ISLAND: How to Create an Environment Where People Thrive

Thank you for having me on today.

Well, the program itself is putting together some kind of a format to teach others how to do it. And where it came from was my own recognition, I think even going back to early in my career, realizing that my biggest stressor wasn’t the calls I was going on, it was the workplace I was coming back to.

And then, as I became a leader, whether it was as a shift commander or moving up to a chief level, you know, how do I control that workplace environment in such a way and influence it so that people want to keep coming back every day? Most of my experience has been spent with small communities that had limited resources.

So, as far as using salaries and benefits and things like that as a retention tool just wasn’t there. So, we had to create these other processes. I had the opportunity to go through the certified public manager program with the University of Wisconsin, and my applied project was kind of the reverse engineering of what we were doing in the department because we’re recognizing that we’re having better outcomes than we previously had had and didn’t really understand what all was it that was coming together.

So, a lot of it had to do with leadership strategy, but some of it was kind of forming by accident because it worked for the staff, too, and it became part of the culture of the department. At one point, we even went, like, almost 4 years between hires at our department, which is just unheard of in a small rural agency, at least in our region. So, we’re doing something that worked well. But now, how do you take this program and form it into something that other people can emulate and make it work for them? Because we know there’s not a one-size-fit-all for anybody either.

Every agency is different in its own culture. So, what are the concepts that we use and what can people take and then apply them to their own situation to improve things?

So, I grew up on Washington Island, which is in northeastern Wisconsin. It’s off the end of the Door County Peninsula.

So, you take highway 42 ’til you run out of land and then get on a ferry and spend a half hour on a ferry and get to this really vibrant community, which has a year-round population of about 700. So, I’m a graduate of Washington Island High School, which is the smallest public school in Wisconsin.

Well, top 10 for sure.

But I am in the top 7. You know, going on to college, I had started on the fire department there. My dad was on the fire department. My grandfather had also been a firefighter in Illinois. So, I’m a third generation firefighter, and started on the department while I was still in high school there.

Went off to college in the Milwaukee area, worked in private ambulances in the Milwaukee area while I was in college, and public safety just became my career, my life. So, my entire adult life has been spent working in public safety in some capacity.

Yeah, you learn a lot about the connection between people. You learn that that interaction I have with them today matters 2 weeks from now, and it matters to the people that touch them, too. So, if you’re a jerk to somebody today, 2 weeks from now, you’re going to run into somebody that they know in the grocery store that might be mad at you because of that interaction that you had 2 weeks ago.

So, you understand that this is this ongoing process. It’s not just as simple as we have an interaction today and it’s over. This is part of something that’s a lot more organic, that’s growing, and, you know, the culture that these communities grows on its own, I mean, it’s — think of it like Australia being an island broke away from the land mass millions of years ago, and just kept evolving on its own without a lot of outside interference.

That’s our organizations, too. It’s largely influenced by the people that are on the island with us without a lot of interaction from people from outside. So, that culture evolves on its own, and we have things in all of our cultures that are like kangaroos, right? Only up here in Australia. But it’s part of that community’s culture.

And I think we need to understand that, and especially as leaders, are those things functional to our organization? And are they getting us where we need to go overall?

So, the idea is that we want to improve inclusion, safety, laughs, accountability, nourishment and direction. So, inclusion, safety, laughs, accountability, nourishment and direction. And in each one of those, putting an emphasis on the specific things that we can control that we’re responsible for as leaders in their organizations.

So, thinking of, like, inclusion, are we actually being inclusive with our staff? Is everybody operating on that same playing field? Are we giving everybody an opportunity to have a say in things? Are we encouraging them to participate? Or are we just having whoever participates participate? Because there’s some people who, just by their personality, need to have that encouragement or that invitation.

So, sometimes when we think about creating an inclusive environment, we might want to interchange the word invitation rather than inclusion. Because I think as leaders, we have to keep inviting people in. We need to not fall into the habit of having these in groups and these out groups and the cliques and the things that develop. I think they develop naturally when we’re not being inclusive because we’re just not paying attention to that.

Oh, yeah, for sure. I think that’s something that’s just natural for us to do.

But as leaders, we need to be aware of that so that we can reach out to maybe some people that have opposing views to us, too. I think the worst thing that I could have had as a leader is people that are just telling me I’m right all the time.

