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Articles and information
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Why Firefighters Shouldn't Confuse Confidence with
Egotism
SCOTT IDLEMAN
Confidence is ordinarily a valued trait in
firefighters and their officers. It would certainly
be difficult to enter a burning structure without a
firm belief that you, and those around you, know how
to do the job and that your chosen course of action
is appropriate. A lack of confidence can also be
dangerous, even fatal. Second-guessing one's
decisions costs time, which may not be an available
luxury, and it often instills doubt among one's
fellow firefighters, distracting them from the
critical task at hand. In short, confidence is an
important part of effective firefighting, and is
basically essential to fireground leadership.
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There are at least two types of confidence, however,
that are markedly less beneficial for the fire
service, and may actually be among its most
destructive elements. The first is inflated
confidence. Also known as overconfidence, it occurs
when one's self-estimation exceeds one's actual
knowledge or skills. At times, overconfident fire
officers can be equally if not more dangerous than
unconfident fire officers, leading their crews into
situations that they cannot handle or refusing to
evacuate or call for mutual aid when circumstances
objectively dictate these actions. In addition,
overconfidence of this sort can potentially inhibit
the mutual trust that firefighting requires. At the
very least, it can be really annoying |
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Fire Fighters In action!
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The other type of undesirable confidence—and the
focus of the remainder of this article—can be
labeled egotistical confidence. This is the
unwillingness of a firefighter or officer to
acknowledge that any given incident may have several
reasonable, alternative solutions, and that his or
her chosen or preferred solution is not the only
feasible approach. It is more than simply a
heightened confidence in the legitimacy of one's
position, as one's position may actually be
legitimate. Rather, it is an unjustifiable belief
that one's position is the only stance that is
legitimate, and that every other position, including
the incident commander's, is hopelessly misguided.
It rarely seems, moreover, that the egotistically
confident firefighter can keep his views to himself.
After returning to the station—if not at the
scene—the firefighter must declare the patent
wrongfulness of other people's decisions, coupled
with a declaration of what the one true
course-of-action should have been. We have all
encountered such declarations. The vehicles should
have been staged at this location, not that
location. The engine should have taken this hydrant,
not that hydrant. The crew should have this tool,
not that tool, or should have done this tactic, not
that tactic.
No matter how well the incident is resolved, the
egotistically confident firefighter must denounce
error and pronounce truth. In essence, he is an
armchair firefighter, equivalent to the proverbial
Monday-morning or armchair quarterback—except that
firefighting is not football, and the consequences
of egotism can be much more devastating.
What, in fact, are these consequences? What exactly
is wrong, in other words, with the egocentrically
confident firefighter? For one thing, his view of
the world is simply distorted. It is rare than an
incident can only be approached one way. Ask several
veteran chiefs how they would handle a scenario, and
you are likely to get several different answers,
although the differences will normally be matters of
degree, not of kind.
It is not mere distortion that is worrisome,
however. It is the fact that this firefighter has an
obvious mental or conceptual blindness, and the
concern is that this blindness will extend to other
(perhaps every other) aspect of his performance.
What kind of personality, after all, can effectively
write off his colleagues, repeatedly and with no
corrective sensibility to his own manifest errors?
What other distortions are in store for his crew or
his department? One suspects that such a person is,
in the long run, a walking liability for the
department and its relations with the press, with
local government, with other departments, and with
the public.
The consequences of this form of egotism also
concern departmental morale. Complaining tends to
beget complaining, and the egotistically confident
firefighter can basically function as an attitudinal
pollutant within the ranks. He may even convince
others that the chief's decisions are wrongheaded,
or that this firefighter or that MPO is genuinely
stupid. In turn, he may foster an atmosphere of
dissatisfaction and a culture of dissent (even
disobedience) in the department or firehouse. And
once a department starts down such a road, it is not
easily turned around. It may take years of
collective effort to undo six months of damage by a
single firefighter whose ego is sufficiently warped.
By no means is this to imply that departmental
assessment and post-incident critiques are
undesirable, or that all criticism is a function of
unbridled ego. To the contrary, well-run and
balanced critiques are an important part of the fire
service. But egotistical confidence does not involve
balanced critique, which is intended to prompt
learning and self-assessment. The declarations of
egotistically confident firefighters, by contrast,
are self-centered distortions of the world that
erode others' confidence, undermine department
morale, inhibit firefighter trust, and impair
fireground performance.
The task of firefighting, whether career or
volunteer, is not always simple. Pressures at work
and at home can impose ample stress on any
individual and clearly do not need to be compounded
by department personnel whose sense of self is so
underdeveloped or twisted that they must tear down
the people and institutions around them in order to
feel satisfied. The costs they impose far outweigh
any benefits that they might provide, and they
certainly do not reflect the ideals of the fire
service, which so many others try so honorably to
achieve.
http://www.fire-command.org/articles.html |
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