When central casting wants to hire an actor who looks like a fire chief, there are a lot of choices. Depending on the casting director's vision, almost anyone who looks like a hero could work. In the past, Steve McQueen, Lorne Green and Denzel Washington have played fire chiefs. In the future we might see Sigourney Weaver or Meg Ryan getting the nod to play the role of a heroic fire chief.

What really distinguishes a chief officer is not appearance but rather actions. It's behavior that counts, not what someone looks like. Chief officers are often characterized by their achievements and the level of credibility they possess within their organization, rather than by their compliance with any sort of very specific physical image.

With all due respect to Charlie Tuna, fire departments don't need fire chiefs who look good, they need fire chiefs who can do good. If we all agree that beauty is only skin deep, then we should probably be able to agree that performance goes all the way to the bone.

I was prompted to write this column after the chance occurrence of two events that showed the distinction between looking like a fire chief and acting like one. The first event was my viewing of the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. This is one of those rollicking, seafaring tales that is filled with everything from humor to pathos and has battle scenes that make you feel as if you were there. This was shortly followed by a telephone call from a fire service friend of mine who was very upset about an incident that occurred between him and his fire chief.

I was struck by the similarities between several scenes in the movie where Capt. Jack Aubrey, as played by Russell Crowe, had to make very critical, life-or-death decisions and this fire officer's anger and frustration at what had happened between him and his superior. In the case of the fictionalized Aubrey, he made several decisions for the good of the ship and the good of the crew that had adverse effects on individuals. Aubrey's fictionalized leadership focused on behaving based on principles. Although those principles were tested several times, the emphasis was not on personal choices or prejudicial bias but rather on what was good for the overall organization.

In contrast, the fire officer who complained to me was primarily upset that his chief's decision was not the same one he would have made under the same circumstances. I immediately began to ask him a series of questions regarding the situation. My friend indicated several times that he recognized the decision was a very tough one to make. It was not one of those “let's form a committee and talk about it” decisions. The issue went to the heart of the organization's honesty and credibility. It was a classic example of the loneliness of command.

Here was the issue. The chief had always talked a lot about participative management and the need to gather large amounts of input before he made decisions. In this case, he was confronted with a scenario in which he did not have time to gather that kind of participative input. He therefore made a decision that was inconsistent with his image and made him appear hypocritical. My friend the chief officer felt somewhat betrayed by the process because it was inconsistent with the image that the chief had projected prior.

Reality is that very few people face one or more situations in their careers where they must make instantaneous decisions. On the other hand, there are many who face them day in and day out. When I compare the role of being a fireground commander to the role of making decisions in the fire station, there's hardly any room for statistical correlation. On the fireground we make decisions in a heartbeat, and very few individuals openly criticize them. They make take us on in the critique later, but on the fireground we don't act as if participative management is a preferred leadership style. Nonetheless, we are sometimes faced with real crises where we don't have time to go through the educational process and have to use a totally different style.

Some fail to make the right decisions under these conditions. Others suffer from their lack of empathy to the consequences of making tough decisions. For example, when people portray themselves as people who engage in participative decision-making processes, they must realize that there are times when they have to make a decision based on principle instead of participation. In Master and Commander, Aubrey made a decision that was very difficult for his longtime friend Dr. Stephen Maturin, the ship's surgeon, but there was no time to question it. If decisions are based on principles rather than position, they often can endure. If a decision is based on positions, it can change at any time.

Now I'm not talking about theoretical principles, I am talking about the ones you actually practice, the ones that are expressed in your personal behavior. In conducting interviews with hundreds of chief officers in my career, I developed two separate lists of such principles. The first is what I call the laundry list. Open up almost any dictionary and start looking up words that have the ring of authority and credibility: approachable, benevolent, compassionate, dedicated, encouraging, etc.

To create such a list, all you have to do is look at the traits different leaders exhibit in achieving their goals and objectives when dealing with others. I would bet that you could think of a couple of peers who possess completely different attributes, yet both are eminently successful. Using the attribute-listing system, you could make up three columns of seven words each and describe yourself by taking one from each column, such as “gracious, intelligent and motivated.”

The second approach is what I call the 10 commandments. It consists of drawing out a set of guidelines that drive your assessment of specific decision-making processes as a template for your behavior. This list could look more like this: always tell the truth, treat everyone with respect, collect all the facts before you act, never lose your temper even when you are disappointed with others and treat everyone fairly. While this type of list is much harder to create and is even more difficult to live by, it is the essence of having a leadership style that evolves over time. When I was watching Jack Aubrey, it didn't take me more than five minutes to determine what I could expect out of his character for the remainder of the movie. Aubrey's actions were based on his adherence to a set of parameters that shaped his behavior. He became predictable.

