For many occupations, the minute you walk out the door to go home your duty is terminated. You're not expected to come back to deal with a minor after-hours crisis. If you leave town on vacation you may call in, but no matter what happens at the office or plant, no one will ask you to return home.

Not so for the fire chief. We joke that our badges are pinned to our pajamas, but in fact the fire chief is on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, no matter where he or she is. For example, in my more than 35 years of attending workshops and conferences around the country, I have witnessed more than one chief officer paged with that all-important message, “Call headquarters.”

In almost every case, that message is the result of one of two things happening: A major calamity has struck the community, or a major administrative crisis has occurred. I hesitate to list examples for fear that some of you would recognize yourselves from conversations we've had. Let it suffice to say that there are many reasons why fire chiefs can have their leashes snapped hard when they're a long way from home.

When you receive such a message from your staff, you have two choices. You can drop everything that you're doing and return home instantly, or you can examine the crisis thoroughly to determine whether your timely return is going to make a difference at all.

Let's examine dropping everything to return home. There are times when you should and times when you shouldn't, but the choice isn't as clear-cut as it might be if you received a notice that an alarm is going on in your community while you were at the office. You could be hundreds, even thousands of miles away from the office when an event occurs.

I've heard of people, literally out of sight of an emergency, who have tried to establish the incident command from a hotel room. The implied message to the fire department's members is that they can't cope with an emergency and haven't made any appropriate decisions. Other chiefs have rushed madly home, engaging in non-stop chatter on the cell phone. Unfortunately, they were actually disruptive to the handling of the event occurring back on the home turf.

But what if you really are needed? The decision to rush home can take you clear out of the loop. If you don't have a cell phone or have to take an airplane flight where you can't use your phone, you then become incommunicado. You're out of touch when your department needs your input.

The most important reason to return home when an emergency is under way should be your concern for how the emergency is being handled by those on site. Instead of immediately dropping everything and returning home, it's far more calming and supportive to ask what has occurred to date, who the incident commander is, what is transpiring and what kinds of conditions are evolving. The tone of your questions should demonstrate that you want to learn what has already been done — you don't want to appear as if you're trying to make up for lost time.

Of course, all crises are not the same. To be pretty blunt about it, something that may not be a major emergency when you're in town looms much larger when you aren't present. But that doesn't necessarily mean your presence is going to make any difference. Assessing the scope and breadth of an emergency while expressing confidence in your secondary command officer sends a message too. Besides, what image does it create for you to show up after an event is already over, apologizing for the fact that you were out of town when it occurred?

The one exception that absolutely demands an instantaneous return to duty is when a fatality is involved. In the case of a civilian fatality, it's very important for the fire chief to demonstrate an appropriate amount of concern. If there's a firefighter injury or fatality, then delaying your return sends a very strong message about your lack of support for your own firefighters.

Let's look at another problem, the phone call that starts off, “Chief, you are not going to believe this, but….” Many of these calls have to do with acts of discipline. Disciplinary events that occur when you're out of town are not your fault; they may even be decisions someone has made to take advantage of your absence. Regardless of the cause, this is the one place where I think it's very important for you to have a game plan in advance. We both know that you can't fight fires from hundreds of miles away, but it's even more difficult to engage in problem-solving from the other end of a telephone.

That doesn't mean you should give up; instead, you should develop a very specific behavioral set to deal with problems of this nature when you're away from the job. The first ground rule is not to over-react. What you hear on the telephone will infuriate you, depress you and even raise fear in your mind. But the one thing that you need to know is that you don't know enough to be able to form an opinion at that point.

One of the first things you should do is seek privacy. It's not good form to discuss an issue that has the possibility of going sour in front of other chief officers. In the good old days before we had cell phones, people usually didn't have this problem. Recently, however, I have seen individuals take cell phone calls and behave rather aberrantly in front of other people without realizing it. When you're on that cell phone, never lose your temper with the message bearer.

Next, sit down with a pad of paper and a pencil and start getting all of the facts before you form any opinions of what needs to be done. In other columns I have indicated that this is a good idea whenever you're confronted with a problem, but when you're away from the workplace this step becomes even more critical.

The reasoning behind this step is that quite frequently people will notify you of a problem long before they've engaged in any form of problem-solving themselves — they're intending to delegate the problem upward to you. What you need to be thinking about is how to get the situation stabilized, which involves fact-finding and verification. Use a fax machine to get copies of documents, and have e-mails sent if you're traveling with a laptop. If you don't have a laptop, you should have a Web-accessible e-mail account that you can use at any computer while traveling.

One of the very important things that you need to determine right away is who already knows about the problem. If only one person in the department has been affected that's one thing, but if it has already appeared as a banner headline in a local newspaper, that's totally another.

Get your facts straight, ask a lot of questions and then ask for a recommended course of action before deciding what should be done. You should be prepared to provide direction to stabilize the situation until you return home. You may not solve the problem, but the absolute minimum that you need to achieve is stabilizing the situation.

My last suggestion may be very difficult for those of us who feel that not being there means we have more of an obligation to make a decision. The people who are on the ground and close to the problem have one advantage that you don't: They have the ability to observe the situation with respect to the problem's context. No matter how many questions you ask, it's unlikely that you will be able to determine what the environment is.

The scenarios I've painted in this column have the potential to be really gut wrenching. I have had several of them occur to me in my lifetime, and I have been standing alongside other chiefs when it happened to them. It's pretty hard to keep the resulting emotions inside when you are “out of pocket.” The real goal is to maintain control while maintaining control. If you have done the job of developing your command staff well, and there is an acceptance of the fact that sometimes bad things happen to good people, you might be halfway around the world physically but you could be standing right there with your people emotionally and philosophically.

When I was preparing this column I thought of the cliché “out of sight, out of mind,” primarily because it's the corollary to another one regarding absence: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Being away from your department when a major crisis strikes should not result in criticism of your performance as a chief officer. It instead should reinforce the fact that your organization has the capacity to perform while remaining aligned with your philosophies as a chief officer.

Just because you aren't there doesn't mean that you are not going to influence the outcome. You need to have a plan in mind before that incoming call.

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A 40-year veteran of the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman is the president of the Fire & Emergency Television Network, which features career development and succession planning in its Command Transfer series. He 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.