Out with the old, in with the new! That cliché is often used to express the transition between December 31 and January 1 of each calendar year. The implication is that old things must be bad and new things must be good. However, that kind of sweeping generality has a tendency to ignore the fact that sometimes things that have been around for a while have stuck because they actually function appropriately. Sometimes new things fail under pressure.

The same phenomenon of sweeping the house clean also has its implications in what happens when new individuals take over organizations. We have all seen it happen during a change of leadership at the national level in our political arena. We also have seen it happen at the state level with a combination of both political and bureaucratic implications. Moreover, we have seen it happen at the local level with the change of a city manager or a fire chief. Obviously it must do something because it has been going on for so many different decades without interruption.

But there may be a dark secret lurking within that phenomenon. The secret could be that a revolving-door policy of getting rid of the old and replacing it with something new could very well be what causes some organizations to remain mediocre, establishing change as their baseline. Sometimes throwing out the old is a compromise instead of achieving excellence by pursuing a course of action that is succeeding. Of course, many people choose up sides in this issue depending on if they're the old guys or the new people who are taking over to try to right wrongs they have perceived in the past.

This particular phenomenon has an interesting implication in today's demographics. I bet that many of you have had conversations in the recent past about the “brain drain” in the fire service. My definition of the brain drain is the perception that we are sweeping out our more experienced and knowledgeable people by offering them retirement benefits they can't afford to turn down. The perception is that we are replacing them with others who may lack experience and wisdom. On the other hand, some of our younger people look at this opportunity as a way of increasing their financial rewards for being a part of our profession and can't wait to get their hands on the reins to run organizations. Wasn't that what our generation wanted to do? Which one of these two perspectives is correct?

Here's an observation that you might have a hard time grasping: Both are 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 because the old guard is running out of it. It's also appropriate to keep seniors and well-informed individuals in place long after they have reached a certain tenured age because they provide stability and depth in an organizational study. Is it possible for these two ideas to exist in harmony?

My answer is that it depends. The new must respect the old, and the old must not fear the new. So a legitimate question is what does it depend on? The first concept that I would like to introduce into this discussion is balance versus extremes. Organizations that devote a great deal of time, effort and energy into pushing people off the top so that they can set people up at the bottom do so at the risk of losing their institutional memory.

Institutional memory isn't always what's found in the file cabinets, but rather what's found within the minds of an organization's most experienced and usually more senior personnel. However, and there always seems to be a contradiction, this system doesn't work very well when individuals who are at the upper end have decided to preserve the status quo. The responsibility to be a wise and experienced person at the top of an organization also comes with the 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 merely comment on it.

The other side of this coin is that 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's really what succession planning is all about. 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 have ways of achieving them.

We're in a unique profession in the sense that firefighting is a young person's job at the end of a hoseline and an older person's career when it comes to managing a fire department. Now before some of you “old” fire chiefs get upset, what I'm saying is that the person who is providing management and leadership in the 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 an expression of behavior.

The current trend in the fire service is to try to do everything we can to reduce the number of years a person has to serve before being able to retire. I'm not going to discuss any of the specific formulae that are at play, but I would like to express concern. More and more we're compressing chief officer development processes into such a narrow spectrum that it's going to be a revolving door in the near future.

For decades, it has been customary for a military career to last about 20 years, and there's a real good reason for that. Military combat is physically demanding. It's very common for a colonel in an infantry outfit to have to share in the same kinds of physical abuse as combat infantrymen. Therefore, a person can enter as a second lieutenant at 19 and still be eligible for retirement as a lieutenant colonel at 45.

We tend to think as the fire service as being somewhat paramilitary, so the idea of having a 20- to 30-year career may make a lot of sense if it's spent in the firehouse. Unfortunately, not all of what goes on managing a fire department occurs in the fire station. In some cases it occurs at city hall. In some cases it occurs at the state capital, and in many cases it happens at a very high level of a national government. Does anybody recognize the potential gap here between a person who is staying in service for only 20 years and having a powerful and influential group of leaders at the national level of the fire service?

We are confronted today with the idea of forced retirements. We also are faced with the idea of ballooning payments for workers' compensation. Many fire departments are struggling intensely with staffing formulae that are driven by double-digit funding gaps.

The argument I would like to make is that you can't resolve such problems by decapitating the fire service — removing more senior people merely because they have reached some kind of a premature retirement age. If you look at the military model, you'll notice that most of the generals in the military, the ones who stay around long after their “forced retirement dates,” are the ones who really wield the most power. White-headed or bald individuals who know where are all the channels of communications are and have the ability to use those channels are the people who fight the most effective battles to protect the interests of the military. We need something similar to that in the fire service.

Of course, there's a parallel problem. Its name is stress. As I travel talking to fire chiefs all over the country, I am hearing people say that they can't wait to get out of top-level jobs because they're just sick and tired of being under pressure all of the time. On one hand I recognize that as a deficiency we must overcome. However, on another level I would note that those who stick around and are capable of dealing with that stress have done so by obtaining a depth of competence in themselves that only comes through experience.

Just for the sake of argument, we need to take a step back and look at what's happening to the demographics of our country and how it effects the fire service. Who is this crowd of people currently running the majority of fire departments? They are somewhere between the 45 and 65 years old. They are not aging any more rapidly than any other generation, but they are part of a balloon population that's not being followed by another generation of comparable size. A city manager recently pointed out to me that a significant number of the upper- and mid-level managers in his organization were moving up and out of the organization, while simultaneously nobody was arriving on the doorstep from the bottom to pick up those jobs.

I usually try to not just identify a problem, but also to promote some sort of a solution. What I would like to suggest is that we take into consideration three things:

1. We should not allow the institutional memory of the fire service to merely evaporate. We should make conscious efforts to work with the older members of our organization (dinosaurs though they may be) to keep an accurate record of those individuals' past contributions and achievements.

2. Those individuals who are aspiring for upward mobility in the fire service and want to take on those new jobs should attempt to preserve institutional memory rather than disrespect it. It may seem like an oversimplification, but it isn't. I can't tell you the number of times that I have watched someone 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. Organizations should constantly strive to balance tradition and change rather than choosing either side as the comfortable place to be. The challenge here is knowing the difference between preserving a tradition and engaging in nothing more than habitual behavior. Furthermore, it's important for us to be able to distinguish between a change that is actually needed versus a change for change's sake.

In actuality, many fire departments are going to choose one of these three paths anyway. I wrote this column basically to raise the level of awareness without losing 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's unblemished. Nothing could be more inaccurate than either one of those crusty clichés.

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

---

With more than 40 years in 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.