The laundry list tends to be more along the lines of the warm-and-fuzzy stuff. The commandments tend to produce a set of guidelines and principles that cause you to approach your job with discipline. While talking to my officer friend who had been so upset, I asked him to put himself in his superior's role and face the same set of circumstances. I pursued this from a standpoint of the laundry list. I asked what attributes he exhibited, and he was unable to come up with any positive ones. I then shifted to the commandments approach and asked him if he had been faced with a similar set of circumstances, what would he have done? As we begin to explore how he would have handled the same situation, it became increasingly clear that both of these individuals came to the same conclusion but would have taken drastically different paths to achieve the end result.

There are significant differences between superiors and subordinates with respect to what laundry list they believe in and what commandments they have to guide their behavior. Our leadership is on the line every time we choose to make a decision that is inconsistent with our outward appearance. It is when our behavior gets tested against our predictable way of doing things that leadership finally begins to emerge. Although these two chief officers are as different as the dictionary would allow them to be, choosing different paths to make a decision, they actually were in the same place in regard to the consequences of the decision.

Who was right in this scenario? You know I can't say for sure whether either one of them was right, but I do know at least one thing. The person who was more responsible for the decision was the one who had to be confident that the decision was right. You can call that the loneliness of command, because that is what leadership is when we put it on the line. It is when we make those decisions when we do not have the ability to turn around and ask for instantaneous compliance. At some point we have to act as master and commander. To call that a lonely position is to deny the fact that it is the rightful role of all leaders to be in charge. Command is not a committee function, and every time such an approach is advocated in stressful sets of circumstances, it diminishes the authority and significance of the role.

So is it better to look the part of the chief or to act the part of a chief? If you want to be considered an actor, you may be able to get away with a laundry list. You can be popular, friendly, humorous or more, but in order to behave a little bit more of a specific fashion, you need to adopt the commandments approach.

If I take one of those last set of attributes, for example being popular, then a behavior would be don't offend anyone. If I am talking about being friendly, you might be able to pull that off by rewarding your friends every chance you get. If a person is humorous, they might try to avoid tough decisions until a crisis is created. You might think these comparisons are a little goofy, but I can assure you that there are behaviors exhibited all the time by people in positions of power and influence that are equally goofy. Some are downright outrageously bizarre, yet people get away with those leadership styles for a while.

Now for a quantum leap of logic. So far I have been talking about being the type of leader who does the right thing the right way and therefore leads the organization in some direction in such a fashion that the leader develops a followership. I am not sure our profession is creating that kind of leadership. We tend to look at attributes all the time as if we are losing specific attributes instead of acquiring new behaviors.

My observations are based on the phenomenon that fewer people really want to be the leaders of fire agencies. I am basing this also on the phenomenon of people believing that appearances are more important than performance. I recently witnessed a candidate excluded from a testing process because “he didn't look chiefly.” I consider that to be outright discriminatory at one level and absolutely stupid on another.

I believe the contemporary idea that leaders look a certain way has to be matched by their behaving a certain way. If I go back to the fire service of some 50 or 60 years ago and look at the photographs of the individuals who are leaders, I sometimes have to chuckle. They don't look like the kind of person that I would see sitting across from me on an assessment lab. Some had weak chins; some were in dire need of a shave and haircut.

However, they formed a consensus that was so powerful it drove the fire service for more than half a century. There was more agreement in the fire service in those days than there is today. Granted, there were fewer special-interest groups and there were far fewer divisions of authority than we have today. However, if you also look at the behavior of the fire chiefs, in those days it was very focused.

Jack Aubrey, where are you when we need you to apply for the job of being a fire chief? Leadership in the fire service is on the line in many ways like the role of master and commander was in those days. On the one hand we really prize the incident commander and all that they stand for on the fireground, yet we criticize them without constraint. We have safer buildings to live in and catastrophic fires to cope with.

When that same fire chief who was a courageous fireground commander goes out on a limb to achieve the goal of making the community less vulnerable to attack from fire through sprinkler ordinances or by addressing other issues, they often are attacked from within their own ranks. There are people who jump at every opportunity to criticize the management of an organization. There are members of management who do everything in their power to diminish the role of labor in improving working conditions. Neither is right.

If you are ready for another quantum leap, it's time to do that now. We now have a great potential to make giant strides forward. We are on the verge of achieving a set of national credentials that has never been conceived of in the fire service. We have a new and real opportunity to build better relationships between the private and public sectors. I believe that we have opportunities for new leaders to emerge at almost all levels, but to achieve that we have to stop looking the part and start behaving that way instead.

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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 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.