A mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person. Derived from the Greek word mentÅr, the term was first used to describe a friend of Odysseus, the legendary Greek king of Ithaca and a hero of Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, who was entrusted with the education of Odysseus’ son, Telemachus.
In 1996, American singer/songwriter Paula Cole released her Grammy Award-winning single, “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” Ironically, it was from an album titled, “This Fire.” Fast forward to 2015, and I pose a similar question: Where have all the mentors gone?
Learning from the Past
When I started my career in the fire service more than 34 years ago, I can clearly remember being genuinely influenced by a couple of old, salty officers who not only taught me what it was like to be a good firefighter but clearly and respectfully demonstrated what it was like to be a good fire officer. Obviously, I was the less experienced and younger person, and it is evident to me now that these officers were setting the bar for me and providing me with invaluable mentorship without me even knowing it. At the time, I can recall being quite impressed that they actually took the time to share their experiences and focus on my development. Without a doubt, the lessons I learned and the attitude they instilled in me from their teachings have stayed with me throughout my career and led me to the place I am today-chief of department.
One of these mentors, who also served as the department training officer, took the time to explain not only his expectations of me but those of the department and what our role in the community was and why we existed-to serve the public. Yeah, imagine that, the idea of customer service professed back in the early 1980s in small-town Wisconsin. During one of the earliest training sessions I had attended, this training officer went to great lengths to explain to me and four other recruit firefighters what it meant to be a firefighter-not what it meant to be just any firefighter but what it meant to be a great firefighter and how to go about becoming one. It is without a doubt that, absent this message and his mentorship, I would not have followed the career path I did and certainly wouldn’t have established the strong sense of both servant leadership and customer service I have.
In Agreement
The questions that arise are simple: Do we have these same mentors today and, if not, why not? As an instructor for the local technical college, I encounter dozens of students each semester. Depending on the state certification class I am teaching, these students range from teenagers right out of high school to veteran, incumbent firefighters and fire officers seeking certification at one level or another and usually in pursuit of promotional opportunities within their respective departments. One of the questions I pose to both my “younger” students and the incumbent personnel is: What do you believe is missing in today’s firehouse? After listening to all the jokes about softer chairs, bigger TVs, and more cable channels, a common answer is revealed: mentors, role models, people who are willing to share their experiences and give help and advice to the less experienced and often younger members.
So, if we have a wide demographic of future and incumbent personnel agreeing on one thing, it’s that “experienced” firefighters apparently aren’t capturing the attention of our future and incumbent firefighters and fire officers. Maybe a better way to look at it is that we aren’t giving them the attention they desire and deserve. Well, then, how do we fix that?
One part of it is surely that we, as more experienced firefighters, have to not only remember where we came from but be willing to build on those experiences and share them with our respective audiences-and maybe not just when they ask about the “big one” but as a method of carrying on the traditions of the fire service and as a tool to educate our current and future firefighters on what we experienced and what went right as well as what went wrong. The value of learning from our past is increased exponentially when we examine all aspects of our response independent of how well or badly the operation went. As Spanish philosopher and poet George Santayana is credited with saying, “Those who fail to learn from the past are destined to repeat it.” This, in itself, should lend credence to the desire to learn our craft from those who have experienced it.
Teaching Moments
I believe this initiative to increase the amount of mentoring that takes place starts with redirecting the mindset of the more experienced firefighters and fire officers and proving to them that sharing their knowledge and experience is what the fire service needs. While textbook learning is valuable and definitely has its place in the fire service and training or drill ground evolutions build competency in our hands-on tactile skills, we also have to stress the lessons we’ve learned throughout the years and turn them into teaching moments-teaching moments that use the experiences of the past and carefully blend them with the new science like what we are learning from Underwriters Laboratories and National Institute of Standards and Technology studies.
Without this critical component of personnel development, the collective fire service is destined to continue repeating past failures and perpetuate the trend of firefighter injuries and deaths. Many of our more experienced personnel may not fully realize the importance of mentoring or even understand the potential impact it can have. If this is so, then it is up to the rest of us to make sure they understand what a difference it can make. Quite possibly the way to do this is to initiate dialogue with our more experienced personnel and ask them to look back on their first days, weeks, months, and even years in the fire service to recall the mentors who influenced them early on. I’d be willing to bet that most of them can identify without hesitation a person or two who took them under their wings and showed them the ropes. I certainly can recall the experiences that were shared with me and those that I was involved in, and not just the positive ones either. Growth and development come from the lessons we learn from both our positive and negative experiences.