Yeah, lots of the things that I learned came from staff members saying, you know, you’re screwing this up, right? And having that open communication where it was okay for them to do that. You know, a question we might want to ask when we feel like there’s somebody that’s not participating or are part of that inclusion is what can I do to help you feel more engaged?

I know I approached an employee who was struggling at one point and asked that question and it led to a 2-hour conversation of all these things that I didn’t know I was doing that was making their job more difficult.

Yeah, that was a very educational response for me with that employee that really taught me that I have a lot more responsibility in this person’s impact on the workplace than I’m giving myself credit for, and creating that environment where they can succeed, you know, understanding that their biggest stressor is coming from the workplace.

So, what are we doing to include them in trying to mitigate that? You know, these people are our biggest investments by far. I mean, 90% of our budget’s going to personnel. I was thinking earlier about, you know, if we have a 4-person fire company, you know, you’ve got an engine that costs you a million dollars, but over the lifetime of that engine, we’re going to spend 30 million dollars, but we put very little regard into the maintenance of maintaining the employees at a high level and maintaining their wellness and so on and their family life and things like that. But we wouldn’t want to skip an oil change on the engine, right? So, you know, we have 90% of our investment going to people. But at the same time, we’re putting all our energy into the device itself that the people are using.

So, part of that is, you know, being inclusive is starting to make that shift in our mindset ourselves to better support the staff.

And then moving on to safety.

Safety refers to creating a civil workplace. So, working on the civility and the respect and displaying mutual respect — even though we don’t always agree — and making it a safe place to come to. I know we have tremendous issues in the fire service with harassment, whether it’s sexual harassment of women, just harassment in general, bullying, hazing, things like that.

There is a study that was done a year ago that came out of Wisconsin, that was done by Shelby Perket, that made significant reference to that. I think FireRescue1 actually just ran an article on that this week, talking about the prevalence of the harassment in the fire service. And that’s, I think, been part of the culture forever in the fire service.

The problem is that’s not culturally acceptable anymore in the real world, and we’re operating as a function of government, and the expectation of the public has shifted. And the expectation of our workforce coming in has shifted. We don’t have anybody that we’re hiring today who has ever been allowed to be bullied at school.

From day 1 when they walked in, they’re supposed to report bullying and someone else came and solved it for them. So, there isn’t that same resilience. And I think some of the older generations sometimes think of that as, you know, we hired all these snowflakes. Well, it’s not that we’ve hired snowflakes. We’ve hired people that have a different expectation for our behavior.

And we need to meet that. We need to understand that these behaviors and the uncivil behaviors are very detrimental to that team and significantly impact the results at the street level because it damages trust. And when you see well-functioning teams that are working together and producing good outcomes, there’s significant trust within those teams.

So, that’s something that we need to work on. It’s something that we need to train on. I’m willing to bet that most agencies aren’t training on civility. That was one of the things that we incorporated into our training plans so that annually we’re doing a civility training and it might be something as simple as going out and picking up Christine Porath’s TED Talk on why civility makes sense for your workplace.

Yeah, it’s excellent. 15 minutes and have a 45-minute discussion about it amongst the team, and that’s your first training for the year. And it’s very powerful. So, it doesn’t have to be complicated, and it doesn’t have to cost money, but it requires us to shift some of our perceptions and some of our behaviors towards each other to better improve some of that communication and being inclusive and so on. So, I really think inclusion and civility really interrelate to each other because there has to be that trust built.

And then moving on to laughs. I think we’re very good at creating fun in our workplaces, right? Or finding things to laugh at; whether or not they’re appropriate might be a whole other question. And that might go back to some of the harassment studies that are being done. But I think there’s a lot of ways for leaders to find fun ways to support the department’s mission that are another outlet for staff, rather than just grinding away and feeling like a number. Whether it’s some of the community outreach activities that can be done. And, you know, getting out and changing up that routine a little bit and helping people feel like they’re making these significant contributions to the agency’s mission, you know, and seeing the people that they’re serving. Because it’s hard to think about the people you’re serving when you’re going out and doing lifts assist every night at 2:00 in the morning and again at 4:00 in the morning and so on. And you’ve been to the same house 100 times and so on. It’s hard to realize that there’s actually this broad community out here that we’re serving every day.

