One of the ways we give words a sense of importance is by capitalizing them. For example, if I write “Leadership,” I'm implying a sense of importance. However, “leadership” just doesn't seem to resonate quite as strongly. Now let me try one more on you: “LEADERSHIP!” Well, that certainly leaps off the page at you.

If you've been practicing as a chief in the fire service for the last 10 or 15 years, you probably have seen leadership expressed in all three ways. Which one applies to you? Are you a lower-case leader, an upper-case leader or an all-caps leader? Don't feel bad if you aren't exactly sure which category you fall into. In reality there is no clear definition or way of measuring the concept of leadership.

We're surrounded by constant rhetoric about leadership in the fire service. Pick up almost any magazine and someone will be writing about leadership. Go to almost any conference and you will hear someone talking about leadership. Head to one of the major bookstore chains, such as Borders or Barnes and Noble, and you'll see the shelves stocked to the edge with books written by all sorts of people telling you how to become a leader. There's Patton on Leadership. There's Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. And there's one of my favorites, Franklin on Leadership.

I would have to say that if you aren't performing some form of leadership, it's because you haven't been paying attention to your job requirements. On the other hand, I might say that if you're practicing leadership and haven't written a book, you simply aren't famous enough yet. But neither of those cases is really relevant. What's important is whether you are practicing leadership at all. That's the real problem. Talking about leadership is easy, but actually performing it is a lot more difficult because there are consequences.

The first thing to clear up is that leadership is not a position, it's a behavior. You can be in charge and still not be a leader. You can be a leader and not be in charge. Leaders have a unique characteristic to them. They have followers, and I'm not talking about subservient followers but people who are willing to go the full measure to support whatever their leader is trying to accomplish.

In my four decades of watching people in the fire service, I have been exposed to a variety of leadership styles. There is no one way for a person to be a leader, but everybody seems to know when someone is performing in that capacity. Some people are flamboyant. Some people are subtle. Some people only become leaders when their followers are down and out. Others only act in a leadership mode when the organization is doing well. This whole thing seems to smack of magic rather than methodology. Where does a person go to learn to be a leader? What happens when you try to be a leader and nobody follows you?

After discussing these styles with some other chiefs, I decided that it's more important to be a lower-case leader than it is to be any other kind. Now what do I mean by a lower-case leader? I'm referring to the personal attributes that cause other people to feel that you are a person who makes them want to commit to your causes. I am not talking about blind obedience; I am not even talking about power or position. I am talking about influence.

I am convinced that you don't go to school or a seminar to become a leader, and I know this from watching kids on a playground. Nobody gives a 5-year-old lessons from Patton on Leadership, yet there are a lot of 5-year-old children who, if dropped into a crowd of other kids, will be organizing activities and convincing others to go along with their course of action — all within a matter of moments. Now you might say to yourself that that isn't the kind of challenge major leaders face in life, but it certainly is lower-case leadership. It is intuitive. It is the application of a set of human behaviors that meet the needs of other human beings to move them.

In our society we institutionalize this form of lower-case leadership all the time, but we don't necessarily give it a title. As I reflect back on my own experiences as member of the Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Marines, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Park Service and then a wide variety of firefighting agencies, I remembered being directly influenced by people who were using lower-case leadership. They didn't have to demand I comply with their desires, but rather demonstrate to me that they cared so much about what we were both doing that I quickly empathized with them and chose to follow them.

On the other hand, can people learn to be better leaders? Take a look at how individuals have been coached, mentored, counseled and even beaten up to make them better leaders. I think you do have the ability to learn to be a better leader, but you will never get to upper-case leadership if you don't have the lower-case version of it first. Now that statement is pretty unscientific, but I believe that it has a basis in reality. Leadership based on false premises is vulnerable all the time. But if your core values demand you think, act and perform in a certain way that is successful over time, then you can take new knowledge about leadership and improve on it.

One of the things that has often bothered me about leaders is that there are two different kinds out there — good and evil. I will leave it up to you to define each. The distinction that I have drawn is that when a leader uses influence over other human beings to result in death, destruction or damage to others, then the leader is evil. Good leaders are ones who care, are compassionate and are competent enough to ensure that advocating a specific course of action will not damage the people who follow them.

What do you think is the most important character trait for a person to possess to be a leader? Is there anything so fundamental to leadership that it's impossible to be successful without that trait? Think hard on the individuals who have influenced you. Do they all share some particular quality? Think even harder about your own use of leadership. What characteristic makes you an effective person in influencing others? Think really hard.

Of course, I have no idea what you're thinking, and it's unlikely that anyone came up with exactly the same description. That little exercise is a trick question, because I'm not sure I know the answer either. Instead, I like to think of molecules. We can't really see them, but they make up everything and are complex in their own makeup. Leadership is not one thing; it is an appropriate combination of several things that makes a person really effective.