RPDM
In fact, past experiences are the foundation for recognition primed decision making (RPDM), the concept similar to naturalistic decision making that has been widely studied by research psychologist Gary Klein and is described as a model of how people make quick, effective decisions when faced with complex situations like those encountered by firefighters and fireground commanders on a regular basis. Klein conducted research in the mid-1980s in which he learned that fireground commanders were making fireground decisions based on previous experiences.
In the RPDM model, the firefighter or fireground commander is thought to formulate a possible first course of action, compare it to the known factors of the specific situation, and select the first response or reaction that is familiar and is believed to produce an acceptable outcome. In other words, the decision maker takes the facts at hand and compares what he knows about them to previously experienced facts and information to make his decision. Because of the dynamic nature of emergency response, very few incidents are exactly the same. So to properly react, the decision maker has to take what he is currently experiencing and compare it to what he has already experienced, possibly at the hands of a capable and competent mentor.
One limitation of RPDM is that it requires past experience to use it to form your reaction. Absent sufficient or quality past experience, a decision maker is forced to guess at the correct response and literally hope for the best. Another limitation is what I refer to as the RPDM trap: When searching our past experiences for a positive outcome, firefighters and fireground commanders have been known to make the wrong decision or choose the wrong option simply based on the fact that the chosen outcome is the only outcome they know of and they get trapped into accepting it without considering other options or outcomes. How the decision maker interprets the information he is being exposed to and how accurately he believes it compares to the information he had previously experienced have an effect as well. If the decision maker misinterprets the original information, chances are very good that he will recall the incorrect outcome. In the realm of emergency service response, choosing the incorrect response could be devastating.
Maintaining Reputation
Critics of the “old guys” will say that things have changed and the more experienced personnel may not be able to fully relate to the current state of the fire service. Fires are different, specialty services are expanding, and EMS has taken a more prominent role in the daily operations of many departments. And, more importantly, we are doing more with less. Just because they have “been there and done that” doesn’t mean they fully understand what it is like to do the job under today’s conditions. While there may be some truth to that, the concepts of teamwork, brotherhood, and saving lives and property are still alive and well. Or, at least they should be because it is these characteristics that make the fire service what it always has been and what it should continue to be.
So what else can we do? Offer up a brief history lesson perhaps, explaining both what it means to be a mentor and to have a mentor. Explain what the fire service means, where it has been, where it is, and where it is going. Explain that we always have been and will continue to be a service-oriented operation answering the call 24/7/365 under any and all conditions. For the less experienced: Seek out your mentor. I’m fairly certain you know who he is. It’s not always the officers or the chief. Often, it’s the senior firefighter who serves as the unofficial leader or “floor boss” out on the apparatus floor.
For the more experienced: Be their mentor. Tell them “yes” when they ask for help. Better yet, don’t wait for them to ask. Offer up your experience and share your knowledge. At the least, recognize the importance of sharing the wealth of information you have.
Finally, as I recently read on a social media site, the job of an old firefighter is to help young firefighters become old firefighters. To do this, we must all do our part. Pass it on. Teach it forward. Make the fire service a better place, and keep it the greatest lifestyle in the world. Be a mentor to those who will lead in the future.
Joseph Knitter is a 34-year veteran of the fire service and chief of the South Milwaukee (WI) Fire Department, where he has served for the past 30 years. He is a Wisconsin state-certified Fire Officer II, Fire Instructor I, and Fire Inspector and is certified by the National Board on Fire Service Professional Qualifications as an incident safety officer. Knitter teaches fire certification classes for Milwaukee Area Technical College; teaches incident management for the State of Wisconsin, Division of Emergency Management; and lectures on various topics throughout the area. He has an associate’s degree in fire science and a bachelor’s degree in fire service management and is a graduate of the Executive Fire Officer Program through the U.S. Fire Administration National Fire Academy.
