Fire & EMS Leader Pro The job of old firefighters is to teach young firefighters how to become old firefighters!

Not so fast! Are you still telling your stakeholders what YOU need or are you telling them what THEY need? In his best seller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the late Stephen Covey calls this “seeing the issue from the other person’s frame of reference and crafting your message so that it comes back to them through their frame of reference.”

So I did, and the CEO of the company picks up my call! Great customer service and I’m not even a “buying customer”! I can only imagine what you folks do for the people who buy your products!

Then “sticker shock” set in. When I first saw how much of a difference there was between my regular paycheck and my disability retirement check…I knew big changes were in store.

The leaders of most U.S. fire department are struggling to make ends meet these days. Smaller departments, and particularly volunteer fire departments, are facing real challenges when it comes to having apparatus that's ready for duty.

Time for another of the great "less filling, tastes great" debates within the fire service: Should a department run a dry or a wet pump during cold-weather operations?

Growing up most of us have probably been told, “You only get one chance to make a good first impression”! This is also true in the market place for any business, organization or individual.

Let’s “cut to the chase”, shall we? We've got many paradigms in the fire service that we need to “break" and one of them is how we seek resources to get the job done.

Is your department consistently faced with an inadequate number of qualified and properly equipped firefighters arriving at the scene of a structure fire? Are your people launching an interior fire attack solo, or with only another member with them? (We know this is happening every day in the USA, don't we).

Think it’s not important to your efforts to recruit, hire and retain the right people? Here’s an Fire Prevention Demoanecdote from one of my fire service colleagues on Facebook, Firefighter Irene Silknetter Fitzkee, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania:

One of the core responsibilities for any emergency services organization is the proper training of its personnel for safe over-the-road operation of emergency vehicles. This is especially true for fire and EMS organizations operating large trucks, when roughly 25 percent of annual firefighter fatalities occur when responding to or returning from alarms.