A couple months ago I wrote a column here about personal succession planning in which I suggested that line firefighters might want to consider entering management at some point in their careers. At least one reader took considerable offense to this suggestion.
“It never ceases to amaze me how self important people can be,” they commented. “You talk about aspiring to management, but you apparently do not acknowledge that without firefighters and company officers, you would have no need for management.” This reader went on to say that the true rewards of the job can never be experienced when one is “melted into a desk.”
More recently, controversy flared last month due to an article about Chicago firefighters in which a couple department members touted their own levels of service by dissing members of suburban departments. “It’s all about being aggressive,” said one firefighter. “And pride. We’re not in the suburbs.”
Them and Us. Management and line personnel. City and suburbs. Prevention and operations. Volunteer and paid. A Shift and B Shift. There are endless ways people on the job can be divided against one another. To some degree, this division is normal. People naturally define themselves in solidarity with those who are like them and in contrast to those who are different. But too much “them and us” can lead to real problems.
I once consulted with a fire department for which a major source of division was civilian versus uniformed employees. The department was in the process of creating more civilian positions and making some historically uniformed positions into ones that would be filled by non-sworn personnel. Not surprisingly, this caused considerable concern and anger among some people as the balance within the department shifted.
The response by some uniformed department members was to completely disregard and even undermine the jobs that the civilian members were doing. “We don’t need them at all,” one officer told me. “We could just do it all ourselves, at the station level. But since we’re stuck with them, we just ignore them as much as we can.”
Excuse me? Ignore resources that could help serve the community better? Does this make sense to anyone?
Certainly the person I spoke to is just one person and does not represent the entire department. Nor do a few Chicago firefighters necessarily represent the prevalent attitude among all members of the Chicago Fire Department. But it is also not realistic to say, as one person did in follow up comments, that the sentiments expressed were a complete aberration, a result of a couple “knuckleheads” getting carried away. Them and us attitudes never occur in a vacuum — they are always reinforced by prevailing organizational culture.
Whenever them and us is the focus, the real priorities get lost, which is service to the community and keeping people safe. Division and polarization lead to degraded communications, a real safety issue on any emergency scene. Promoting a culture of them and us may make some people feel good in the short run, but ultimately it undermines trust and damages the credibility of the organization within its service community.
And in the end, that’s what it is about — serving the community. One firefighter said that without firefighters and company officers, there would be no need for management, but without a community, there would be no need for fire departments at all. When people’s houses catches on fire or their parents have heart attacks, they don’t really care what city or what shift responds as long as those responders are trained, capable and ready to help them.
A friend who was a union president for a large urban department once said, “We always had our differences between labor and management, and we fought hard at times. But one thing I learned was that whenever we could get on the same side of an issue, we always won.”
When it comes to serving the community, everyone needs to be on the same side. No one wins when a them and us attitude prevails. Disrespect breeds only disrespect. Such attitudes are often fostered at the company officer level, and that is where they can end.
