Horatio Alger stories are not very well read these days. Back at the turn of the last century, this author popularized the concept that became labeled as the American success story. Alger, an American author who wrote approximately 135 dime novels, developed a theme best referred to as the rags-to-riches story. Alger's stories always centered on some young man coming in from the country and being confronted with the difficulties of city life. The characters responded to their challenges and opportunities with courage, conviction and capability. Inevitably, Alger's heroes emerged victorious.

When you read those novels today, they sound incredibly naïve, if not outright simplistic. Yet, most every young person who enters some career orientation hopes to become a success sooner or later. In the case of the firefighter, it almost always begins with getting through probation. Young people entering the fire service must prove to us that they have the right stuff or we won't even allow them to go to the second step. There is no question in my mind that if Horatio Alger was participating in a recruit academy today he probably would have approached his meeting our standard with the same degree of focus on values and personal qualities that he wrote about in his books.

And Alger's fictional characters can help us to examine a characteristic of our selection process. Someone once told me that we hire every firefighter ultimately to be the chief. I wonder if that is truly correct today. The next time you are at a recruit academy graduation, look up and down the line and ask yourself how many of these individuals still will be as highly motivated and as committed to their profession as they are the day they graduate from the recruit academy.

If you came back on the Monday morning following the graduation and asked each individual how inspired he or she was, chances are you would receive the same enthusiasm you had seen the previous Friday. But what happens when you come back five years later? What happens when you come back 15 years later?

Alger's sense that people will remain courageous and convicted throughout their entire lifetime suffers a little bit in the translation when it comes to people's attitudes towards their lives and their profession. How great is the possibility that the young person who emerges as the chief of your rookie academy also will emerge as chief of the department sooner or later?

These questions are problematic because most of the time, when we hire firefighters, we are not thinking of them in terms of lifetime achievement. We are interested in whether or not they can graduate and be able to perform the job in the fire station the day they go to work.

In the past, we have more or less allowed the group members to sort themselves out, and we still are doing that today. The industry is not assessing individuals based on their long-term promotability beyond considering their strengths and weaknesses as they go through entry-level training. The term deep selection means using promotability as part of the assessment.

Almost immediately some will react negatively to the concept of deep selection because it smacks of favoritism. However, deep selection doesn't mean giving someone special favors. It means looking at an individual's potential and evaluating how well that potential is brought to the forefront as he or she moves through the ranks. This process places an almost constant assessment on how well these people maintain themselves and improve over time.

But who conducts this deep selection? The higher up in the organization that it is attempted, the more likely it is going to be perceived as favoritism. I like to think of it as being a function of a first-level supervisor. In my career, it was these fire officers who worked very hard to keep me motivated and focused on elements of my career.

Our current competent officers are the best people to help identify future officers. If an organization uses the deep selection process it should start to look at recruit firefighters as soon as they come out of the academy and find ways of keeping that positive attitude and development of their skills on the front burner.

Believe it or not, the one technique that works best with deep selection is strong use of the performance-review processes. Those individuals who have potential are expected to live up to a high standard. Those individuals who have potential and refuse to live up to it may survive and have meaningful careers, but might never make a significant contribution to the organization.

In examining the characteristics we are looking for, we shouldn't spend too much time on reviewing their firefighting skills alone. Instead, we should take a clue from Alger's novels and start looking for sturdier character traits that have nothing to do with the profession but an awful lot to with who a person is as a human being. Traits such as honesty, courage, commitment to closure, integrity and willingness to take responsibility are all important indicators in assessing the long-term potential of a human being.

The second lesson we can take from Alger's stories is that adversity is a means of strengthening all of these traits. Having it easy is not a sign that a person will succeed. To the contrary, a little bit of adversity is an important part of bringing out someone's best personality traits.

The first two years a company officer is on the job may have more influence of their long-term success than any other stage of his or her career. Most individuals will remain on their best behavior during their probationary period just to pass the magic mark that allows them permanent status. The next year it is much more critical. This is when we get an opportunity to observe the real person. I am not suggesting that most people necessarily withhold their true character and try to deceive the fire service, but you cannot tell me that there isn't a little bit of behavior control until probation is over. I have seen way too many cases of it in my own career to deny its existence.

When a company officer has that person for the second year, they have the opportunity to really find out what his or her character is all about. It is not just a case of giving them more work to do. It is not just a case of hoping that you will get a lot of calls to go on so you can test them under stress. It is a case of the officers working to keep that person focused on the development of their own capacity to perform at the next higher level.

In Alger's stories the hero always overcame everything. Hundreds of times he told the same story over and over again with very subtle if not parallel outcomes of each of his stories. In a sense we have a similar need in the fire service. We don't need just one success story; we need thousands of success stories. We need to involve a sufficient number of leaders in the fire service to keep our profession moving forward as part of the succession-planning process. In an organization there might be numerous individuals who are deep selected at any one point in time.

If someone happened to focus on you and help you prepare for the opportunities that have benefited you and you family, then you should repeat it for the benefit of the next generation. If it didn't happen to you, let your observations now be among the first in building a new generation of fire officers that are stronger than we have had in the past. Look hard - they are out there.

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With more than 40 years in the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.