'Americans love a winner." That's what George C. Scott said in the title role of "Patton." Every year, millions of people tune in on Super Bowl Sunday to see if their team will become the next champion. Right now, Regis Philbin is capturing a lot of audience attention by providing the opportunity for someone to become an overnight millionaire.

Yes, we Americans do love a winner - unless we're trying to win, too! Of course, our excitement about someone winning changes drastically when we're one of the competitors, because that's when we want to win. If we don't, we're disappointed and angry, and sometimes we give up on further competition.

Ways to be a winner Competition is a way of life in the fire service as well. We compete for the job of entry-level firefighter, and we continue to compete our way to the top job of fire chief. To better understand the chances of a person obtaining that top goal, we should look at the types of winners who emerge from the contests we admire.

For example, a lottery winner just happened to pick the right numbers - no skill, no talent, just dumb luck. A person who wins money on a tv quiz show is a little bit higher up the scale, because she has to answer questions that require knowledge even if she isn't competing with anyone but herself. A person who wins a decathlon is still higher up the scale, because he has to both prepare for the event and outscore his opponents. The coach of a championship athletic team has to manage both his performance and that of the team.

So what's the lesson to be learned here? Winning can sometimes be a matter of luck, skill or circumstance, but winning at things that really count requires preparation and practice. Which is it going to be when a person competes for the opportunity to lead or manage a fire service agency? This is a serious question, because operating a fire service agency is becoming more and more like coaching a championship athletic team than winning the lottery.

While writing this article, I was very much aware that it would appear in a magazine aimed toward fire chiefs. Why would I want to discuss with them the preparations for running a fire department? Well, there are at least three reasons:

1) Today's chiefs have the opportunity to help their successors be better prepared than they were when they were aspiring to the top job.

2) Some of those in the position today may well need some more assistance in improving their own knowledge, skills and abilities.

3) There are readers, future chiefs of department, who are deciding how they're going to be ready when their time comes.

Education or experience? For many years, its members have contended that the fire service needs better-educated fire service leaders and managers. Very few argue with that point any longer. There's also a belief within the fire service that we need experienced personnel to assume some of the more difficult tasks. That's a reality too. So what's the right combination of education and experience that ensures a person's place in the winner's circle?

For about 10 to 15 years now, there's been an increasing demand on newly hired fire chiefs to be almost all things to all people. I wrote about that phenomenon in "They said they wanted Superman, but ...." [Ed.: See Chief's Clipboard, March 1995, available at www.firechief.com>.] Since its publication, I've spoken with many fire chiefs who said that their career development process didn't address some of the specifics they faced when taking over the chief's job.

Not only were those chiefs right, but the state of career development is getting worse. While we've constantly improved on the curriculum of fire science technology at the community college level, just getting an education isn't enough to compete for a chief's job today. Even though we've also improved on opportunities to obtain advanced degrees in the fire service, they're too few and far between to help everyone who needs the assistance. In-service training programs are almost completely inadequate sources of information for an upwardly mobile person.

Granted, some agencies have created what are called "career development guides," which are very useful in providing some structure to the preparation process. Unfortunately, they're often myopic and oriented toward past practices instead of presenting new expectations to prepare the chief officer.

After reviewing many of these documents, I would say that they're very useful in pointing out the various educational and training sources used to qualify a person for promotion, but they're not the least bit helpful in determining whether or not the person is prepared for that promotion.

To that end, I've developed a few guidelines for you to consider when contemplating what all of this means. These guidelines listed below have to do with the events that occur when a person embarks on a track for upward mobility.

* The best way to be prepared for the next job in the hierarchy is to be competent in the current position.

* Every level of the fire service is built on the knowledge of the previous level, but there's often no connection between the knowledge, skills and abilities required at the higher level and those of the one you just left.

* Every job in the hierarchy has aspects that are never revealed until you get the task of dealing with them.

* There's no one place where anyone can go to learn everything needed to deal with increased responsibility.

* You can't learn all jobs in the hierarchy at the same time. Each has a different mix of variables.

These guidelines might give the impression that being prepared for the promotional process is a lot like climbing a mountain. You have to keep hold of where you are before you reach out for the new step, but once you leave where you were, you had better be prepared to hang on, because there's a longer drop each time.

In some ways, this is the very reason that potential chiefs aspire to the opportunity. Being increasingly prepared to cope with higher levels of responsibility often results in a sense of excitement and enthusiasm. The real issue is that this preparation can't be superficial, lest you get the job and not really have the tools.

Performance dimensions The fire service now has two separate tools that might help bridge the gap between the job and the tools: the Commission on Fire Accreditation International's Self-Assessment Manual and the iafc's Professional Designation Program. [Ed.: See "Something borrowed, something new," Aug. 1998, and "On the fast track," Jan. 1999, available at .] While these topics won't be explored in detail here, their body of knowledge offers a clue for the preparation of chief fire officers.

