When firefighters become officers, they move from the watch desk to the office and from the jump seat to the cab. But the physical move is not the critical move; the mental and emotional moves are critical.

Firefighters can train in-house or through public and private sources. They can attend college-level courses in traditional or non-traditional settings. Firefighters can acquire experience through their own activities or by studying unusual incidents. They also can learn by watching officers engaged in both administrative and operational settings, learning to model the effective and avoid the ineffective.

The difficult phase of becoming an officer is the transition to leader and manager. It is more challenging when the transition is temporary, such as when a firefighter only fills in for an officer for a shift.

Fire officers should not solely be managers; it is a service business that involves people both in provision and oversight and on the receiving end of the services provided. Fire officers should not solely be leaders, which can contribute to anarchy if individual visions are not aligned with those of the organization. Fire officers must be both leaders and managers, but much of the fire service has focused too much on leadership and ignored management.

The focus on leadership in recent years might stem from an overemphasis on management in the years before, causing the pendulum to swing to the opposite end of the scale. This over-emphasis on leadership can create an environment characterized by leaders who can develop and sustain a followership, but who are leading in every direction. This is ineffective within an organization. To paraphrase songwriter Harry Nilsson, a directional arrow pointing in every direction is like no arrow at all. While most fire chiefs want to develop leaders at all levels of the organization, they expect that those subordinate leaders will work toward the chief's goals, not their own.

Excessive leadership is an over-reliance on personal values and vision, and even if positive in tone, can create lead employees to believe their views are unimportant or unheard. Employees who don't share leadership's view can feel marginalized. Extreme leadership may make the leader so focused on the direction he is heading that it causes him to forget the team is comprised of many people, each with differing personal values and capacities. This makes it more difficult to engage team members in organizational activities, which can hinder organizational success and lead to employee frustration and withdrawal.

If employees believe their views are rarely, if ever, considered, they often will stop providing feedback, which may be incorrectly perceived as buy-in by more-senior officials. Without member buy-in, their performance might become perfunctory, based on a feeling their jobs are viewed as unimportant. There is an old saying that “any job worth doing is worth doing well.” Management guru Ken Blanchard wrote that the opposite often is viewed as being just as true by marginalized employees, who believe “any job not worth doing is not worth doing well.”

Obviously, this is a concern to any organization. It is not that leadership is inherently negative, but if one leader provides all leadership, it may prevent subordinates from exercising significant leadership in any way, which can hinder their motivation.

Ironically, strong management has many of the same flaws as excessive leadership, but as with any scale, extreme behaviors at either end often share some similarities. An over-emphasis on process and structures can inhibit creativity, limiting employees's ability to excel. Excessive bureaucracy can inhibit organizational flexibility, slow decision-making, and lead to compromises where excellence is not achievable.

Organizations need rules and guidelines to provide consistency across all levels and, in the public safety arena, to ensure compliance with applicable safety and labor laws. These guidelines provide a framework for decision-making and help to align each organizational unit's efforts with the organization's values and mission.

The need for rules and guidelines becomes increasingly important as organizations become larger and more decentralized, which is clearly characteristic of the fire service with its numerous stations and unusual shift patterns. As the environment becomes more complex, leaders may have insufficient power to push their values to all players. Formal rules and guidelines take the place of chief officers when they aren't present. The conundrum for leaders is to find the balance.

While excessive rules are unacceptable, rules that are applied inconsistently might be worse. The first is analogous to recruiting and training the best basketball players in the world, only to glue their feet to the floor before the game starts. The second would be similar to changing the rules of the game every few minutes. This would cause player frustration that would lead them to under perform or walk off the floor in disgust. This would seem like insanity to the audience witnessing the confused, disjointed effort that led to failure, putting the organization in a poor light to the audience.

There must be a balance between leadership and management. The balancing point is in flux, dependent on circumstances, issues and parties involved in what is essentially an unstable, countervailing forces model, with each factor weighing in differently at different times. The leader-manager faces a tough problem. Ignoring it is harmful. Addressing it solely through stronger leadership is futile. Responding with an excessive managerial approach might lead to increased performance in the short-term, but not the full-fledged buy-in associated with excellence. Addressing it through differing forms of leadership and management is possible, but may be at odds with the leadership and managerial styles of the individual, making it a difficult path, especially for those new to the position.

When a firefighter becomes an officer, he or she must appreciate the differences between the new role and the old. The new officer is responsible not only for personal tasks and safety, but for that of the people being supervised. Their success is a group effort; failure may be the officer's alone. The new officer must recognize and communicate good performance and to correct or report unsatisfactory performance.

The new officer must apply positive and negative discipline in a just, equitable and consistent manner. Discipline can be defined as a developmental action taken to correct or reinforce performance. Negative discipline is associated with counseling, reprimands, suspensions and terminations. Positive discipline is associated with counseling, informal award programs, commendations, medals, and desirable assignments or projects. This is challenging when negative discipline is applied to a friend or former peer, leading to issues being ignored by immediate supervisors, or situations where higher-ranking officers have interjected themselves into the process to stop any negative discipline from occurring. It also has contributed to circumstances where positive discipline has been withheld because of pre-existing interpersonal conflict between members, which in many ways contributes to the organizational culture in a destructive manner.