And it’s not just the people that are calling 911. We’re here for everybody. So, you know, trying to incorporate some of those activities in and being part of these other groups, whether it’s going and doing programs at the schools or maybe at the nursing home or so on, but getting out there, doing things that are a little bit different, change up that routine.

And, you know, what works for one group might not work for another one. So, what works for that group or that person to help them feel engaged and being part of something that’s this community rather than this is just my job I’m going to grind away on for 25 years so I can retire.

Now on accountability. Moving on to that. I think of it as authentic accountability because it has to be something that someone internalizes. We can’t create accountability by banging our fist on the table and saying, "You will do this or else," or what we’re going to get is the person’s behavior is going to just barely touch that standard so they don’t get the hammer and they’ll never excel.

So, one of the things that I incorporated into the discipline process — or when things didn’t go well with using just culture, and I think you’re seeing that really come down the pipe hard in EMS in particular — this idea that the organization shares responsibility for the thing that didn’t happen.

And it also shares responsibility for the good thing that happened, too. We need to remember that part is that 99% of what’s going on is good. And there’s these infrequent events, with most employees anyway, that aren’t that. But trying to really understand what the root cause is of the thing that happened that we don’t want.

And is it something that where somebody just made a mistake? Is it a training issue? Is it something where the person’s, like, violating policy not realizing what the consequence will be? Or are they just being plainly reckless and just going out there and deliberately doing things that harm the organization?

You’re going to approach each of those with a different perspective. It might be training. It might be some minor discipline. It might be a termination. I think under just culture, the terminations become very infrequent because we realize that the root cause is somewhere up the chain, and it’s not just because of a deliberate act by the employee. But trying to get the people to internalize their behavior and their expectations, rather than just avoiding punishment. When I think of an emergency responder, overall, I tend to look at them as the kind, compassionate problem solver.

That’s how I framed it with the staff. They needed to be nice. They needed to care about what those are serving, and they needed to make decisions that made things better. If I expect this person to be a decision-maker and make decisions, I need to understand as a leader that sometimes that decision isn’t going to go the way they intended.

And I think just culture leaves them in the position to continue making decisions without fear that a mistake is going to bring the hammer. Right, so we want them going out doing good things that we think will be decisions that make things better. But that being said, they — you know, we have to have a process in place to cause correction when things don’t go well, either.

Moving on to nourishment, how are we fulfilling the human needs of our staff members? Because we all have needs. We all want to grow as people. And when we feel stagnated, that’s when we lose some of that engagement. And engagement is a very good tool for letting us understand if the good things are going to get better, or if we’re seeing lots of negative actions happen, like lots of injuries and things like that.

There’s probably a poor engagement issue.

Gallup did a study on that years ago, the State of the American Manager, that talked about employee engagement. And what they found is that when employees were engaged, the good things went up a lot, and when they weren’t engaged, the bad things happened a lot. So, if we want good things, we need to figure out how to engage the staff and nourishing them as a way to do that.

So, how are we helping them grow? What’s their ongoing education plan? Do they have an ongoing education plan? What do they want to be when they grow up? And how do we help them get there?

No, I think that’s a really effective tool when the stay interviews are done well is what are we doing well?

Because we always ask, “What are we doing bad?” Right? “What are the things you want me to get rid of?” But we don’t ask, “What are we doing well that we should do more?” So, how do we do that? So, one of the questions I started using in evaluations with staff was “What are your career goals?” And “What can we do to help you accomplish your goals even if accomplishing those goals means you no longer work for us?” So, we might train them right out of the organization. So, when I make reference to that, we lost staff. We had like a 4-year period and then lost staff. We had one who left the agency to go work for an agency where his friend became chief, and he lateraled to that and took a $32,000 pay raise.

It’s hard to compete with that argument.

The other one that left shortly after him became the chief of another agency. And one of the things we had done is provided training and opportunities to grow into that and become a chief of another agency. Those are the kind of losses you want to have because they’re going to something.

They’re not trying to escape from something. And that was the whole goal behind that. The other part to this is how are we addressing the staff’s mental wellness? You know, are we incorporating wellness into the workplace? What are their expectations that we have for them for sleep? You know, are they expected to just grind it out?

