I was recently asked, “What’s one mistake you see a lot of probies make?”
It’s been a long time since I was a routine visitor in the firehouse, but during paramedic school I took a lot of clinicals at different stations and departments to learn as much as I could. Almost every station I visited had a rookie, probie, boot firefighter or whatever you call the new person. One station had two.
As for mistakes, I saw a lot of little things: showing up last minute or late, checking text messages, nodding off during the day’s in-service training, and so forth.
One thing that really stood out for me: In regard to daily station duties, about 50—60% of the rookies only made enough of an effort to give the illusion that they were doing something. They’d slowly sweep the floor and then hide out, only to return with a lame excuse as to why they were MIA while others finished the remainder of the work. Often the lame excuse was, “I wasn’t feeling good.” That lasts until the call drops, and then they’re suddenly feeling well enough to be first on the apparatus bunked out, seated, buckled in and ready to go–wondering what’s taking the old-timers so long to get on the rig.
One day I asked a rookie, “What are you thinking being slack on station duties? Don’t you understand that the effort you put in when not on a call allows you the opportunities to build trust, camaraderie and all the intangibles that I can’t put into words with your peers on the engine or truck?”
The response: “They hired me, I’m part of the team now and I don’t want to do more work than anyone else here.” Fortunately for me, the rookies were never my preceptors for my clinicals.
With the station I visited that had two rookies, one had a couple years on the job from another department and the other was a rookie straight from the local community college academy. Bet you can’t guess which rookie worked their ass off.
I asked the more experienced rookie why he worked so hard, and he related that he knew what he had to do to “make the team.” He said he’d tried to school the new rookie without success. I stopped by the station roughly a year or so later, and the hard-working rookie was clearly a member of the team. The slacking rookie had been though their three stations, swapped back and forth five different times on various shifts, and probably wouldn’t get an opportunity for a sixth swap. I know for a fact that people perform differently depending on who they are working with and for, but in my opinion, I think they put too much effort into keeping the new rookie.
The moral of the story: If you’re the newbie, you have to find and do the scrub work to earn the respect and trust of the crew that you’ve joined. If they can’t trust you to do the little things in the station without coaching, how can they trust you to do anything without direct supervision and micromanagement on the fireground?