Seek first to understand...

Seek first to understand…

Here’s an exercise you can do at an officer’s meeting to help your supervisors improve their coaching skills. Give them the following scenario:

“You have a subordinate who is misbehaving. In one sentence, write how you would handle it.”

Then have each of the officers report out on what they would do. As each tells how they would handle it, keep score by putting a hash mark beside one of the following three categories (though don’t share the categories with them until all the answers have been given).

Tell-Inform-Instruct-Advise

Ask-Understand-Discuss-Learn

Unsure

All of the responses will fall into one of the three categories above and if your session is like most I facilitate in my leadership develop programs, you’ll see that most of the responses fall into the first category.

If that happens, you will have a teachable moment. The best officers/supervisors are those who seek first to understand, then to be understood (from Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People).

All too often an officer wants to jump right into the solution to the problem… telling… informing… instructing… and advising… usually with a healthy dose of threatened disciplinary action for non-compliance to the officer’s demands. Talk about the set-up for a bad coaching session.

The best officers seek to understand why the behavior is happening and then try to work with the subordinate to develop an action plan to improve the performance to meet the acceptable standards of the organization. That, my friends, is the set-up for success!

Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
Executive Director
Center for the Advancement of Situational Awareness & Decision Making
www.RichGasaway.com

Situational leadership: Using the right tool

How to handle a particular personnel situation is often the topic of interview questions for promotion. These can be difficult to answer because the question rarely contains all of the information needed to make a good decision. This can work to your advantage or to you disadvantage depending on how you choose to resolve the use.

In most cases, the short answer to how you’d respond to a personnel issue should be “It depends.” However, if you stop there you’re probably not going to score well on the interview. Take the response to the next step and share with the panel what it depends on. What are the critical criteria that are essential to evaluate to make a good decision.

Say “It depends on additional information that provides the critical criteria that would help me make a quality decision. In this scenario, that criteria would include…” and then list the things you would consider when evaluating the situation and how you would respond. There are many ways to handle problems and each scenario is dependent on the situation.

The best leaders have many tools in their toolbox to help them build and maintain successful organizations. If their only tool were a hammer, then every problem would look like a nail. If a hammer is your only tool, you’ll end up using the hammer on a board that needed a saw. This will cause you expend unneeded energy because you used the wrong tool. You may eventually shorten the board by beating it until it breaks. Obviously, there’s a better way to get the task complete. Use the right tool, at the right time, in the right way, under the right conditions. That’s situational leadership!

Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
Executive Director
Center for the Advancement of Situational Awareness & Decision Making
www.RichGasaway.com