The new officer also must be capable of taking command on an incident. This is not solely directed to the formal establishment of command, but the normative processes of establishing a command presence; creating, sustaining, maintaining and enforcing communications pathways; and coordinating activities of all crews until relieved by a superior. Good tactics are easy; good command may be challenging. On incident scenes, an officer must be prepared for the unexpected and plan on everything going wrong until things start to go well. However, it's important to remain rigidly flexible in the face of changing events. Dwight Eisenhower once said that plans were useless, but planning was invaluable.

The new officer also must maintain the correct focus. Transitional processes may be hindered by the traditions and culture of the fire service, both nationally and locally. While traditions are important in developing team identity and building morale, they can hamper performance improvements. Maintaining the status quo may lead to happier employees, but happy employees who prevent progress may harm the organization in the long run.

Poor communication can lead to an unclear understanding of a department's mission because it is open to individual interpretation. Organizations and groups work best when there is collective effort. This requires open and constant communications in all directions. Organizations and groups may be dysfunctional when they presume everyone shares the same values and perceptions. This is the antithesis of interpersonal dynamics and modern leadership theories, which focus on the importance of recognizing, engaging and leveraging differing perspectives and talents. The best judge of an open communications channel is the lowest ranking employee in the organization. If he doesn't feel free to share his thoughts, the communications channel is not completely free.

The new officer also must discuss issues and truly accept differing perspectives as valid. Try to strike a balance, but do not waver on basic organizational or human values. Agree to disagree, when possible. It may be harder than it sounds, but it is possible. The “skunk works” at Lockheed Martin, NASA in the 1960s, and special forces units like the British Special Air Service or the U.S. Navy SEALS often have achieved a constructive balance, contributing to the excellence of their performance in competitive, evolving, dangerous and complex environments.

Although the fire service is professional, things do go awry. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “There is nothing so monstrous that we cannot believe it of ourselves.” And Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” If you think these statements do not accurately represent the fire service, think again. Ask anyone who has been in the National Fire Academy's Command Post Pub about the nighttime story-telling after formal classes end. Regardless of the outrageous nature of any story told, it is immediately challenged by someone who responds with an anecdote from his or her department, which often is even more outrageous.

Chief Alan Brunacini said for years to “be nice,” but it may be better to follow Patrick Swayze's advice from Road House: “Be nice until it is time to not be nice.” Too many new officers are hesitant to confront others. There are times when an issue involves employee safety, dishonesty or theft, EEO issues, or some other equally egregious behavior that demands immediate confrontation. This does not suggest an intemperate, personal attack, but it does suggest that it is not the time to waffle between roles. At such times, officers are expected to stop the behavior and initiate some form of corrective action. In other words, if you are in command, command.

Lastly, new officers must appreciate that, while the company is the basic unit of fire service provision, it is only a component in a larger organizational, corporate, regional, professional and sociopolitical environment. Independent operations on the fireground, even if conducted in a company format, may be defined as freelancing if the operations are not within the overall vision of the incident commander. The same applies to administrative actions taken without considering the long-term consequences or ripple effects of decisions made contrary to existing policies, laws or verbal directives, or which challenge precedence created by the fire chief. A failure to consider these overlapping identities can hinder the operations of others now or in the future, cause conflict, create unreasonable expectations or inaccurate perceptions in partner organizations, all while simultaneously creating potential legal, ethical and moral liabilities for the employee, department, profession and locality.

The concept of the leader-manager is not new. It is an attempt to address the shortfalls of both leaders and managers, using the strength of the other. Leadership is important. Fire departments need a vision and someone to set the path. Members appreciate the need for someone to begin the work, engaging others in the efforts. Without leadership, the fire service might never progress unless compelled to by an external cause. Management is important. The fire service needs to plan. Fire commanders need to allocate and deploy resources effectively and monitor activities to ensure goals are being achieved in an effective and efficient manner. Without management, fire departments might easily waste scare resources, limiting their abilities to succeed.

The adage says, “Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right thing.” It is concise. It is simple. It makes a nice slogan, but should critical organizations be run based on something that would fit on a bumper sticker? In truth, the fire service needs both — in the same people. It needs firefighters to become leader-managers and officers who can lead a group, align actions with the organization, and use resources effectively and efficiently, while all the while attempting to engage employees in an open partnership focused on success, motivating them to higher levels of performance.

Obviously, each individual who has moved from the ranks of firefighter to officer has experienced a unique transition. If you discuss these transitions with people who have made them, successfully or not, you will find many commonalities between their experiences. Whatever the challenges they faced, whatever the actions they took, many likely would agree that the technical part of the transitional process was easy. The physical move was nothing. It was the mental and emotional transition between roles that made all the difference.

Thomas E. Poulin, ABD, MIFireE, is a doctoral candidate in public administration and urban policy and serves on the adjunct faculty of Nova Southeastern University, Old Dominion University and the National Fire Academy. He has been engaged in the fire service since 1977 and is employed as a battalion chief with a metro-sized fire department in southeast Virginia. He may be contacted at tpoulin@odu.edu.