When I began my career in the fire service 39 years ago, the comment heard most often by a new member of the fire service regarding leadership was simple and straight to the point: “If I want to hear your opinion about something, I'll give it to you.” While that comment may have made sense and worked well for the senior leadership of the fire service 50 years ago, it does not in today's fire service.

A fire chief of today has to address many issues, ranging from complex budgets and the impact of emergency medical services to planning for potential pandemics or the use of weapons of mass destruction. But one element of the fire service that remains paramount is that the front-line people still provide the services to our citizens. As fire service staffing changes from Baby Boomers to Generations X and Y, and on to Millennials, a fire chief's human resource skills will be as more essential than ever. We enjoy strong citizen support for the myriad of services we provide and the way we provide them, but if we want to continue to be held in high esteem by our citizens and members, the chiefs of tomorrow will have to continue to hone their human resource skills.

The complexity of governments over the last 50 years has forced all of us to expand our knowledge base. No longer is it sufficient to be just someone who knows how to put the wet stuff on the hot stuff. The chief must be someone who is politically astute and just as comfortable discussing the impact of the global economy on local businesses as the stack effect of smoke in a high-rise building. I have been very fortunate over the four decades of my fire service career to have been able to be around individuals who are the leaders in shaping the way fire service leaders think.

Recently, Fire Chief honored Alan Brunacini as the Career Fire Chief of the Year, an honor that he richly deserves. That recognition is a testament to the changes he has been able to make in fire service operations, in fire service leadership, and how we, as chiefs of today, view the profession.

Chief Brunacini was a part of a very influential group of people called “The Baggers.” They came to influence the fire service in so many ways. In addition to Chief Brunacini, there was Chief Ronny Coleman, Chief Charlie Rule and Chief Harry Diezel, just to name a few. They would sit around the table with their “brown bag” lunches discussing strategies, suggesting possibilities and sharing “outside-the-box” thinking about how to do a better job of leading the fire service.

They knew that to be successful the fire service had to take advantage of the tremendous creativity that firefighters possess. They worked to fuel the engines of innovation and made all of us change the way we think and act.

I've heard it said that necessity is the mother of invention, and over the past 50 years, those of us in positions of leadership in the fire service have had to reinvent ourselves several times. The necessity has been driven mainly by the economic realities that have faced the fire service. Events like those of the 1970s, such as the oil crisis and the end of the Vietnam War, or the early 1990s and the global diversification of the U.S. economy, have required innovation, creativity and people who have understood that “the times, they are a-changing.”

The individuals who served as chief officers in these years had to bring with them a passion for the job that would allow them to face those challenges and be able to adjust to the new demands of the quickening pace leading to the 21st century. Our work force today and the citizens we serve are better educated and better informed. They are no longer willing to accept “because I say so” as a reason to put their lives on the line or to spend their tax dollars. And the focus of leadership has had to shift from simply that of internal orientation to one that accommodates both internal and external customers — a major change for the leadership of the fire service. We have expanded our service delivery and improved our interaction with the community, and that has driven us into a continuous improvement cycle.

As we continue to look to the future, I know that the leadership that will follow today's chiefs will be those who have been raised in a customer-focused culture. But they will have to continue to scan the horizon to anticipate the new requirements of the fire service over the next 50 years.

If the past 50 years can be used as a benchmark, we have done a good job of meeting challenges. Now we must apply the lessons learned from the past to expand our analytical skills and better understand the community risks we face, internally aware of the needs of our changing work force and externally focused to adapt to new challenges facing our communities.