Episode 111 - Parallels and Extreme Ownership with Chris Welchel

For this episode, we sit down with Chris Welchel, co-owner of the Towing and Recovery company Welchel Enterprises, to talk about leadership; specifically the concept of “extreme ownership.” What it is, how to walk the walk, and how to get your followers on board. But along the way we also end up finding out that the towing and recovery industry is a lot closer to being like the fire service than we had ever realized.

Episode 109 - Do We Need to Demystify Leadership? (Part 1)

This episode grew out of a discussion while hiking that maybe we have talked about great leadership to the point where anyone starting out on their leadership journey may think good leadership is almost unattainable. Have we elevated the discussion to mythic proportions? In our pursuit of sharing the challenges of leadership on so many episodes of this podcast, are we actually discouraging people from stepping up and leading?

Episode 108 - The Most Sacred Leadership Principle

On this episode, we examine the crash of a B-52 in 1994, and the events leading up to it, through the actions of two of the four USAF officers killed: the pilot whose disregard for safety led to the crash, and the copilot who had tried to have him grounded. This is a story about missed opportunities and what can happen when warning signs are ignored. It’s a story about tolerating things that we shouldn’t. But most of all, it’s a story about copilot Lt. Col. Mark McGeehan’s bedrock belief in the most sacred of leadership principles.

Episode 102 - Building Experience And Turning It Into Expertise

In this episode, we dive into how firefighters’ decision-making process works, and how critically reliant that process is on experience. So, where are we missing opportunities to build experience and convert it to expertise?

We’ve come up with a new concept called DIFOS that is a series of questions that can be asked to really examine how a decision-making process evolved. It can be used on-scene after a fire or in any situation where an important decision was made.

Episode 100 - Bob Maynard Part 2: Purposeful Non-Compliance

Photo credit: Maarten Visser This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Bob is the first guest we’ve had to show up to the recording with a powerpoint presentation. And while that gave us a chuckle, it’s a presentation filled with concepts that blew us away…and it’s a presentation that he “threw together” the day before. There’s a lot here, and we barely scratched the surface on some of it, but we really dig into purposeful non-compliance in Part 2.

We also discuss getting everyone dialed in on paying attention on scene, as well as teaching all of our folks to speak up when they see something they think may be important. We also discuss what accident investigation in the airline industry may hold for the fire service, heuristics, and Bob throws in a literal war story from Vietnam about tunnel vision.

The presentation Bob made:

Episode 099 - Bob Maynard Part 1: The Most Interesting Man In The World

Bob on the right.

Bob Maynard is Shane’s father-in-law, and he just happens to also be one of the most interesting people we’ve ever met. Highlights from his past include Chinook helicopter pilot during Vietnam, personal pilot of one of our leadership idols, did 20 years with the FAA, and now runs his own company training pilots to fight forest fires. And while he’s never fought a fire in his life, a LOT of what he knows about flying directly applies to the fire service.

In Part 1 of our interview with Bob, we begin to explore purposeful non-compliance - when you know you shouldn’t do something, but for some reason do it anyway.

The presentation Bob made for our discussion:

Episode 098 - Technical Expertise vs. Judgment

This episode started with the deceptively simple question, “At what level in your organization do people begin to feel and act as if they are valued more for their judgment than for their technical expertise?” We applied that question to our own experience in fire departments, but it’s an interesting question for any organization. And that’s just the jumping off point for a discussion on the nature of judgment, what experience has to do with it, and the other ways you can build and strengthen your judgment.

Episode 097 - George Cowgill on Resigning, Retiring, and Leaving the Birmingham Fire Department

Former Birmingham Firefighter George Cowgill posted a very personal account of his time as a firefighter, and why he’s leaving that behind. If you’ve read it, you’re probably not surprised that it went viral, which is how we came across it.

In this episode, we interview George (in Birmingham) by telephone as he discusses how he decided it was time to go.

Episode 096 - We Debate What the Hell a Psychological Contract Is (and Whether You Can Break One in Good Conscience)

Like the picture above, psychological contracts can be binding, circular, heavy, old, rusty, and sometimes broken.

Before this episode, two of us hadn’t ever heard of a psychological contract, but apparently we all have them. What they really are, who you have them with, and whether or not it’s okay to break them are questions that aren’t so easily answered, but we give it the ol’ Combustible try.

Episode 093 - We Solve The Pay Problem

Spoiler Alert: we don’t really solve the pay problem. That would break a long-standing tradition on our podcast of not solving anything. But there are virtual arms races in some regions as departments raise salaries to compete for what seems to be an ever-shrinking pool of firefighters. Pay is one of those things that we’re all talking about, but we haven’t talked about. So, we took a stab at it.