The leadership environment in itself is made
up of the leader, the people, the situation and the consequences. And so what comes to
my mind when I think about that is the people. The idea that it’s not about me, it’s
about the people. It’s about understanding that the people that work for me are my greatest
assets and the greatest value at risk. And so that really sets the stage for me to start
thinking of that leadership environment. Leadership comes into play on the fireline
in many ways. First you have to recognize the dynamic situation that you are working
in and the fire environment is extremely dynamic and the individuals that are working on that
fireline are just as dynamic and diverse. The fuels, weather, topography, and all the
factors that are associated with those three things. Fire behavior itself, operational
objectives, priorities that are shifting. You have friction that exists in the environment,
frictions at force that make simple things difficult, and difficult things seemingly
impossible. Uncertainty, what’s known versus unknown in the environment to help base those
decisions on. You have operational tempo decision space, the fluidity, how are things moving
in an incredibly dynamic environment. Understanding the situation, the environment, and making
sense of that is critical in the success of all those different arenas.
10 years ago on a Tuesday morning I conducted a parachute jump at Fort Bragg in North Carolina,
It was a routine training jump like many I many more I had done since I became a Paratrooper 27 years
before. We went down to the air field early because this is the army and you always go
early. You do some routine refresher training and then you go to put on your parachute then
you sit down and you wait a little while because this is the army. Then you load the aircraft
and then you stand up and you get on and you kind of load the lumber to the aircraft like
this in the line of people and you sit down on canvas seats of either side of the aircraft.
Then you wait a little bit longer because this is the air force teaching the army how
to wait. Then you take off and its painful enough now and I think it’s designed this
way, it’s painful enough you want to jump. You don’t really want to jump but you want
out. The jumpmasters start to check the door, and then when it’s time to go, jumpmaster
goes go. The first guy goes and you’re just in line and you kind of lumber to the door.
Jump is a misnomer, you fall. Now you prepare for the inevitable, you are going to hit the
ground. You cannot delay that much. Then you prepare to a parachute landing fall. Now the
army teaches you to do five points of performance. The toes of your feet, your calves, your thighs,
your buttocks, your push up muscles. It’s this elegant little land, twist and roll,
and that’s not going to hurt. In thirty some years of jumping I never did one. I always
landed like a watermelon out of the third floor window. And I would look around and
I’d see another paratrooper, a young guy or girl that would be picking up their equipment.
They would be doing everything that we had taught them, and I realized that if they had
to go into combat they would do what we had taught them and they would follow leaders
and I realized that if they came out of combat, it was because we led them well. And I was
hooked again on the importance of what I did. So now I do that Tuesday morning jump and
it’s not any jump, it was September 11, 2001, and when we took off from the airfield
America was at peace, when we landed on the drop zone everything had changed. And what
we thought about the possibility of those young soldiers going into combat as being
theoretical was now very very real and leadership seemed important.
Duty, Respect, Integrity Our basic principles are duty, respect and
integrity. Within those three principles the first one is duty and that is really to our
mission. We talk about being proficient at your job. We talk about making sound and timely
decisions and decision making under time critical situations under stress with life and death
consequences are significant. So we put a lot of value in being an expert in your field
which leads into that second one which is respect. For us when we talk about respect,
we talk about taking care of our employees. Looking out for their wellbeing. Investing
into their development in the future. We talk in many principles such as moral courage,
the ability to do the right thing because it’s the right reasons. Many of those decisions
or having the moral courage to make the appropriate decisions opposed to the easy decisions is
not one that is easily done. The third principle is integrity. Really what we are talking about
is developing yourself, by taking that intro perspective to look as you as a leader, knowing
yourself and what your flaws are. Seeking improvement on those things. Knowing how you
as a leader interact and what the consequences are on that leadership environment which you
operate or which you influence. The wildland fire community adopted duty,
respect and integrity. In making sense of those to me it really starts individually because
they can sure as heck just be words, unless you make them something to you. You have to
make them real to yourself in order to be able to communicate them to others.
Mentors I was raised with traditional stories of leadership,
Robert E Lee, John Muford at Gettysburg. And I also was raised with personal examples of
leadership. This was my father in Vietnam. And I was raised to believe that soldiers
were strong and wise and brave and faithful, they did not lie, cheat, steal or abandon
their comrades and I still believe real leaders are like that.
