Out with the old, in with the new! That cliché is often used to express the transition between Dec. 31 and Jan. 1 of each calendar year, with the implication that old things must be bad and new things must be good. However, that sweeping generality tends to ignore two complementary facts: Sometimes old things have been around a while because they function appropriately, and sometimes new things fail under pressure.

The same phenomenon of sweeping the house clean also occurs when a new individual takes over an organization during a change of leadership. We all have seen it happen at the national level in the political arena, and we also have seen it happen at the state level in both political and bureaucratic organizations. Moreover, we have seen it happen at the local level with the change of a city manager or a fire chief. Obviously clean sweeps must do something because they've been taking place for so many decades.

However, there also may be a dark secret lurking within that phenomenon. Could a revolving-door leadership policy that advocates getting rid of the old and replacing it with something new be what causes some organizations to remain mediocre? When organizations establish change as their baseline, they may be compromising with an illusion of advancement instead of achieving excellence. Of course, many people will choose sides in this issue of depending on whether they're members of the old guard or if they're new leaders trying to right wrongs that they have perceived in the past.

Clean sweeps have an interesting implication for the demographics of today's fire service. I bet you that many of you have had conversations in the recent past about the fire service “brain drain.” My explanation of the brain drain is that we're sweeping out our experienced and knowledgeable people and replacing them with others who may lack experience and wisdom. On the other hand, these new leaders look at this opportunity as a way of increasing their financial rewards for being a part of our profession — they can't wait to get their hands on the reins to run organizations. Which one of these two perspectives is correct?

Here's an observation that you might have a hard time grasping: Both are right! That's right, sometimes it's a good idea to replace individuals at the upper end of an organization with a succeeding generation for the specific purpose of restoring energy. That's right, it's also appropriate to keep senior and well-informed individuals in place long after they've reached a certain tenured age because they provide stability and depth. Is it possible for these two ideas to exist in harmony?

My answer is that it depends, but what does it depend on? The first factor to look at is the concept of balance as opposed to extremes. Organizations that devote a great deal of time, effort and energy into pushing people off the top to set up people at the bottom do so at the risk of losing institutional memory. Institutional memory isn't what's found in the file cabinets but rather what's within the memories of an organization's more-experienced and senior personnel.

However, this system doesn't work very well when individuals at the upper end have decided to preserve the status quo. The responsibility of being a wise and experienced person at the top of an organization comes with a responsibility to keep the organization viable. You can't rest on past laurels, sitting around waiting for someone to do all of the heavy lifting while you just comment on it.

The other side of this coin is that there are times in an organization when you must put younger people in positions of power by the sheer force of their energy and focus on the future. That is really what succession planning is all about. Of course, you don't promote people into positions of authority merely because they are energized but rather because they have the ability to come up with new ideas and ways of achieving them.

Firefighting is a young person's profession while managing a fire department is an old person's profession. Now before some of you fire chiefs get upset by the word “old,” let me be more definitive. What I'm saying is that the person providing management and leadership in a fire service organization has to be more mature than the organization itself. Maturity often is expressed in years of life, but in fact maturity is an expression of attitude and behavior.

A current trend in the fire service is to do everything we can to reduce the number of years a person has to serve before being able to retire. I'm not even going to discuss any specific formula that may be at play, but I would like to express concern. More and more we're compressing the development process and career lifetime of chief officers into such a narrow spectrum that the fire service is going to have a revolving door in the near future.

For numerous years, it has been customary for a career in the military to last about 20 years or more. A person could enter as a second lieutenant when they are 19 years old and still be eligible for retirement as a lieutenant colonel at about age 45. There's a real good reason for that early retirement. Military combat is a physically demanding job, and it's very common for a colonel in an infantry outfit to have to share in the same physical abuse as combat infantry.

We tend to think of the fire service as being somewhat paramilitary, so the idea of a 20- to 30-year career makes a lot of sense if all of it is spent in the firehouse. Of course, not all of what goes on in managing a fire department occurs at the fire station or at incident scenes. In some cases it occurs at city hall or the state capital. It may even occur at a very high level of a national government. Do you see the problem? There's a disconnect between a person staying in service for only 20 years and having a powerful and influential group of leaders at the national level of the fire service.

So why are our elder statesmen leaving? There are many fire departments struggling intensely with staffing cuts that are driven by double-digit funding gaps. You can't resolve these problems by decapitating the fire service — removing more-senior people merely because they have reached a premature retirement age. In the military, you'll notice that it's the generals who stay around long after their “forced retirement dates” who wield the most power. Those white-haired or bald individuals who know how to use many different channels of communication are the ones who best protect the military's interests. We need people like that in the fire service.

Those elder statesmen of the fire service are also leaving due to stress. As I travel around the country talking to fire chiefs, many say that they can't wait to get out of their top-level jobs because they're just sick and tired of being under pressure all of the time. While this is a problem that we must overcome, I would note that the ones who do stick around and deal with that stress obtain a depth of competence in themselves that only comes through experience.

Let's take a step back and look at what's happening to the demographics of our country and, subsequently, the fire service. Who are these people currently running the majority of fire departments? They're between the ages of 45 and 65, and they're part of a balloon generation that isn't being followed by another of comparable size or depth. A city manager recently told me that a significant number of his organization's upper- and mid-level managers were moving up and out of the organization, but nobody was arriving on the doorstep from the bottom to pick up those jobs.

Now, I don't want just to identify a problem; I also want to promote some sort of a solution. What I would like to suggest is that we consider three things:

1. Honor our history

   We shouldn't allow the history of the fire service and local departments to evaporate. We should make conscious efforts to work with the older members of our organization, dinosaurs though some may be, by keeping an accurate record of those individuals' contributions and achievements.

2. Preserve institutional memory

   Those individuals who aspire for upward mobility in the fire service and want to take over top-level jobs should preserve institutional memory rather than disrespect it. It may seem like an over simplification but it isn't. I can't tell you the number of times that I have watched individuals take over from another person and totally ignore the guidance and wisdom that was contained in that job. In my opinion the idea of a maturing individual is someone who can build from something without having to tear it down in the first place.

3. Balance instead of choosing sides

   Organizations must constantly strive to balance tradition and change rather than choosing either side as a comfort zone. The challenge here is to know the difference between preserving a tradition and engaging in habitual behavior. Furthermore, it's important for us to distinguish between a change that is actually needed versus a change for change's sake.

In actuality, many fire departments are going to follow these steps anyway. However, I wanted to raise awareness about this problem without denigrating many of the fundamental reasons we are as strong as we are today. “Out with the old” implies that the old wasn't good enough. “In with the new” implies that it must be better because it is unblemished. Nothing could be more inaccurate than either one of those crusty clichés.

As chief officers in fire departments who are confronted with advocating and/or implementing the values within an organization, if we can maintain a balance between respecting the past and advocating the future, I think we will all be better off.

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A 40-year veteran of the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the state fire marshal 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.