Previous Story
3 Tips for Improving your Team Leadership Skills
TIP # 1: Identify and set-up shop in your team’s strengths and passions
It’s easy to lose focus of what we enjoy doing when we are drowning in administrative responsibilities, and/or dealing with difficult people on the job, especially when you go months or longer between fires. When you find yourself or others burning out, or struggling with motivation, knowing the strengths of your team members and coupling them with their passions can help serve as the jump start to a dead battery. One only needs to look to the small training groups around the country whose passions are creating fantastic research on civilian saves, search operations, suicide prevention, fire tactics, etc.
As a leader, it’s important to make sure you know your people’s passions (teaching, training, physical fitness, etc.), so that can you continue to keep them engaged. The fire service can quickly start to feel like work, and less like something we enjoy, if we stay away from our passion for too long. Leaders tend to operate in the areas they enjoy, almost exclusively at times, and this can turn other team members off while leading to the incomplete development of the team. Knowing your team’s strengths and passions will transition into our second point—finding an easy win.
TIP #2: Find an easy win, and sustain momentum
An easy win is a great way to help galvanize your group together. Every group either seasonally, or when new members arrive, needs to feel success in order to reinforce that the course direction the leader has set, as well as all the work that is required to get there is worth it! Oftentimes the opportunity to perform under true high stress in our passion and strengths i.e. structure fires, vehicle extrications, technical rescues, can be as seldom as rainfall in the desert.
As leaders, finding an easy win involves motivating the team towards the lowest hanging fruit items. Leaders don’t always need to hit home-runs with performance improvement. Look for easy to fix little things, and celebrate the accomplishments. If a team who has never trained routinely, starts with quick in-services a few times a cycle—that’s a win and needs to be celebrated (even though it’s not the hour or two a day you think is necessary). Having fun is the easiest way to create and sustain momentum towards improvement.
TIP #3: Find a way for PRIDE to show up on the job
Each of us loves this job differently, and that’s a good thing. It can be frustrating at times to leaders when others don’t demonstrate the same type of motivation they do, or gravitate to the same aspects of the job that we find fun. As leaders, we need to discover for ourselves, and at times help our team discover for themselves, how pride can show up on the job. Ladders getting cleaned, bay floors getting scrubbed, a thirty minute in-service around the pump panel that turns into three hours of healthy discussion…these are all great signs of teams showing pride in the job.
I’ll be the guy who always pushes everybody out the door to train if I have to, but it’s incredibly powerful when the group decides that for themselves. Create a space in which leaders can emerge, support people through learning mistakes, and above all make sure you demonstrate humility when you screw the pooch. Mistakes are okay…as long as it’s not the same ones that keep popping up. Pride is a symptom of a much larger organizational issue–winning!