Especially now when you have staff that are working these 48/96s and things like that. If they run a lot of calls and don’t get a lot of sleep, are we expecting that then they go to sleep, or are they expected to do station duties all day, too? And starting to make that shift to putting the person’s wellness ahead of the needs of the organization as a whole, sometimes too, in trying to find that balance. I think we see a lot of organizations that they spend a lot of money to have an EAP that’s a poster on the wall with a phone number.

One of the things we incorporated into our annual training plan is that each year we would have 1 training that would be all the resources available to the employees. And we’d have people come in so they could put a face with that. So, to take EAP beyond this poster on the wall. That said, if you’re sad, call us and make it a resource that’s fair for them to use, and they feel safe using it. We have a significant issue with PTSD in our industry. I can tell you when I started 30 years ago, I never in a million years thought I would be someone that would have PTSD. Well, for one thing, 30 years ago, they didn’t tell us it would happen. Now, at least we train this to people to start recognizing it.

But the culture was so strongly against saying anything if you were starting to have symptoms that I went for a very long time before I went in and got the treatment that I needed for that. But now I’m willing to share that experience with others, too, and say, you know what? Not only did it help me with the situation that I was experiencing and the symptoms that I was experiencing, it made me better. Look at this example of all these different things that I’ve accomplished in my career as a leader since going through that process. It’s not something to be afraid of. It’s something that we should be embracing and encouraging.

And I think we’re doing better with that in the last few years. Dena Ali’s podcast that you ran back in December speaks to that, too, and speaks to that interaction between the increase in PTSD and poor leadership. And I think we need to be very, very conscious of that. You know, we wouldn’t send people out to be exposed to hazardous materials on purpose.

So, what are we doing in the internal workplace to mitigate that, too, and make sure that we’re working with their wellness? And then the final letter is direction. So, D for direction. And that’s our communication plan. How are we communicating with each other? How are we interacting with each other?

How are we getting this shared vision of what the department’s trying to accomplish? And where are we going? You know, one of the things that we did in our organization when I was the chief is the staff had developed this mission statement that described the staff as kind, compassionate problem-solvers.

That was built right into the mission. And that became something that was very easy to communicate and understand because it was appearing everywhere. This is the expectation for your behavior. Whether it’s here in the station or out with the community or so on, first and foremost, you’ll be a kind, compassionate problem-solver.

We actually built that into our hiring processes and everything. That was the targeted attributes of the employees that we would be targeting, would be the kind, compassionate problem-solver. But, you know, how are we communicating these things? How are we kind of moving forward? Because lack of communication is one of the huge stressors that emergency responders have.

When you look at it, you know, in the focus groups that I’ve done on that, lack of communication is number 1. If I make a word cloud with it, it’s in huge letters. We need to be conscious about how we’re communicating things, and we can’t lead by email. You know, that’s another thing that we need to remember is that there’s appropriate things for email and there’s appropriate things for face-to-face contact.

And figuring out which ones are which and being accessible to staff in our leadership roles so we can have casual conversations and build organic relationships. Because that relationship will never be built over email. If anything, there will be misconceptions about what’s being said over that email.

One of the things I saw in a book by a coach once was, are we telling him to score touchdowns? Are we telling him not to fumble? So, how are we messaging the thing in the first place? Now, if we tell them to score touchdowns, they might fumble once in a while. So, that’s where we go back to that accountability and that just culture to help them get back on their feet so that they can go and score a touchdown.

But if we tell him, don’t fumble, they’re not going to fumble, but they’ll never score a touchdown. You know, they’re just going to sit back and be so conservative. That doesn’t work in this business. We’re in a business of responding to emergencies. It’s a very high-risk business where we need them to make decisions on the fly with not a lot of information and we need them to score a touchdown.

It becomes a process, and what my experience has been, working with individual agencies, is that if there’s an adoption by the leadership to some of the ideas, and they pick a concept to work on, that can really help facilitate some of the growth in the organization. Generally, we’ll go in and train the leadership and the line staff and everybody on the concepts. If the leadership does not go along with ideas, it creates this rift. It can almost make things worse, at least on the front end, because the staff will become hyperaware of these concepts.

