The admonition "Look before you leap" has been around for thousands of years, reminding you to take the time to understand what you're getting into before making a commitment. It's been applied to a wide variety of personal and professional conditions, from marriage to business deals.

This same cliche applies to one of the most critical and emotionally frustrating circumstances faced by a fire officer: the disciplinary act. It's rare indeed for an officer to go an entire career without having to discipline a staff member. The opportunities to perform this responsibility aren't limited to large fire agencies. In fact, even a two-person organization could have circumstances that require one person to act on the behavior of the other.

I need to explain right away that I'm not intending to offer you legal advice. Numerous columns on disciplinary actions have been written by people with law degrees. However, I would like to focus on dealing with an infraction that offends you as an officer but may not actually have broken any rules. In essence, I'm suggesting that you look before you leap in the disciplinary act.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that we back away from disciplinary action. On the contrary, I think that one of the most glaring reasons for many serious performance problems in the fire service is due to people failing to take action when the situation was relatively benign but with the potential to get worse. Many times, major infractions are a direct result of overlooking minor infractions or dealing with them inadequately.

The first step in looking before you leap is to examine your reaction to an event that's leading toward discipline. The word discipline comes from the word disciple, which means a "student of." Therefore, creating a disciplined organization often starts with your reaction to perceived or real infractions of departmental culture or conduct. You can't be an effective disciplinarian if you don't have 100% control over your own behavior. You might be reminded of another old cliche, "Do as I say, not as I do."

There's a parallel to that one called "Monkey see, monkey do." There's not much of a chance for a disciplined organization to have an adequate code of conduct if all officers don't comply with the basic rules themselves. Nothing creates more stress and strain than someone who's been known to bend the rules for his or her own benefit strongly disciplining someone else further down the chain of command.

At one level this is hypocritical. If we don't expect our people to live by certain rules, then we should abolish those rules. If we choose to exhibit a certain type of behavior, then we ought to expect our subordinates will exhibit that same behavior. Disciplined departments start with a sense that discipline is good for the entire organization and is a function of every rank. Firefighters, company officers and chief officers need to be held to the same set of standards when it comes to disciplinary action.

At one time in my career, I was forced to take disciplinary action against a person who was very close to me. I was approached by a group who felt that I should have let this person get away with it because of "who he was." This isn't a moralistic decision saying that some people have more freedom than others. It's an actual indictment of a disciplinary system if people can avoid accountability because of their position or their perceived political influence in an organization. That sends an entirely wrong message.

This leads to the second element of looking before you leap: What do you do when you're first told that there's been an infraction? Your first reaction to an event sends many signals throughout the entire organization. The best advice I can give you in this context is:

1) Never lose your temper, and

2) Never jump to conclusions.

Going against this advice may start you off on a path that's destructive to your credibility as a disciplinarian, and may prejudice the outcome if the process ends up being appealed. By not losing your temper, you don't give the person being disciplined an opportunity to use that against you further down the road. You can be as angry as you wish inside, but on the outside your demeanor has to be very objective. Your line of inquiry needs to be based on facts, not in your belief of the rightness or wrongness of the act that's been committed.

One of the best approaches when facing a disciplinary action is to literally sit down and start asking yourself really basic questions, such as "What happened? Who was involved? Who has information? What documented facts exist?" Deal with the situation chronologically instead of emotionally.

Another way to control your temper is to ask yourself how you would sound on an instant replay. Any reaction that lends itself to subjective interpretation is to your disadvantage, including profanity, remarks about someone's past actions or behavior, and statements that someone must be guilty merely because his or her name was mentioned.

Don't forget the old admonition that people are innocent until proven guilty. The worst thing you can do is take immediate disciplinary action without all of the facts. To ensure that you get all of the facts, document everything you hear and see. You can even document everything you think. I may have told you not to say a lot, but that doesn't mean you can't make observations.

However, those observations are going to have to be narrowly focused. If you look at your notes after going through this process and you see a lot of adjectives, you may have gone a bit too far into the emotional range. Observations should consist of nouns and verbs, such as "This is what I saw and this is who said it," or "This is who said I should look at this, and that is what I found."

