Leading a Culture Change

		Robert A. Creecy has 26 years of service with the Richmond Fire Department and has been Fire Chief since 2005. He’s also a change agent. According to Wikipedia, a change agent “is someone who intentionally or indirectly causes or accelerates social, cultural, or behavioral change.” Barron's Educational Series, Inc. defines a change agent as “a person whose presence or thought processes cause a change from the traditional way of handling or thinking about a problem.” What’s motivating Robert to lead a culture change in his department?

“There are a number of issues that are deeply ingrained. I don’t want to give the impression that the Richmond Fire Department is broken or doesn’t have good people. What we do have are some complacent behaviors that have settled into the organization. For us to become the progressive fire department that I know we can be, I decided that we would have to change these complacent behaviors. When you want to make that kind of change, you’re working at the bed rock with deeply rooted stuff.

“How we treat each other in the fire department when we think nobody is watching is how we treat the community we serve. I don’t think you can have biases or a negative attitude and turn them off. You can do a good job of being with the customer in the moment but over the long haul I think that on a personal level and on a team level, that kind of ingrained mindset and behavior tends to leak out.

“The starting process for us was a retreat based on confronting racism and sexism with my command staff of battalion chiefs, deputy chiefs, and some station captains. In the beginning of the retreat, the conversation was along the lines of, ‘We really don’t have that problem in the department. Every now and then this individual or that individual will do something inappropriate and we deal with it on a disciplinary basis but we’re a family and we look out for each other and we try to take care of these things.’ When that was said, other people in the room would roll their eyes. We realized that when we stopped and got right into it not everyone in the room could or would agree as to: What do you mean by family?

“In the intensive period of time we were together, those are the discussions we became deeply involved in, which we had politely avoided having because they’re difficult. We’re afraid of being labeled. We’re afraid of being misunderstood. We’re afraid of being able to express ourselves accurately. But we have to get through what’s painful to have what Larry Sagen calls ‘courageous conversations’.

“A courageous conversation is where you stop trying to convince someone that your belief/idea or position is the right one and in order for you to be right, someone else has to be wrong. A courageous conversation transcends that—it’s one where you seek to understand and be understood. [In FIRE 20/20’s July Newsletter, Deputy Chief Robert Oliver shares his wisdom on courageous conversations, http://www.fire2020.org/July_FocusLeadership.html.]

“I want to debunk any notion that what I’m doing is courageous—it’s not. It’s essential. In many fire departments in the United States today, there is enough stuff going on that presents enormous risks to the organization. All you have to do is read any of the fire service online literature to see what happens in departments large and small when they let these issues fester. They have avoided the courageous conversations hoping it won’t blow up. But when it does, it does so much damage to the organization on so many levels and in so many ways. That doesn’t even take into account the tens of millions that get spent prosecuting and litigating inappropriate behavior in the workplace. Once they get past all that, fire departments will bring in consultants to study the problem and get to the heart of what’s wrong. They will then devise a plan which contains lots of training (usually along with some terminations) to deal with it and try to bring the organization out of the train wreck and put it back on track.

“If we see evidence that this is happening all over the country and we have evidence that some of that behavior is here in our department—that there are some individuals who are not behaving properly in the workplace or who don’t have the right attitude toward a contemporary workplace setting—then if I don’t do something about this individual, if I don’t handle this correctly, it can blow up. They can’t be treated as isolated incidents. They must be handled as a symptom of a deeper problem. This mindset becomes risk management and gets out ahead of the problem. We have a choice: pay now or pay later. I want to remove the potential of litigation from the equation. We’re spending the money now to help the organization find a stronger culture to embrace. As Gordon Graham says, ‘Firefighters haven’t invented any new ways to screw up. It is predictable, and if it’s predictable, it’s preventable.’

“The retreat provides a good example of our experience with considerable misunderstanding and speculation as to what we are trying to do. Our retreat, or what we called ’Empowered Leaders in a Global Society’, was nicknamed variously by the grapevine as ‘the pajama party’ or ‘lock-in’. For logistical and cost reasons, we selected a location here in the City that included overnight accommodations, and I was urging those attending to take advantage of the opportunity to truly retreat from other distractions. That caused considerable heartburn for some who did not consider it necessary to stay or had other family considerations. To accommodate everyone’s wishes and to quell the ‘noise’, I backed off and allowed staying to be optional. Instead of focusing on the chatter of dismissive criticism, what everyone is now hearing is that the participants were wowed - ‘blown away’ by the experience. They were deeply moved and changed by the experience.

