The bickering continues, and the shining star in the office, citing a stressful work environment, jumps ship for another agency.

Following a particularly tense after-action review, a crew boss decides to reconfigure the squads to redistribute experience. When he states his decision at morning briefing, one squad boss just grins, the others look shocked, and crew members are heard grumbling “what a bonehead.”

Hoping to improve morale, a fire chief adopts a more casual and comfortable department uniform. The department has to force both firefighters and officers to stop wearing their old uniforms, amid accusations that the chief is destroying the department's traditions. Morale declines and the chief's credibility suffers.

Sound familiar? People assigned to leadership positions face decisions like these every day, and despite good intentions, everybody screws up now and again. So how does a person avoid the pitfalls that trapped these leaders to become the most effective leader possible?

Fundamentally, each of these people lacked adequate situational awareness in the leadership environment. They misunderstood the situation, did not see what was truly there, tackled the wrong problem or pursued a bad strategy. In each case, the would-be leader tried to diagnose a problem from a single perspective while ignoring other vantage points, like sizing up a fire while standing at the engine. A too-narrow view of the situation led them to an oversimplified, one-size-fits-all approach to leadership. Unfortunately, when leaders lack situational awareness and don't know what to do, they fall back on what has worked for them before, even when that course of action is inappropriate for the circumstance at hand.

In the first two cases, prospective leaders tried to restructure their way out of problems caused by internal politics and human-resources issues. Unlike the line officer and the crew boss, the fire chief addressed what he perceived to be a human-resources problem, only to be surprised by negative response from his people. The fire chief failed to account for the importance of symbols in the organization.

Organizational learning research suggests that the ability to make sense of the complex and ambiguous work world depends on the mental models or “frames” applied to the task. Any situation can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and our point of view largely determines what we see and how we see it.

Consequently, to truly understand and influence events in their organizations, leaders should observe those events from as many angles as possible. When faced with a decision, effective leaders engage in multi-frame thinking, or the ability to reframe the situation to see and understand more and more, until they fully comprehend the circumstances at hand. The ability to reframe experience broadens and improves a leader's situational awareness.

The foundation of reframing is examining the same situation from multiple vantage points. For any given situation, one perspective may prove more helpful than others. However, to understand their organizations, leaders should evaluate issues, problems, decisions and organizational effectiveness using four frames described by Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal in their book Reframing Organizations.

The structural frame includes the rules, policies, procedures, formal relationships and the organizational chart of your outfit. Problems arise in this frame when the organization's structure does not fit its needs.

The human resources frame includes people's skills, attitudes, energy, commitment and relationships as fundamental resources of organizations. How we adapt organizations so that people get the job done while feeling good about what they are doing lies at the core of the human resources frame. Problems arise in this frame when the fit between the people and the organization is poor. When this happens, both the people and the organization suffer.

The political frame describes how different interests within organizations compete for power and resources, bargain, negotiate, compromise, and handle conflict. By acknowledging the political frame we recognize that organizations are networks of coalitions made up of many individuals and interest groups. Most important, decisions in this frame involve the distribution and exercise of power and the allocation of scarce resources. Problems arise when politics become distracting, unproductive or destructive and when organizations concentrate power in the wrong places.

The symbolic frame describes the organizational culture, rituals, ceremonies, symbols and heroes that help us make meaning of organizational events and activities. In the symbolic frame, people judge organizations primarily by their appearance. It's in this frame that organizations create the image that is expected of them, reassure their constituencies, and generate support for their missions. Symbols, rituals, ceremonies and other elements of organizational culture are critically important, even when they don't directly contribute to the activity of the organization. Problems arise when the organization's culture isn't well-aligned with the challenges the organization faces or the organization's symbols and customs lose meaning.

A practical approach to reframing is to examine the situation or the organization's effectiveness from each of these four frames, one frame at a time. For each frame leaders should ask:

• From this perspective, what is going on?
• What options does this viewpoint suggest?

By taking this approach, leaders in organizations can learn to use the four frames systematically and together as part of a comprehensive approach to improving their situation awareness in the leadership environment.

Mike DeGrosky is chief executive officer of the Guidance Group, a consulting firm specializing in the human and organizational aspects of the fire service. His interests include leadership, strategy, and bringing the concepts of learning organizations and high-reliability organizing alive in fire agencies. He is currently completing a master's degree in organizational leadership. He can be reached at info@guidancegroup.org.