And as firefighters are, they’ll point out every time that that concept is not being expressed. So, there has been times where leadership did not want to adopt or wasn’t willing to make the changes that they needed to make but expected the staff to, and it created some issues. But largely a lot of my work with this has been on the law enforcement side that became a very challenging place to work, you know, starting around 2020 with the civil unrest and things like that.

Where a lot of law enforcement leadership has been interested in this and has done some individual work with it. I’ve done a number of presentations at national conferences on the concepts and so on. So, it kind of depends. I know in my own experience that it works well. I know of chiefs who are individually working with these ideas on a regular basis from their own leadership development and I get a lot of inquiries. I have an inquiry right now for a national conference this fall, working on employee wellness. So, it definitely resonates with people. But I think the key idea is taking these concepts and making them work with you.

Because my leadership style, especially growing up in a small rural community on an island, my approach to interacting with people and the things that I just intuitively know from that are different than somebody that might have worked — you know, grown up in a large, urban area, for instance.

So, what this looks like to me and what it looks like to somebody else are different. The concepts are still valid, but they might have to express them in different ways. And each organization needs to figure out its own path to bringing these within their culture, and what that looks like for each individual as part of this greater organization.

I think we’re at a crossroads in our industry. I think we all recognize that. What the fire service looked like for the last 100 years will not look like that a hundred years from now. And we’re in this big transition period. I think the biggest thing that we need to do is put more of an emphasis back on our people.

We need to better support our people. We need to retain the people that we have in our workplaces. We have the greatest job in the world. I mean, without a doubt, I mean, we get to go do things that nobody else gets to do and have these tremendous impacts on the individuals in our community every day.

We work with amazing people. I’ve met the best human beings in the world working in public safety. They just want to go out there, do good for the people, and how can I help? And I think that’s just part of our culture, but we also need to recognize that with that, when we take leadership roles, we have a responsibility to help keep that going.

And I think with all the research going on and stuff, we’re becoming a lot smarter about the things that we need to target, but our training largely hasn’t caught up to that, especially at the local level. We aren’t there. I mean, National Fire Academy and EFO Program has excellent programs, teaching some of the similar concepts to this, but that’s hard to get to for a lot of people.

So, what do we do each day to grow ourselves as leaders? And what’s our goal today? And how do I want to better serve our staff? Because my own successes as a leader never came because of something that I was doing. It was because of the outcome that were being created by my subordinates.

So, I was leading people in a certain way, but they were actually the ones out on the street level doing good work that then reflected positively on me. And if there’s a concept a new leader can understand, I think that’s a critical one — is it’s not about me. My job is to put them in position to be successful.

Well, and think of the impact a good leader has on the home life of their employees, because nobody leaves their work at work. As much as we say we leave our work at work, we don’t. So, if this person’s coming to this workplace that’s miserable, and you’ve got this oppressive leadership style that’s just beating them down, beating them down, beating them down, that’s going home with them.

There’s a reason we have a 75% divorce rate in our industry, and it’s not the calls. Right? We go on the calls, we get impacted by the calls, we have the critical incident stress issue, and then we come back to this workplace that’s this force magnifier that makes everything worse. And then we go home. And then we sit at home, and we dread going back to work the next day, because we don’t want to deal with it. This is the part — we control that. Our leadership, how we interact with our staff and what goes on in those 4 walls of our stations is what we control.

We can’t control that 911 call. And I think, as we put more emphasis on workplace, on culture, on serving our staff, well, I think we’ll see improvements at the street-level performance, too, that come with that. There’s studies coming out of hospitals and stuff that say that the training providers and soft skills and like conflict resolution and communication actually improves outcomes better than treating them in the hard skills.

So, you know, making that mind shift away from the stuff so much and more to the staff. I think what is part of this transition that we’re in right now, and in some ways, we have the opportunity because we have a generation coming in that’s saying, “We’re not putting up with your garbage anymore.” It’s that simple.

We don’t have an option because they won’t be here anymore if we don’t learn how to lead them differently.

Well, I’m an employee of the Wisconsin Office of Rural Health at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine.

The best way would probably be to email me there. My email is small5@wisc.edu. So, S-M-A-L-L-5 at W-I-S-C dot E-D-U. And I’m always happy to help out, provide materials or give advice to our leaders.