“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” Abraham Lincoln

Talk about unsettling times!

• Recruiting and retaining a qualified, diverse, inclusive and safe Fire/EMS workforce.
• Meeting the needs and challenges of an aging population and growing multicultural communities.
• Bringing prevention to the forefront.
• Natural and man-made disasters with far-reaching operational and financial ramifications for the fire service.

When change is this monumental, we have two choices: It can drive us, or we can lead it. FIRE 20/20 is proposing that fire service leaders can master change. And we are promoting a workshop that provides the insights and tools for how that’s accomplished.

Mastering Change in The Fire Service is a customized version of a program called the Masterful Change Agent^TM that was developed by Hanley Brite, founder and CEO of Authentic Connections. We’re going to let Hanley introduce himself and tell you how his workshop came to be and what he believes is at the core of mastering change.

Background and experience

“My working career began in the Air Force. Four years later, I went to work for Dow Jones as a field service engineer. Eight years later, I joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). I migrated into technical training and then management development. DEC sponsored my rotating into a program involving Organizational Development and change management. That’s when I made it my career.

“I founded my first consulting company in the late 1980s. Over the years, whether as an officer for a large international consulting company or back in the corporate world as Director of Human Resource Development for Intuit, I focus on what leaders do to thrive and bring about effective change.”

Approach to change management

“Through all the years I’ve been working, I watched how well people talk about change, but when it comes down to really making it happen, they don’t have much success and rarely investigate why change fails. From my observations and experiences, I’ve come to the belief that the core of change comes not from some process or methodology, but an agent of change.

“My contribution to the field has not been inventing yet another supposed step-by-step process or methodology. Instead, I help develop leaders as masterful change agents.”

How Mastering Change in The Fire Service came about

“It’s the result of a collaboration relative to FIRE 20/20’s research and Larry’s insights—having identified a very specific set of critical and driving needs within the fire service—and my program called the Masterful Change Agent which I’ve been running since 2002 in both the private and public sectors. I’ve also run it as a public forum and within companies as a major intervention.

“I’ve known Larry for more than 25 years. He’s attended Masterful Change Agent as a participant and sat in on a session where we had fire service leaders. Larry proposed that a tailored version would help the new generation of fire service leaders to motivate and effectively navigate the growing complexities of leading a department.”

Principled-driven vs. using blunt instruments

“Everyone talks about change and lots of people are doing stuff around change but it tends to be mostly blunt instruments. The appeal seems to come from the hope that the blunt instrument will have a broad impact. I’ve found that this doesn’t work.

“Here’s an example. I went into a large technology company on the heels of another consultant who had tried to hammer change with a blunt instrument. The company was dealing with quality problems, missed deadlines, poor decisions within the organization and what I call ‘upside down attrition’—the people you wanted to stay were leaving and the people you wanted to leave, were staying. They had been working on these problems for a long time and their blunt instrument was some rigid 8-step communication process. It was top-down and one way. ‘We need to tell them; tell them again, and if that doesn’t work, we have to find a new way to tell them.’

“The medium for that message was videos of the CEO. I watched just two and then told the CEO that he needed to change the way he was communicating—to stop producing videos and set up small groups where he talked to them directly.

“The more precise action that I recommended came from seeing effective change as being principled-driven. Before I explain what being principled-driven entails, let me get right to the success. These talks with small groups, shifted his point of view, completely changed the content of the discussion, and most importantly, positively reversed the way he was perceived in the organization.

“Principled-driven means that a certain set of values guides actions and decisions. Values come from people. An analogy I use: It’s not about the scalpel—it’s about the surgeon. A fool with a tool is still a fool. So with the value of people as opposed to a methodology being primary, we’re supporting you as the most powerful instrument you have for change.

“The ‘you’ in this principle is the fire chief and the command staff. Their actions and what they say as leaders is much more powerful than any methodology.

“Another principle is having compassionate understanding for why people resist change. Most people resist change for what they believe to be good reasons. Discounting what they believe or forcing them to believe differently only causes more resistance. Leaders’ ability to be able to listen and empathize with those reasons paradoxically is the best way to get people off the dime. And be open to consider more compelling reasons for them to change.

“When you read your environment through the sharper lens of clear values, you get better quality information with which to take more precise actions. Precise actions tend to have a lot more leverage to them, yielding more results.”

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Mastering Change in The Fire Service is a two-day workshop. The first workshop will be held on November 11th and 12th at Montgomery County Fire Rescue Training Academy in Rockville, Maryland. The workshop has been structured to have three-person teams from fire departments participate. The $2,400 fee for a three-person team includes materials, lunches, snacks and beverages.

If you would like to have a workshop conducted in your area, contact us at: info@fire2020.org.