current assignment. My engineer and I were doing preventive maintenance on our apparatus. The station phone rang. I popped up and looked at the probationary firefighter on our sister company to get the phone. After staring at me, for what appeared to be to size me up, he informed me that I should get the phone because I was “the second newest on the shift.” I answered with a simple “OK” and left my crew to give the probationary firefighter words of advice.
At first glance, one could believe that this would have been the conversation of concern that inspired me to write this article, but the inspiration came a full day later when I received a text message from the probationary firefighter, to ask whether I was mad, to apologize and to explain that he didn’t understand that what he did was wrong. At that moment, I realized the disservice that he was dealt and the changes that must be made in the way that we serve the new generation of firefighters.
Customer service
A quality organization exists when all employees share the same vision. Many civilians are becoming firefighters today for the same reasons that civilians became firefighters 100 years ago: They want to serve their community, ride around on big trucks and have an exciting job.
Unfortunately, firefighting isn’t an organization. The department is an organization.
We do an intensely poor job of getting our newest generation of employees bought in to our vision. Throughout their school career, recreational sports and extracurricular activities, these people were made to believe that they can be anything that they want to be by just working hard. Valid descriptions of how to achieve goals and of the sure failures and hardships along the way likely were omitted.
Our newest generation expects the customer service of a hotel bellhop at the cost of a complimentary valet.
They must be shown where the organization started, where it is currently, where it’s going in the short and long terms and where we would like to see them in the mix. We must replace instant gratification with instant ownership.
Communication
For the life of me, I couldn’t get over the fact that this firefighter sent me a text message over a problem at the firehouse. It puzzled me at first, and then it became more and more clear.
This firefighter finished high school virtually. He completed his initial interview with the department virtually. He only knew how to solve problems—you guessed it—virtually. How could I hold him accountable for staying inside of his comfort zone of communication? Furthermore, how could I solve this organizational puzzle?
The fact is, it wasn’t a problem. It simply was a young man adapting to his generational surroundings.
I texted the firefighter back, explaining that, yes, I initially was angry with the situation but also that I did him a serious disservice by not explaining why I was angry. I used the path of communication that he felt most comfortable with—texting—and laid out the problem with the situation: the way that we have a rank structure and why seniority in the fire service matters.
Then I gave him time to speak. I let him vent to me about how he didn’t understand until that very moment that anything was wrong and that everything would be fine now.
This firefighter and I now have a bond that never will be broken, because we found a way to complete the communication loop: encode, send, receive, decode, return.
It’s our duty as fire officers—and firefighters who have been around—to find the communication methods that are most effective for all of our firefighters, not just the ones who are inside of our generational surrounding.
For anyone wondering, this firefighter and I now sit around the kitchen table and have some of the best conversations that I ever were a part of in the firehouse.
