Accountability is easiest to defend when it is clear, consistent and applied before problems become personal. The first article in this series examined how tolerated incompetence, dishonesty and destructive behavior erode trust across a department. The next step is determining how chiefs can respond without confusing compassion with avoidance or accountability with punishment.
This is important for the chief in the moment: There is a big difference between a person who is learning and one who isn’t meeting the standard. There is also a big difference between a mistake and a pattern. There is a difference between someone who needs support and someone who refuses ownership. There is also a difference between being wrong and being dishonest. Good leaders pay attention to these distinctions because they matter. They don’t use accountability as a punitive hammer, but they also don’t confuse compassion with avoidance.
Define the standard early
The first responsibility of the chief officer is to define what right looks like — establish the expectation and how to achieve them. People cannot meet standards that have never been clearly explained. A healthy department needs a way of doing business. That means more than a mission statement. It means the organization has a common understanding of how leaders communicate, how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, how problems are elevated, how performance is coached, how behavior is corrected and how truth is protected.
Without that common operating picture and overall understanding of what right looks like, accountability becomes personal. But with it, accountability becomes organizational. This is why honesty must be written, taught, expected and enforced. Departments should not wait for a serious investigation to announce that lying is unacceptable. It should be clear from the first day a person enters the organization. It should be part of every officer’s expectation document. It should be discussed before promotion, not after failure. It should be included in command expectations, employee evaluations, internal investigation standards, recruit orientation and leadership development. The entire organization should know where the line is before someone crosses it.
This organizational need for doctrine and practice is a critical area where many leaders fail. They wait until they are angry before they address performance. They avoid small corrections until the issue becomes big enough to require formal discipline or punishment. They let frustration replace documentation and process. They confuse being liked with being trusted or give vague or passive-aggressive feedback, then blame the employee for not improving. That isn’t leadership. It is just delayed avoidance dressed up as patience.
Correct problems before they grow
Leaning in and addressing issues early is one of the most adult and humane things a leader can do. Early correction gives your people a chance. It prevents small problems from becoming identity-level conflicts and allows attorneys to buy new boats. It prevents the leader from building a case in private while the employee remains unclear about the concern. If a firefighter, officer or chief officer is not meeting expectations, they should know that clearly, specifically and promptly. The conversation should be direct enough (candor) to be understood and respectful enough to preserve dignity.
This does not mean every issue becomes discipline or punishment. In fact, just the opposite. Strong accountability systems should prevent some discipline because expectations are clear and feedback is timely. Some examples:
- A healthy officer can say, “That is not how we do business here,” before the feedback becomes more formal.
- A healthy battalion chief can pull a captain aside after a call and say, “Walk me through your decision-making, because what I saw created risk.”
- A healthy assistant chief can tell a BC, “You are avoiding conflict with your officers, and it is now affecting the shift.”
- A healthy fire chief can tell the command staff, “We are not going to talk about culture and then tolerate behavior that damages people.”
The same must be true with candor and honesty. A leader should be able to say, “You can make a mistake here, and we will work through it. You can make a bad decision, and we will evaluate it fairly. But you can never lie about it. You cannot conceal information. You cannot mislead the organization to protect yourself or each other. That is not who we are.” That message should be delivered before the crisis, before the investigation, before the legal proceeding. It should be part of the culture long before it becomes part of a disciplinary file.
Build a culture of candor
Candor has to move in all directions. Chief officers should expect feedback from the field, labor, peers and the people closest to the work. The ability to hear feedback requires vulnerability and maturity. It also requires leaders at all levels to separate discomfort from disrespect. A firefighter raising a legitimate concern with candor isn’t automatically being disloyal or attacking the decision. A company officer challenging a deployment decision is not being negative. A union president identifying a trust problem and bringing it up to the chief is not necessarily creating conflict for the sake of conflict. Sometimes the organization’s best early-warning system is the person willing to say what others are only whispering.
At the same time, candor can’t become a free license for bad behavior. We used to excuse disrespect by wrapping it in the language of just being “old school” or “that’s the way we are.” That excuse has run its course. We aren’t living in Backdraft, Ladder 49 or some fire department TV show, and there are books of lawsuits to prove it. Professional candor is clear, timely and tied to the mission and the way. Bad behavior is personal, corrosive and usually self-serving. An officer who humiliates other firefighters is not maintaining standards; they are damaging the next generation.
The healthiest organizations make the expected way of doing business visible. They teach it in entry-level academies, officer development and promote for the behaviors. They model it in labor-management meetings and in formal and informal mentoring programs. They reference and return to it when decisions are hard. Over time, people begin to understand that the department is not chasing personalities or preferences. It is building a consistent standard.
Leadership requires personal discipline
For the chief officers, this level of leadership understanding requires personal discipline. We must be willing to examine whether we are tolerating something because it is truly manageable or because we are tired of dealing with it. We must ask whether our patience is helping the person improve or simply transferring pain to the rest of the organization. We must be honest about whether we are protecting the mission or protecting ourselves from conflict.
We also have to ask whether we are making excuses for dishonesty because confronting it will be painful. That is a dangerous place for any leader. Once deception is minimized, the organization starts negotiating with reality. Facts then become flexible. Trust becomes situational. Discipline becomes harder to defend. Promotions become suspect. Formal investigations are doubted. The informal message becomes louder than the formal one: Tell the truth when it is easy, but protect yourself when it matters. We should never allow that message to take root.
There should always be room for grace in leadership. People go through hard seasons. Good employees stumble. New officers make mistakes. Even experienced chiefs can misread a situation. A department that has no grace becomes brittle and fearful. But grace without standards becomes permission. The balance is not complicated, but it does require courage. Support the person. Tell the truth. Set the expectation. Provide help. Watch the pattern. Document reality. Act when action is required.
Grace without standards becomes permission
The fire service doesn’t need perfect leaders. I have never met one. What it needs are leaders who will tell the truth, hold the line and ensure the organization’s standards are more than words on paper. Competence still matters. Character still matters. So does the willingness to correct behavior before it becomes part of the culture.
Every chief inherits problems — that just comes with the job. But every chief also leaves behind a record of what they chose to confront and what they chose to live with. People may not remember every email, policy or meeting, but they will remember whether their leaders protected the organization when it counted. They will remember if poor behavior was excused because someone had rank, history, friendships, technical skill or political cover. They will remember if the best people were expected to carry the weight while others were allowed to drift. More than anything, they will remember whether the truth mattered when the truth was inconvenient.
A fire department’s culture is not built by what the fire chief says. It’s built in the daily decisions that show what the organization will accept. If we want a disciplined, capable, mission-first department, then we cannot excuse incompetence, accept bad behavior or allow deception in the name of loyalty or power. That may be uncomfortable, but the work is too important to do otherwise. Our people and the public deserve better.
The responsibility that comes with the bugles
It should be clear by now that chief officers shape the environment around them. They can make expectations clear or leave people guessing. They can build trust, or they can spend it down. They can deal with problems while they are still manageable, or they can allow them to grow until the damage is much harder or impossible to repair. They can make honesty a non-negotiable part of the organization, or they can teach people that deception is survivable if the person is useful enough.
The standard has to be visible, consistent and real. That is not harsh leadership. That is the responsibility that comes with the bugles. In this profession, that responsibility cannot be optional.
References
Detert, J.R., & Edmondson, A.C. (2011). Implicit voice theories: Taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship at work. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 461–488.
Edmondson, A.C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Kouzes, J.M., & Posner, B.Z. (2011). Credibility: How leaders gain and lose it, why people demand it (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
