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!