Perhaps a real-world example might serve my purpose. As long as we're going to think big, let's use an example that is so common almost anyone can relate to it: England's Winston Churchill during World War II. No one can doubt that he was a world leader, but he also was removed from power when he no longer served the needs of the very people whom he had worked so hard to protect. How many times have we seen individuals rise to a position of influence and then, as soon as the conditions which caused their rise evaporate, their power disappears also? I know I've seen that.

This pattern of events tends to make me believe that one of the attributes of people who are in leadership positions is not that they're trying to make things they want in life happen so much as they're prepared to achieve something that meets other people's needs. Ghandi probably expressed that most appropriately when he said, “There go my people — I must get out and get in front of them, for I am their leader.”

But in terms of the most important characteristic, the one thing I have observed most about individuals who rise to high levels of influence is that people trust them. Trust. What a word. It's one of those things that you must give away in order to get it back. You cannot be trusted unless you trust others, and vice versa.

In examining leadership, one of the things that also becomes clear is that all great leaders have flaws. Sometimes the flaws are greater than the image of leadership will bear. The degree to which those flaws affect the outcome of their leadership varies considerably. Perhaps if I went back to my discussion of good and evil in terms of leaders it would be easy to determine that sometimes the flaws can become so predominant that they take over the person's influence in a manner that can be perceived as either good or evil.

With these different approaches to leadership attributes in mind, think about the people who influence you. What character traits do you admire in those who influence you? What flaws do they have that you're concerned about? Continuing with that line of though, whom do you think you influence? What kind of influence do you exert over them? What character traits do you have that make you who you are, and what flaws do you have that can derail you if you aren't careful?

In researching leadership styles, I have found a list of adjectives a mile long used to describe leaders. So how we pick and choose among those often determines our personal success? Lacking one of those traits does not mean we are unsuccessful, but rather that we must rely on the strengths of other traits to overcome inertia or to obtain a positive response from others.

In other words, learning to be a leader is an exercise in self-assessment. If you don't know who you are, what you stand for and what you're trying to accomplish, there's a strong possibility that nobody else will be able to figure it out either. One of the first steps in lower-case leadership then is to have a really good grasp on the character traits you display to other individuals as you attempt to influence them to follow your way.

This leads me to one of my characteristics of good leaders. They walk their talk. They don't say one thing and do something else. Granted there are individuals, especially in the political arena, who can get away with that from time to time, but credibility depends on reliability. If you say what you do and do what you say, then people can believe that it's OK to follow you if they concur with the destination.

All of this leadership discussion is taking us to a place where many have already been — the realization that no matter whether we acquired those leadership skills and abilities, there are times when people rise to the occasion and there are times when they fail miserably. Those who rise to the occasion often survive long enough to be able to describe their leadership style in a textbook, but not necessarily to be able to transfer their skills to and influence others along the way.

Interestingly, many of the books written about great leaders are written not by the leader but by someone who observed that person's behavior and then wrote about it. That's why I'm not convinced that reading a book on leadership makes you a better leader. But comparing the way you feel about things with what other people have expressed in their dealings with other human beings is a real good starting spot in influencing how you're going to deal with others in the future.

You are not Patton. You are not Lincoln. You may only be the head of a Boy Scout troop, or you could be the president of the local fire chiefs' association. You are who you are. You are going to be what you make of yourself. You are going to be a leader when given the opportunity, using the combination of how you feel about yourself and what you know about what others feel about you. That is the bottom line.

To me this is all good news, for it simply means that leadership is not bestowed like a velvet cloak covering your shoulders, but rather emerges from within individuals as a sort of personal glow. Everybody can be a leader. It is not a case of just one of us out in front of the pack, but a case of hundreds if not thousands of us leading in situations where influence is important.

The future of the fire service does not depend on the development of one or two individuals to guide it. It will survive the challenges of the future when leadership exists at every level. All of your stories may not make up a textbook on leadership, yet each and every one of your them contributes to the idea that anyone, anytime can make a contribution.

To steal the lines of Forrest Gump, “Leadership is as leadership does.” You don't need to go to fancy workshops to make a difference. You don't need to have positional power to have influence. However, you do have to have some very specific things in your mind's eye as you approach your job. You must have the courage to act on your own initiative; you must have the ability to communicate to others a common vision of the future; and you must put your money where your mouth is.

If there is a leadership vacuum in the fire service, then shame on us. If there is a leadership vacuum in your department, you had better start looking in a mirror every morning. If there is a leadership problem at the fire company level in your organization, there's a strong possibility that someone who has been given power and influence hasn't chosen to do anything with them.

Everyone can have influence over the future. With lower-case leadership, all you have to do is to wake up with the idea that you are going to act in a manner that's consistent with your goals. If those goals obtain the support of others, the leadership you exert will soon sport a capital “L.” Ultimately, some of you will have successes that receive local, if not national, recognition. That's all it takes for your leadership contributions to be all-caps. Then add an exclamation point. It all begins with you.

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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.