Due to time constraints of job, family, and the needs of the department/district, many leaders are unable to commit the time required to attend formalized classes on leadership. This course is designed to address the leadership principles necessary to effectively direct and manage volunteer, combination and small to medium sized career departments. This course will identify leadership philosophies and facilitate a patch of discovery designed to help the student identify their own leadership qualities, strengths and weaknesses. Discussion of individual department challenges in a case study format is encouraged. Primary focus will be for Intermediate or advanced command level/supervisory personnel, but can include fire service/emergency services personnel at all levels.
This program is intended to focus on the strategies to help students exercise leadership within their organization, regardless of whether their role is as a senior firefighter, company-level officer or chief officer. Exercising leadership is a critical component in helping our nation’s fire service successfully implement many of the programs and initiatives to help reduce firefighter deaths and injuries. An important premise is that exercising leadership is not without its dangers. You may have personally experienced occasions where individuals avoid tough issues rather than upset anyone. Exercising leadership is dangerous because it can challenge what people hold dear, including their habits, loyalties, and ways of thinking.
The goal of this program is to enlighten firefighting personnel, regardless of their rank, on the important role that leadership plays in all aspects of firefighting operations and to offer strategies on how to not only avoid those dangers, but also to thrive, helping them to make a difference that is beyond measure.
The course shows students on how Leadership, Accountability, Culture, and Knowledge (LACK) impact firefighter safety. It assumes the student has a firm understanding of the Everyone Goes Home®, Courage to Be Safe® campaign, and that the student can communicate to others how to integrate life safety initiatives into their organization. While discussing how Leadership, Accountability, Culture, and Knowledge impact firefighter safety, the LACK Trainer utilizes the LACK Program as an opportunity to explain how the Courage to Be Safe® 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives can be a blueprint for a personal and an organizational improvement action plan. The program examines the root causes of line of duty deaths (LODDs) and the role of Leadership, Accountability, Culture, and Knowledge. LACK helps fire instructors gain a better understanding of the root causes of firefighter fatalities and how lacking these four elements affect firefighter safety. This knowledge is then used in the program to help fire officers understand how to improve survivability. Special emphasis is placed on discussing and understanding how fire service culture impacts line-of-duty injury and death.