Today's firefighters face a multitude of situations daily that require knowledge, skills, and abilities far beyond those required to fight fires, provide medical care and rescue entrapped victims. Many of those situations require skills more akin to a social worker than that of a firefighter.
Read More »Tag Archives: organizational knowledge
Homegrown Fire and EMS Leadership
Chief Eanes laid the foundation for the department's "homegrown" leadership when he assembled a group of fire officers from across the ranks of the department in 1985 to begin developing an Officer Development Program (ODP). The ODP—whose target audience was firefighter who aspired to promotion to the rank of Company Officer and incumbent Company Officers—was launched only a few short years later and would continue to be nurtured through the leadership of Eanes’ successors as Fire Chief.
Read More »3 Tools for Sharing Organizational Knowledge
So how can we in the Fire & EMS profession more proactively “capture” such knowledge before it “walks out the door” with the next retiree? Let’s take a closer look at some of our “old and reliable” information management tools: policy, procedure, and processes. Frequently, we use these terms interchangeably, but they are not synonymous at all. However, if we understand how the “fit” together, we will find that they can serve as powerful tools to help transfer organizational knowledge from one generation of members to another.
Read More »Communicating Organizational Knowledge to the Next Generation
So how can we in the Fire & EMS profession more proactively “capture” such knowledge before it “walks out the door” with the next retiree? Let’s take a closer look at some of our “old and reliable” information management tools: policy, procedure, and processes.
Read More »I was a “college boy” Fire Officer and Damn Proud of it!
I'm not saying that a more educated officer corps will prevent those kinds of things from happening in a department, but I am saying that I believe that it will reduce the organizational risk to a large degree.
Read More »Curators of the Organizational Culture
However, the more I look at news stories involving FEMS organizations that have been “ripped from today’s headlines”, through this “lens”—that of the organizational leader as a curator of organizational culture—I can’t help but feel…something must have been missing from their system of “law and order”.
Read More »More Customer Service Skills for Firefighters–The Wrap-Up
Reminds me of the story of what happens when you throw several lobsters into a lobster pot to cook. When one of the crustaceans tries to climb out of the pot, the other lobsters pull them back into the boiling water.
Read More »Learn to Use All the Tools to Market Your Fire and EMS Department
Your department’s website still needs to be the bedrock for your Internet presence, but with Web 2.0 there is so much more. Let’s take a look at some of the tools in the toolbox, shall we?
Read More »Passing Along Organizational Knowledge
While there are certainly many aspects of this shift that Fire & EMS leaders need to address, I believe one of the most critical is the communication of organizational knowledge from one generation of members to another.
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