Couple of things that stand out to me from what I learned from leaders that I worked for, one
that really stands out is that we can contribute. We could, we had ideas that we could expand
upon, we could contribute to the greater good, we could come up with and develop training
and we were only really limited by our imagination, our will to do it. The second thing that stands
out is the values and actions that I was able to observe from those individuals; I was able
to see it and what that meant to me. The sense of duty, to drive, to commit to developing yourself
to learning to becoming a student, to do the right things with integrity to seek and try
to look internally and evaluate yourself and see if you are doing the right things. Ask
yourself those questions, the respect and caring and looking out for the people that
work for you. Leader’s Intent
The ability for a leader to provide good clear intent upfront – what we call commanders
intent or leader’s intent. And we typically will put that in context of task, purpose
and end state when that fog of war sets in that our leaders know how to navigate, we
know what the end state is we know where we need to be, we know why we need to be there.
We know what our task is so when that immediate supervisor or leader is not there, the intent
is at least clear and they know to navigate toward that final end point or desired outcome.
The task is usually pretty intuitive; sometimes the end state is pretty intuitive as well.
The purpose is the one that I think requires the most thought to be able to communicate the
why. Why are we doing what we are doing? The end state is you can start painting that picture
of what it should look like by the end. Digital Leadership
When 9/11 came, 46 year old Brigadier General McCrystal, sees a whole new world. First
the things that are obvious that you are familiar with, the environment change, the speed, the
scrutiny, the sensitivity of everything now is so fast, sometimes it evolves faster than people
will have time to really reflect on it. But everything we do is in a different context.
More importantly the force that I led was spread over more than 20 countries, and instead of
trying to get all the key leaders for a decision together in a single room and look
them in the eye and build their confidence and get trust from them, I am now leading
a force that is disbursed and I've got to use other techniques. I've got to use video teleconferences,
I've got to use chat, I've got to use email, I've got to use phone calls, I've got to use everything
I can, not just for communication, but for leadership. A 22 year individual operating
alone thousands of miles from me has got to communicate to me with confidence, and I have
to have trust in them and vice versa and I also have to build their faith. And that’s
a new kind of leadership for me. We had one operation where we had to coordinate it from
multiple locations, an emerging opportunity came, but didn’t have time to get everyone
together. So we had to get complex intelligence together, we had to line up the ability to
act, it was sensitive we had to go up the chain of command, convince them this was the
right thing to do and do all this on an electronic medium. We failed. The mission didn’t work.
And so now what we had to do, is I had to reach out try to rebuild the trust of that
force, rebuild their confidence, me in them and them in me, and our seniors in us as
a force, all without the ability to put a hand on the shoulder. Entirely new requirement.
The technological advances are pretty amazing. Where we have come in such a short amount
of time, the capabilities of cell phones, tablets and all this information, all this
data is out there available to help to pass and share that information and turn those unknowns into knowns in some capacity. But those technological
advances can also be points of friction as well.
We have a tendency to rely on those technology advancements and in some cases we reduce the
value of human factors that are associated with decision making. The individuals that
are on the fireline, that they can touch, feel, see, hear in many cases, many of our
firefighters we know something’s different we just can’t tell you exactly what it is.
We are relying on that gut instinct. We rely on the subconscious messages from time to
time that say there is something here that I am not liking, and when that hair stands
up on the back of your neck. Technology cannot replace those decisions. Resilience
There are a lot of definitions of resilience, but I would quantify resilience as the ability
to respond to the negative things that occur. In terms of ecosystems it’s really
that ability to self-heal, and so for organizations I would also say that is the same thing, the
ability to continue moving forward and not to succumb to those adverse effects that occur.
Within the wildland fire arena resilient teams are so critical, because I can’t think of
a day in my career, that when I started the day with a plan that at the end of the day
I said wow that went exactly as planned, and so the ability to respond and adapt to those
factors that come in that are unforeseen or even unexpected. The ability to respond to
those and continue moving forward and maintain the same operational tempo is critical.
People & Generations Also the people have changed. You probably
thought that I force that I led was all steely eyed commanders, big knuckle fists, carrying
exotic weapons. In reality much of the force I led looked exactly like you. It was men,
women, young, old, not just from military, from different organizations, many of them detailed
to us just from a handshake. And so instead of giving orders, you’re now building consensus,
building a sense of shared purpose. Probably the biggest change was understanding the generational
difference; the ages had changed so much. I went down to be with a ranger platoon, an
operation in Afghanistan. We talked about the operation, and then at the end I did what
I often do with a force like that I asked, where were you on 9/11. And one young ranger in the back,
his hair is tussled and his face is red and windblown from being in combat in the cold
afghan wind, he says sir I was in the sixth grade. And it reminded me that we are operating
a force that must have shared purpose , shared consciousness, and yet he has different experiences,
many cases a different vocabulary , a completely different set of skill sets in terms of digital
media, then I do and to many of the other senior leaders. And yet we need to have that
shared sense. It also produces something in which I call an inversion of expertise because
we had so many changes at the lower levels in technology and tactics and what not, that
suddenly the things that we grew up doing wasn’t what the force was doing any more.
