Picture this: You're the assistant chief of a volunteer department that's in the early stages of absorbing a neighboring department, when your chief is called to serve in Operation Desert Storm. Not wanting to lose any momentum, the township trustees approach you about taking over the chief's slot and shepherding the consolidation. What do you do?

If you're Tim Holman, Fire Chief Magazine's 2002 Volunteer Fire Chief of the Year and the head of German Township Fire and EMS in Clark County, Ohio, the answer is simple. “I said I would take it,” Holman recalls, “but I said you're going to have to give me five years to work a strategic plan to bring these two together, and it took almost five years to get that to run smoothly.”

Balancing act

Holman's interest in the fire service began when he was a freelance news photographer who often would arrive at fires and vehicle accidents before the local fire department. He eventually began taking photographs for the department, and then went on to take firefighting and EMT classes.

After earning his paramedic certification and joining the department, in 1976 Holman started as a critical-care therapist on the night shift at Mercy Medical Center in Springfield, Ohio. Over the years he was promoted to supervisor, technical coordinator and director. Volunteer firefighting and hospital work were a difficult fit at first, however.

“I think I did very poorly at balancing the two,” says Holman, “because between the two of them that was pretty much my life, and I think without that balance the stress really starts getting to you. I think in many ways I started seeing that stress, but I had some good mentors over the years.

“One of them was my dad, and he said, ‘You've got to have time away from that stuff.’ That was probably one of the best pieces of advice he ever gave me. I started trying to be more conscientious about it at that point, and now I think I have a real good balance between all the different things that I do.”

Part of the credit goes to his family, Holman, 51, says. His three daughters have taken an interest in the fire service, with one working with the department as a cadet and another hoping to follow in her footsteps. The oldest is stationed in Italy with the U.S. Air Force.

His wife is a paramedic, too. “It's wonderful because she's very supportive; she knows what I go through,” he says. “We ride together on a squad every now and then, so we're on runs together frequently, and we function very well together. She's very understanding, very supportive of the whole thing.”

Consolidation challenges

When Holman took over the German Township Fire Department in 1991, he needed to absorb the Tremont Community Fire Department as part of the job. Both were funded by the township, but they had different command structures and different equipment.

“It was like they were two separate entities, but they were both owned by the township and funded by the township,” says Holman. “What we wanted to do was stop the duplication and get it all under one command structure, and that was the reason for that. It's saved the community a lot of money. It's still run out of two stations, but it's all one department.”

Today, German Township Fire and EMS has 52 members who cover 48 square miles over two counties. The district has two villages with a combined population of about 10,000, a figure that climbs significantly during the day due to several large shopping complexes and some light industry. Although the area includes its fair share of farmland, the department makes about 1,500 runs per year, 80% of which are EMS calls.

During the consolidation, one of Holman's major challenges was updating equipment to comply with various standards and better protect firefighters' safety.

“Our turnout gear did not meet NFPA standards at the time,” he says. “Our radio system was in pretty poor shape. None of our trucks met DOT certification, and our SCBAS needed to be brought up to standards as well. We didn't have the money to do that, but over a five-year period we completed all that.

“Now everyone is in turnout gear that exceeds NFPA standards, and we spend approximately $2,000 on each individual for their turnout gear,” says Holman. “We'll buy the best that's on the market at the time. Our SCBAS are all up to date; we have a new radio system; all of our trucks are certified yearly under DOT.”

Departmental culture

As the departments merged, Holman hoped to cultivate a culture of participation and learning, where everyone had input into decisions and officer development was valued.

“We have to take into consideration the people of the department,” he says. “I'm only as good as the people who work for me — they'll either make me look real good or they'll make me look real bad, so my main focus is to try to make those people successful, and in turn they'll make our organization successful.”

To do that, Holman says, you need to ask for people's opinions while keeping in mind that you don't have to please everyone. “Any time they come up with a good suggestion, I promote their suggestion and I promote the individual who came up with the suggestion. We have a lot of innovation and creativity that's coming out of the department because we allow people to participate in a lot of the decision-making.”

For example, Holman notes that the department's last four trucks were designed with only some guidelines from him. The involvement of his members gave them a sense of ownership that hadn't been there before. “Those trucks become their trucks,” he says. “They're not Tim's trucks, they're their trucks.”

That goal of increased participation in department decisions proved its worth when Holman decided to tackle the problem of long daytime response times by transitioning the volunteers to a part-paid force.