“To expand on this reaction to the off-site retreat and another project to assess our capacity to support diversity, I am keenly aware that some members of our Department are saying that it’s all a waste of time—just more ‘window dressing’ to make it look like we are doing something about today’s ‘issue du jour’ or something to pad my resume. Others are spending more time listening to the naysayers or reacting to what they think it is about, rather than investing themselves in truly understanding what it is really about. Strong, individual resistance isn’t going to go away overnight, and some individuals may never ‘get it’, but most people are really saying that they are tired of hiding from these issues and not dealing with them. Those who are part of the generation already here in the workplace today and arriving in greater numbers every year want to get this behind them and move on.

“Because of the word spreading about the retreat, more and more people down in the rank-and-file are saying now that they understand that it’s tough stuff, but they feel it’s way over due and desperately needed. They are the ones I am committed to, and I appreciate their willingness to do the ‘tough stuff’ and their enthusiasm for getting on with it. Together, we are going to move the Richmond Fire Department—the sixth oldest paid department in the U.S.—from living with history to making history.

“The highest compliment I’ve ever been paid came from my EEO/Diversity officer who has been on-the-job 37 years and working on this issue since he was among the second generation of African-American firefighters to join the department. He told someone that he has worked for nine different fire chiefs and I was the only one willing to take this issue head-on—with both hands and both feet—and not avoid it. And again I will point out that this is not courageous, just necessary.

“What we’re doing is not bound by a set timeframe. We can’t say that in six months, we’ll kill all the bogeymen—that everyone and everything is fixed. We’re crafting a solution for what is really wrong and then we’re going to spend many years working at it collectively as an organization with a purposeful intention to accelerate change to our culture.

“I often use metaphors to make a point. To do this otherwise would be like walking out into your back yard one day, looking around and seeing wire grass, crab grass, weeds, and matted leaves, and then deciding that you want to turn it into an English garden—one with very ordered rows of plantings, perfectly spaced. You take out a leaf rake and give the yard a quick once-over, and then throw a handful of seeds here and there and wait for your English garden to appear. Obviously, this will never work. You will have to diligently tend your soil and eradicate the weeds. You have to figure out what’s there to begin with—what can be kept what can be gotten rid of—and then you have to come up with a design. You have to select the right plants based on your plan, and then have to prepare the soil so the plants will flourish. Otherwise you’re going to fail all around.

“Here in the Richmond Fire Department, our soil is good and our plants are of strong and hardy stock, but in places the sunlight has not been able to reach, we are finding entwined and choking weeds of hidden biases masked by what has been described as tolerance. Now we are creating a plan for a new garden and deciding what we have to do with our ‘soil’ to make it resistant to complacency and inappropriate behaviors and fertile for the values of inclusion and diversity. It’s that understanding we want to take root and grow within the organization.”

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There’s only one point where we disagree with Chief Robert Creecy: We believe that it does take courage—moral courage—to lead a culture change! His bio follows:

Robert Creecy’s connection to the Richmond Fire Department actually began in 1961 when his mother married Richmond firefighter, Arthur R. Sieg, Jr. Without realizing it, the many visits with his stepfather at the fire station, laid a very significant foundation for his life and his career.

After graduating from VCU in 1980 he taught high school English on Tangier Island and joined the Tangier Volunteer Fire Department. During that year and with the encouragement of Assistant Chief Jim Daley, he was drawn towards the calling of firefighter and applied to the Henrico Division of Fire.

Upon his return to Richmond after teaching, he volunteered briefly at Bon Air Fire Company #4 until being hired by the Richmond Fire Bureau. On June 7th, 1982 he started as a Recruit at the Richmond Fire Training Academy.

Over the next five years he served as a firefighter at Engine’s 22 and 12, received both Rookie and Firefighter of the Year awards, was a founding member of the Dive Team and served on the Disciplinary Hearing Panel.

From May of 1987 to March 2003, he advanced through the ranks of Lieutenant, Captain and Battalion Chief. Since then he served under special assignment to Fire Chief Larry R. Tunstall as an administrative projects manager. Over the past two years he coordinated the relocation of Fire Headquarters and the emergency renovation of Fire Station #21, flooded during Tropical Storm Gaston, and oversaw development of revised policies and procedures, as well as a number of other administrative and operational projects.

On May 2, 2005 he was tapped to be the Interim Fire Chief by Mayor L. Douglas Wilder and appointed into the permanent position on July 8th. He commands a department of 401 sworn firefighters and twelve support staff, with a budget of $35 million and calls for service approaching 29,000 per year.

He is married to his college sweetheart, Nancy Trexler Creecy, and they reside in the City’s Museum District where they have raised two wonderful sons, Austin (21) and Matthew (18). They enjoy the company of family and friends, occasional travel, and spending time at their little place on Totuskey Creek in Virginia’s Northern Neck.