As you can see, objectivity is extremely difficult at the outset of most disciplinary actions. But I will absolutely guarantee that when you enter a courtroom or an appeal process, the judge or arbitrator won't respond favorably to any display of emotional hysteria.

Next comes documentation, the third step in looking before you leap. Except in the most egregious cases, you should never make a statement about a disciplinary act until you've completed the paperwork and documentation to hand off to the individual who's about to be disciplined. If you collect the facts and stay objective, you should be fully prepared to articulate everything you've learned.

Your perspective isn't the only aspect of the disciplinary process that needs to be documented. Skelly hearings are essentially opportunities for people to come in and tell their side of the story before a disciplinary action is taken. Failure to allow people their due rights is probably the single biggest reason why many supervisors lose when they take a disciplinary act to an appeal process. The person who committed the act has a right to state his or her side of the case. You have an obligation to listen to it before you form your conclusions.

Granted, many of us chief officers don't have the time to go out and do all the fact-finding. However, this doesn't preclude us from having an internal process to investigate personnel matters. Of course, the more complicated a situation, the more appropriate it is to seek some third-party assistance. In any disciplinary process that involves property rights, including time off, reduction in pay, salary loss or even termination, you need to consult the corporate counsel for your jurisdiction. No major disciplinary action should ever be taken without adequate legal review.

In many cases, you'll need to confer with your human resources manager. Sometimes dealing with these issues falls under restrictions that are incorporated in the memorandum of understanding or agreement with the labor force. Checking on these details is absolutely essential before acting on an infraction that involves extensive discipline.

To round out the subject of documentation, you should also build a portfolio of supporting papers that clearly shows the grounds you have for taking your actions. I'm not talking about referencing an obscure rule that's filed away somewhere in the chiefs office, but rather explaining what the infraction violates.

The last step is actually delivering disciplinary action - in effect, leaping. While conditions on this will vary a great deal, I firmly believe that the disciplinary process should be conducted with dignity. Even if the person has violated your own personal values, you need to consider his or her human rights and emotional consequences.

In short, you praise in public and punish in private. This is especially true when it comes to dealing with very complicated circumstances. It's absolutely essential that this process be both dignified and structured, including the use of additional staff to make sure that these conditions are maintained.

In the final analysis, discipline is needed to maintain a level of anticipated performance in an organization. We don't discipline people to punish them; we discipline them to maintain a code of conduct. Disciplinary actions should always be based on a standard of behavior, not personal bias. We have a right to expect individuals within fire agencies to perform a certain way under the conditions in which we live and work. Discipline is intended to maintain uniformity in that behavior so our organization doesn't perform erratically and inconsistently.

For this reason, individuals who are reluctant to take minor disciplinary actions shouldn't be officers. Failure to take action on minor infractions starts to change the benchmark for acceptable behavior in an organization. Although it's absolutely essential to review and modify department values over time, it shouldn't be done by pushing the envelope of propriety.

One of the best examples that comes to my mind is firefighter hair length in the '60s. I can recall extensive discussions over how long sideburns and mustaches should be. In the course of one of those debates, I asked a chief officer why this was such a big deal. His answer to me was "That's the tradition of the fire service."

I went home that night and dug out a bunch of history books, photocopying some of the pages. I brought them in the next day, pointing out that some of this country's top-level fire officials once wore beards or mustaches, both of which were considered appropriate facial adornment. The chief officer who had stood behind tradition was outraged.

After I had escaped from his office and the clutches of that discussion, I began to evaluate why hair standards were regulated in our organization. It seemed that facial hair was more of an scba problem than an appearance issue. I concluded that I would rather see a firefighter upset over a requirement for beards than in a hospital bed from chemical inhalation.

Organizational discipline should take an "all for one and one for all" approach. What's good for anybody should be good for everybody. We also have a right to decide which behaviors are inappropriate. For example, I personally would find it difficult to deal with anybody who would steal from another firefighter in the firehouse. I also think that a person with a reputation for lying or cheating is inconsistent with the basic values of all firefighters.

Nonetheless, we have evidence of all of these behaviors in the fire department. Unfortunately, they're seldom dealt with until they become so dramatic that we end up taking an action that's both traumatic to the recipient and tragic for the organization as a whole.