Are you fully confident in your ability to navigate successfully the political environments in which your agency operates? Do you know WHAT to do to be effective, as well as HOW to do it? If you answered “no” to one or both questions, I invite you to join me on July 24th for an IAFC [Continue Reading…]
Effective Delegation Tool for Leaders
May 12, 2014 by Leave a Comment
Early Saturday morning I went to the Long Beach Fire Department’s Training Center to attend a traffic control class for CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) members. The CERT program manager, Firefighter/Paramedic Jake Heflin, a highly respected and nationally recognized expert in emergency preparedness and response as well as a sought-after FEMA-certified trainer, came in a [Continue Reading…]
Public Safety Insights Newsletter: March 26, 2014
March 26, 2014 by Leave a Comment
March 26, 2014 VOLUME 2, ISSUE 6 A Quick and Easy Way to Demonstrate Your Agency’s Value Public Safety Insight: You can demonstrate your agency’s value easily by re-framing existing data in ways that people care about and can understand quickly. Fire Chief Dennis Mueller of the Lake Havasu City (AZ) Fire Department knows what [Continue Reading…]
IAFC Webinar: Relationship Interoperability: How to Excel at the Human Side of Operational Effectiveness
January 7, 2014 by Leave a Comment
How would you rate the quality of your relationships with internal stakeholders such as personnel, union officials, and in-house governance bodies (e.g., fire commissioners)? What about your relationships with external stakeholders such as the public, partners, and decision-makers (e.g., politicians, administrators)? Would you like to learn some practical, immediately usable tips and techniques [Continue Reading…]
Setting Priorities: It’s Not Just for Field Operations
December 31, 2013 by Leave a Comment
As triage experts during emergencies, first responders would seem to be naturals at establishing personal and professional priorities. After all, triage requires them to evaluate victims and situations to make on-the-spot decisions that often have life or death consequences. Thus in non-life threatening conditions, setting priorities would seem to be a walk in the park. [Continue Reading…]
Accountability: It’s Not Just for Field Operations
December 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Throughout my varied career, I understood “accountability” to mean that people are held responsible for doing what they are supposed to do, with consequences for poor or non-performance. It wasn’t until several months into a project with a client that I discovered that the fire and rescue service uses this term in a very specific [Continue Reading…]
How to Help Employees and Stakeholders Embrace Change
June 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Resisting change is part of human nature. Yet change has become the new “normal” in today’s world, including in the public sector, where change tends to occur at a glacial pace, if at all. These two facts illustrate why it’s critical for public safety leaders to help their employees and stakeholders embrace change, or at [Continue Reading…]
Consolidation: Panacea or Pandora’s Box?
April 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment
There’s a lot of talk about “consolidation” going on in the public safety arena these days, as well as some action. For example, municipalities such as Naples, FL are beginning to combine adjacent fire districts; others such as Long Beach, CA are consolidating their police and fire dispatch centers; and still others, such as Sunnyvale, [Continue Reading…]
