The Leadership Moment
On Tuesday, we concluded the IBTTA workshop on Incident Management, Safety and
Security in Denver. There were so many excellent speakers and moderators and so
many wonderful exchanges in the question and answer sessions, it’s impossible to
summarize the entire meeting in a small space. Instead, I offer a few of the observations
I shared with the assembled delegates at the conclusion of the meeting. Here goes…
On a blisteringly hot day in southern California, a team of professional firefighters
struggled to contain a blaze in a forested area that had burned out of control for several
days. In the process of scouting the best routes of attack and escape, several members
of the team became separated from their comrades. One small group consisted of the
team leader and two or three less experienced firefighters. All at once, they realized that
they would soon be engulfed in flames if they did not take immediate action. The less
experienced firefighters wanted to retreat; their leader urged them to stay with him. A
moment later, the less experienced fighters fled on foot to seek safety. Their leader took
the bold and unconventional step of entering the flames in order to save himself.
Striking a match, he threw it into the underbrush where it started to burn very rapidly.
Within seconds, a small circle of grass had burned completely and the leader
immediately jumped into the circle. Having removed the fuel from the path of the larger,
oncoming blaze, the leader fell to the ground and protected himself as best he could.
In the end, the quickly advancing blaze leapt over the spot where the leader lay and he
survived; all of his companions who departed perished in a wall of flames a short
distance away.
This story and eight others appear in a fascinating book called The Leadership Moment:
The story about the firefighters could be considered both a disaster and a triumph. It
was certainly a disaster because several team members perished in the fire. We learn in
the story that this particular leader and team had not worked together for very long. The
leader was also somewhat reticent about sharing his plans and thoughts with his
subordinates. This lack of experience working together, the less than adequate
communication skills, and the failure to develop a trusting relationship all contributed to
the death of the other firefighters.
On the other hand, you might consider the actions taken by the leader to be something
of a triumph. In a moment of grave crisis, he kept calm and invented a new way to
escape a quickly advancing wall of flame. His very elegant solution was literally to enter
the blaze before the deadly flames reached him. He drew upon years of experience
fighting fires to invent a completely novel solution, a solution that was both bold and
untested but also completely appropriate for the circumstances. He entered the fire to
escape it.
I hope that none of us ever has to confront an advancing wall of flame and be forced to
make a split-second decision about survival. But, on a daily basis, all of us do face
difficult choices and make decisions, well grounded in experience and intuition, that lead
to the survival or perhaps even the triumph of our organizations and the people we
serve. This is what the leadership moment is about. It’s about tapping into the wellspring
of experiences that reside in us and using experience, intuition and trained initiative to
create novel solutions to the incidents, challenges and crises we had never faced
before.
If there is one major takeaway that I draw from all of the presentations and tabletop
exercises during this meeting, it is the importance of collaboration, rehearsal and
TRUST. We heard about the importance of these attributes again and again.
Over the last two and a half days, we have together looked at many different tools,
techniques, strategies, and technologies to confront and solve incident management,
safety, and security challenges. The most effective of these tools seems to be TRUST.
It’s a simple tool to use once you own it, but usually it takes time to acquire it. It
demands time, patience, testing, and continual investments of goodwill and open-
mindedness. It’s not something that you can turn on at a moment’s notice. It is
something that requires the building up of strong relationships over time, relationships
that are nurtured by honesty, mutual respect, and deference to the needs and interests
of others. It’s hard. It’s hard to create trust, but it is probably one of the most important
investments of time and energy we can make to prepare to deal with the incidents we
face on our facilities.
-- Pat Jones
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