So how does a leader stay credible and legitimate when they haven’t done what the people you
are leading are doing. It’s a brand new leadership challenge that forced me to become
a lot more transparent, a lot more willing to listen, a lot more willing to be [inaudible], and yet again you’re not all in one room.
Those galvanizing events of the wildland fire community. Those long before my time and those
that have been within my career as a fire professional. South Canyon as an example.
In 2014 this is the twentieth anniversary of that event and for myself as a young hotshot
crewmember at the time, hotshots and smokejumpers died on the hill that day, that was a huge
event for us and that was a defining moment in many of our careers. And now with the twentieth
anniversary of South Canyon occurring in 2014 this year, we have firefighters that weren’t
born, when that event was such a defining moment for us. And unfortunately with the
events that occurred in 2013 with the fatalities on the Yarnell Hill fire. Those firefighters
that were lost are now that galvanizing event for the next generation of firefighters. And
so for us as leaders in the wildland fire world, that is a constant challenge of trying
to relate with our generational differences, the ability to communicate with an individual
from one generation versus the other generation. The mindset or the motivations that may drive
one individual versus another and just simply how they process information is different.
The South Canyon example, 20 years from South Canyon. You know the thing that stands out
in my mind with that is where we were before and where we are today. We got to see this
pretty significant transformation with leadership curriculum to leading in the wildland fire
service, leadership blog, leadership webpage tools, staff rides, sand tables, after action
reviews. None of these existed in our world prior to that. As we got farther away from
that, it’s the normal, it always was. IRPG, always was for the generations as they come
in. And so to see that come about, and I remember the IRPG when it first came out , and how
it was this so much smaller than the fireline handbook, and it fit in your shirt pocket
and it had a leadership element into it. The leadership curriculum has always been kind
of a grass roots movement. South Canyon inspired my generation to move forward and to drive
the leadership curriculum and develop tools. It will be interesting to see what the generations
to come does with Yarnell. Eyes Forward
Having friends who uh lost their lives on the Yarnell Hill fire in 2013, I worry that
we will continue to rely on technology and push more technological advancements as opposed
to just focusing on the decision making that occurs. Recognizing those human factors and
pressures that occur and are placed upon all of our leaders at all levels of the organization,
and with very short decision space taking in thousands of variables and just because
we do things and get away with it, a thousand times does not mean the thousand and first
time we are going to get away with it. And recognizing that very good leaders, excellent
leaders, can still make bad decisions, and that’s not to say that failure is desirable
but it’s acceptable recognizing that in that pathway moving through any individuals
career or just in the leadership position that not all decisions will have an optimal
outcome. Even our best leaders have a little scuffed paint from time to time as they navigate that complex
and windy road to those areas where we put them on the pedestal but all leaders have
had challenges and tried things and failed along the process, but that failure is recognized
and moved on from. And then finally with innovation, the environment that encourages innovation
and encourages complex problem solving and that ability to look for new ways of doing
business. One of the quotes that I will be paraphrasing that is what Einstein once said
“we cannot solve our problems utilizing the same thinking we did when we created them”.
There is always obstacles, budget, training, nominations, budget cuts, travel cap, the
stuff that is always going to be there in some way or another. I think the future is wide
open and the generations that are coming up are going to be the ones that really drive
that. What is the next evolution, how do we train people differently now, then what we have
got concurrently. So what Yarnell might mean to this generation is where do we go from
here. Last point I just want to make that is that
we provide all the resources, we can make sure they are all coordinated, but as what
I just told these firefighters what we can do is to provide them with courage and determination
and the professionalism, a heart that they show when they are out there battling these
fires. I came to believe that a leader isn't good because
they are right; they are good because they are willing to learn and to trust. This isn’t
easy stuff. It’s not like that electronic abs machine where 15 minutes a month you get
washboard abs. And it isn’t always fair. You can get knocked down and it hurts and
it leaves scars, but if you are a leader, the people you counted on will help you out.
And if you’re a leader the people who count on you need you on your feet. Thank you!