“The problem was just like everyone else is experiencing around the country,” Holman says. “We couldn't get trucks out during the day, mainly for EMS. We just didn't have the staffing to do that, so I started talking to all the people in the organization and I said, ‘You know what? We're having problems getting trucks out. What do you see as the solution?’”

The unorthodox approach of asking for opinions, touted by many corporate gurus but practiced by few, yielded a lot of ideas that Holman was able to develop into a response formula that avoided a traditional solution. “I wanted to stay away from a combination department because I've worked with combination departments all over the country, and they have a lot of problems merging the two together, the career and the volunteer,” he says. “We wanted to try something unique to stay away from that.”

The eventual choice was to make everyone a part-time employee, allowing the department to pay firefighters to cover day shifts at the stations while continuing to use volunteers at night. “I put together a plan and I took it to our township trustees, who are the governing body, and they looked it over,” Holman says. “I had really thought about all the pros and cons of this, and I delivered both to them. They jumped right on it.

“We didn't have to ask for any more money to do it; we did it under our current budget,” he says. “When we publicized that, the community just loved that part of it because they were getting better service with no additional funding. We've done that for the last three or four years now, and it's worked out real well. The public likes it. They're not paying as much as they would if we were a career department, while at the same time they're getting some of the benefits that you would with a career department.”

Team-building

With staffing and equipment concerns out of the way, German Township turned its attention to team-building and officer development, especially as it related to managing people. According to Holman, “we already did a good job as far as taking care of the scene, but I didn't think that we were all on the same page as far as the way we managed people, so we spent a lot of time on that.”

Holman notes that although most fire departments work well together on scene, when the members return to the station they're more likely to not know what to do with themselves or each other. “The number one cause of team burnout and team ineffectiveness, whether it's on the fireground or back at the station, is lack of focus,” he says. “What we try to do and what most departments, if they want that type of environment, need to do is keep the people focused.”

Focus is a natural part of team-building and should be the responsibility of officers. However, Holman believes that working with others doesn't come easily to most. “It's a lot different managing a team than it is just a group of people. Team-building is not a natural process.

“We are taught to be very independent from a very young age, and then we grow up and we're thrown in a group and told to work with them,” Holman says, “but we don't know how to do that because we're still relying on all we've been trained as kids to be independent, and now all of a sudden we're supposed to be interdependent.”

Interdependence among firefighters needs to be fostered by officers who have been taught how to bring a team together when it's not on the fireground. Holman says that officers need to know how to manage their teams and keep them focused.

“Our focus comes from our mission, our vision and our goals. Now we lose that focus, and the team becomes fragmented at the point and we become very ineffective,” he says. “If you don't provide the focus for the people, the people will provide their own focus, and if they provide their own focus, that focus will be centered around themselves instead of the organization. We want them focused on the organization.”

Starting from scratch

If you're thinking that Holman has especially well-developed management theories, there's a reason. After years of training Mercy Medical Center staff, in 1993 Holman was laid off from his position as director during a hospital merger. “It came down to a money thing and I was downsized,” he says. “Well, they call it downsized; I call it fired.”

Although he had several offers to go elsewhere, Holman decided to follow the advice of people who had been impressed by his training skills and had encouraged him to do it for a living. He took his severance package and used it to start Holman Training & Development, which specializes in custom programs for organizational development.

“I've been doing it for 10 years now,” he says. “The first six months were real scary, but after that it all came together. In fact, the hospital that downsized me hired me to come back, and I taught 80 of their managers management training and leadership training, so that was kind of interesting that they let me go and hired me right back to do training for them.”

Many of Holman's thoughts on management and leadership can be found in his books, The Ten Commandments of Highly Successful Leaders, The Building Blocks of a Winning Team and Leadership Rules of Engagement. His latest, The High-Performance Attitude, is due to be published any day now and explains how attitude can influence every aspect of an organization.

According to Holman, “a high-performance attitude is not a Pollyanna attitude, the one that everything's just peachy. The high-performance attitude is one that says we've got problems, but if we work together on these problems we can solve them.

“We're not going to sit around and complain about them, we're going to take action on them and we're going to try to correct some of the problems that we have,” he says. “If everyone takes that type of an attitude, we can accomplish a whole lot.”

In many ways, this latest book reflects how Holman has conducted himself throughout his career. “Most of our success comes from attitude,” he says. “I don't care how much knowledge you have or what kind of degrees you have — if you don't have a good attitude, you're not going to be successful.”