Supporting fire service leaders to build a stronger culture

This is the second part of a two-part article describing how fire and rescue services can leverage the leadership and culture that is critical to both surviving and thriving. The focus of this part is on how services can enhance their leadership culture by supporting and developing the leaders they already have.

Our experience at Real World Group over more than 20 years of supporting organisations to create more values-based, people-focused cultures has shown how fundamentally good leaders can become distracted by targets, find themselves separated from what’s happening on the ground, and don’t realise what effect their leadership, or lack of, is having on the culture of their organisation.

By taking the time to pause, gather feedback from others on their leadership, reflect on that feedback, and act on it, they can truly transform their approach, and therefore, their impact on others. They can then start to role model the type of leadership they expect from others – it is a choice that each of us has the power to make.

The what and the how of leadership excellence

So what do the most effective leaders do? The National Fire Chiefs Council Leadership Framework is clear that leadership is much more than what you do well professionally. They echo what our research has consistently found is key to leadership that creates superior, sustainable performance – recognising that there are two factors we must attend to:

• The ‘what’ – effective leaders are sufficiently competent in managerial or professional skills critical to their role (but they don’t need to be the most skilled person in their team)
• The ‘how’ – leaders are only effective when they ensure they enact their skills and competencies in a way that maximises other’s potential, and which is closely aligned with the values of the organisation.

Unfortunately, it is far more common for organisations to be familiar and comfortable with the ‘what’ and to either exclude or insufficiently focus on the ‘how.’ Both are essential, and need to be embedded in leader selection, appraisal and development to get culture right.

Engaging leadership to maximise potential

Our research over the past 25 years has built on the foundations by our founding director, Professor Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe, exploring exactly what leaders do on a day-to-day basis that enables them to harness the full potential of their people. This research and resulting Engaging Leadership model has been published in a number of scientific journals and utilised around the world by PhD students from all sectors.

Engaging Leadership shows that the ‘how’ of effective leadership comes down to simple, common sense behaviours. True leaders treat people as human beings rather than simply human resources. They value their input, they encourage them to question, they demonstrate appreciation and show genuine concern for their needs and aspirations. They coach and mentor them so that they can achieve their best for their team and organisation.

These leaders don’t just focus on their team, they also proactively influence the wider culture of their organisation. They lead across boundaries, seek feedback about what they and their service can do better, and they actively build shared visions of success with stakeholders to create greater value than the individual parts of the system.

Importantly, they are always looking to improve as a leader and genuinely seek the input of people at all levels. After all, who knows the reality on the ground better? They create learning from mistakes and ensure they provide clarity of expectations for others. They are prepared to take risks and make tough decisions when required. At the core, they are people who act with integrity, honestly and consistency: they believe that the good of the organisation is more important than satisfying their personal ambition.

Longitudinal research we’ve undertaken with King’s College shows that this approach to leadership not only has a direct, causal influence on performance, but it also increases innovation, change readiness, motivation, wellbeing and other positive outcomes.

Our practical experience of working with fire and rescue services here and around the world shows that it can transform cultures by enabling existing leaders to see a different, more effective way to lead, one that is powerful because it satisfies our fundamental human needs of being valued, appreciated, supported and developed.

Developing engaging leaders

In creating a bespoke 360-degree feedback tool that not only assesses engaging leadership but also reflects the specific requirements of an effective fire leader, we started by mapping the model to the NFCC Leadership Framework. In doing this we found very significant overlap, as well as a handful of FRS-specific senior leadership requirements which we then incorporated into the FRS360 tool we created.

In the fire and rescue services that have applied our 360 tools, it should ideally begin with the senior team led by example in undertaking the FRS360 themselves, followed by individual feedback sessions to enable them to interpret the feedback in their own context and create action plans for what they felt they needed to develop. A team workshop follows, with the individual 360s combined into one team report which they explore together. On this basis, the senior team can agree what are their collective strengths to leverage and development needs to action to become even more effective in influencing the culture they want to see.

While the vast majority of important leadership behaviours are the same regardless of level, there are some that can vary, such as the need for political skills or defining organisational strategy. We have worked with fire-based OD experts to create middle-manager, supervisory leader and firefighter versions of the FRS360.

Through upskilling fire and rescue services’ own people from both operational and support roles to run the feedback sessions for these versions of the tool, the 360 is then rolled out in a cost-effective way that upskills these facilitators better understanding leadership and developing their coaching skills. The 360 can be provided to individuals throughout the organisation to help truly embed the values and culture that fire and rescue services need in every nook and cranny.

Practical tips for enhancing leadership and culture

• Explore how well your selection, performance appraisal, promotion and development processes reflect the leadership behaviours in the NFCC framework. Reflecting the wrong frameworks, or using 360 tools that only focus on competencies or the motivations and needs of the leader in question can make things worse.

• Everyone knows deep inside what great leadership is, we just forget among the many demands on us. Help colleagues reconnect with this by asking them to describe the best boss they ever had (someone highly competent who also motivated them to go the extra mile) and they will list the leadership they want and need. They just need to then actively do more of what their best boss did for them.

• Leaders often think that it’s necessary to make a choice between achieving targets or keeping their people engaged in their roles. The reality is that if you do the latter, the former comes more easily. Making the tough stuff happen successfully, whether it is achieving a challenging new goal or leading people through change they are less than keen on, is about recognising that people have emotions and need to be allowed to discharge them first, and they have great ideas about how we can achieve things

Once you invite both of those into the room your people are much more likely to come along with what you need them to do – and enable you to achieve a much better result.

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Read part one of this article in full: Leveraging the right leadership and culture for the fire service.