In the self-assessment document, there's a comprehensive listing of the categories, criteria and performance indicators that go into the management and leadership of a department. In the chief fire officer designation program, there's a parallel process that tracks a person's exposure and involvement in the processes needed to use the self-assessment methods. Each document also includes an extensive bibliography, where the knowledge of the technical tasks can be researched. What is missing is the human behavior link between accreditation and designation.

To that end, let me introduce another concept: performance dimensions. If you've ever taken an assessment laboratory, you've been exposed to the concept. Dimensions are actual behaviors that can be measured and therefore evaluated, such as oral and written skills, analytical skills, decision-making, interpersonal communication, and the ability to prioritize. These dimensions are reflections of how people behave under a specific set of circumstances; they're the skills and abilities people use when confronted with a task.

If we take these three concepts and look at them from a distance, we can see that there are correlations among them. Accreditation encompasses an overall scheme for operating a fire agency; professional designation ensures that the person who runs the agency has a combination of knowledge, skills and the ability to use the right methods; and performance dimensions charge the person with the responsibility to perform when called on.

It sounds simple, but it isn't. There are often conflicts when a person achieves the responsibility to operate a department, but lacks the past experience and education to deal with one or more components of the job. Just like the coach of a winning team, a fire chief can't get by on luck or talent alone. He or she needs a game plan.

Knowledge versus behavior This need for a game plan leads to an element of career planning that's not discussed as often as the issues of education and experience: the evaluation of a candidate's personal strengths and weaknesses. This isn't the testing process, it's the preparation process.

Col. David H. Hackworth discusses this aspect of the planning process in his book "About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior," which addresses the preparation of soldiers going into combat. Noting that "Practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent," Hackworth goes on to say that doing something over and over again doesn't mean that you'll succeed in doing the right thing when confronted with a problem. It merely means that you'll do what you've practiced to do.

In the fire service, we need to ensure that future chiefs are getting ready for the types of activities that demand the most appropriate response to a problem, not just a repeat of what's been done in the past. How do we do that? One of the answers is a career development process that balances the emphasis on the fire service's technical aspects with the development of the knowledge, skills and abilities that transcend the specific problem facing the chief.

Within the basic concept of career development, there's a need to develop specific knowledge, skills and abilities, but they have to be appropriate for the task or activity. There's a wide range of activities needed to be better prepared for moving up in an organization.

Acquiring technical knowledge is very one-dimensional. A person preparing for a higher level of responsibility needs to realize that there's more to that process than taking a class on the subject. There are other considerations, such as engaging in activities that develop other needed skills and abilities.

For example, let's consider legal issues and concerns. There could be many different behaviors to develop competency in this area. To acquire this behavior, you need to actively apply the technical knowledge. Application is as important as abstraction, because theory is useless without making it work. Activity is preferred over exposure.

Balanced development I'm sure that many of you can recall individuals who had a lot of education on a topic but couldn't put it into practice. You probably also know some people with intuitive skills who have never stepped foot in a classroom. Since neither situation is ideal, this process focuses on a balance in career development with:

* constant improvement instead of stair-stepping,

* role modeling and mentoring, and

* personal inventory of strengths and weaknesses.

Constant improvement bases your preparation on continuous involvement in the process instead of gearing up for examinations and coasting in between. Examples include involvement in committee work above and beyond the normal commitment, such as serving on developmental processes whenever possible.

Constant improvement relies on a daily attempt to learn more about every dimension of the job instead of studying up for the exam, but it isn't constant activity. It's a conscious effort to acquire new knowledge and information instead of trying to learn it as an incremental class or as a means to acquiring a certificate.

Role modeling and mentoring has been written about many times. In career preparation, however, the role model and mentor take on a new relationship. They're not limited to people, but to the ideas of those people.

As you work your way through the needed technical knowledge, skills and abilities, there are many mentors who could and should be contacted. Of course, a single mentor isn't capable of providing you with all of the dimensions. You need to use the mentoring process to acquire knowledge from as many people as possible.

The last element,the personal critique, is the most difficult. This is where many candidates fall short, because they become so enamored of their own image that they fail to realize their weak points. A similar problem occurs when they become so focused on trouble in one area that they lose sight of their overall ability to perform. Self-critiques are not enough.

To truly conduct a personal critique, you need to get to know as much about yourself as you can. This involves using everything you can to learn about your personality and behavior patterns, including your decision-making style, stress-handling preferences, and verbal and written skills. These can significantly help a person assess what he or she has to improve on to become more efficient and effective.

The chief's job has become more and more demanding over time. Consequently, prospective chiefs should begin developing their skill sets long before they acquire the responsibility. Of course, even though every recruit firefighter we hire is a potential fire chief, people seldom identify their lifelong goals early on in their career.

After researching this concept for many years, I'm now convinced that the only way this approach works is when people make the commitment themselves. The decision to take a comprehensive and interpersonal route to career preparation is different from just studying up for the next exam. It prepares a person to perform better after the selection process.

The responsibility for making that decision is very personal. It can't be made by a person's superior, and it can't be institutionalized within the departments' career planning processes. Yet individuals who understand that getting into the winners circle isn't a function of luck or chance can accomplish it. The price of overnight success is often constant preparation.