When you’ve worked your way up through the ranks, it’s often tough to hand off responsibility to others. There’s always the temptation to perform tasks you’re supposed to be overseeing. But delegating responsibility is a critical part of being a good leader. Nowhere is that fact more apparent than in the field of fire fighting, where efficient leadership can literally mean the difference between life and death. Carl Holmes, now a management consultant, was a member of the Oklahoma City Fire Department for almost 30 years and a chief there for eight years. During his tenure, he had to take some radical steps to get his battalion chiefs to stop fighting fires and to start managing their people. In this conversation with HBR senior editor Regina Fazio Maruca, he discusses what he has learned about delegation and trust. How did you come to realize the importance of delegating responsibility? At some level, of course, it’s common sense. But the lesson was drilled into me early one morning, years ago, when I was chief of field operations in Oklahoma City. The phone rang at my house, and I was told that one of my battalion chiefs had asked me to respond to a fire at an apartment complex. It was early. Very early. And it was sleeting. I wasn’t happy about being hauled out of bed, but I figured it must be pretty bad if one of my chiefs was calling me to the scene. So I drove, slipping and sliding all the way there. When I arrived, the building was fully involved. I knew that there were four battalion chiefs on the scene, one of whom was supposed to have command, but I couldn’t find a single one of them. It was by then a three-alarm fire. Additional companies were responding to the scene and staging all over the place; personnel were milling about; people were getting hurt. No one seemed to be in charge. I found myself a mask and an air pack, and I followed a hose into the building, right to the end. There was my battalion chief, down on the floor with one of the fire companies, slinging water. I yanked him up off the floor. “Aren’t you supposed to be in charge?” I yelled. “Did you know that the other side of this building is about to fall down?” He said, “I was in here.” And I screamed back, “You aren’t in charge of anything in here except what’s right in front of you. Fighting the fire with your own hands is what we have firefighters for. Someone has to be in control.” I pulled him outside, and we took control of the situation. I knew then that it was an organizational responsibility of mine to get people to understand who had to be responsible for what and how the chain of command should work. How did you put that insight into action? First, I invested a lot of money in outfitting each of the battalion chiefs’ vehicles with the most sophisticated information and communications equipment available. In each chief’s van, there is now a database that stores the building plans for every commercial building and apartment building in Oklahoma City. I also installed radio systems through which the chiefs can converse with their firefighters all the time. With the equipment, I knew that my chiefs would be able to start managing a fire—in other words, they would be able to plan the attack, organize which companies would set up where, and so on—while they were en route to the scene. Second, I established a new rule, one that stands to this day. Once a battalion chief reaches the scene of the fire, he or she must stay in the command vehicle. All the tactical information they need is in that van. When they’re in the van, they’re in absolute control. If they step out of the van, they’re just another firefighter in a coat and helmet. That sounds like a difficult rule to enforce. It was. But sometimes you have to train leaders by taking drastic measures, by forcing them to learn a new way of operating. The transition period, for us, was like pulling teeth. I remember one of my division chiefs threatening to handcuff a battalion chief to his steering wheel if he got out of the car one more time. It must be hard to command without being able to see for yourself what’s going on. It is. There’s no doubt. But when someone comes to you and says, “The west side of the building is about to come down,” you really don’t have time to say “Okay, let me just verify that.” Which brings me to the third step we took to change things. We began to invest a great deal of time and money in training—more than ever before. The best way to control people is to give them the ability to control themselves. And that’s what we set out to do. We trained our leaders to give the fire-fighters a clear understanding of what’s expected of them, a basic script to work from, and an understanding of the time they have to accomplish their work. To a small degree, firefighting is unpredictable, but 99 % of the time you know what’s going to happen. In a bowling alley, for example, or any building with a large open space, like a supermarket, you have about 20 to 25 minutes to fight the fire before the ceiling starts to come down. You need to decide within 15 minutes how you’re going to respond to that. So we set parameters, and within those parameters we let people use their best judgment. We created, in other words, a work environment in which there was mutual support, mutual trust, and genuine—genuine—lines of communication. Without those things, people pull back into what I call a “zone of safety.” They fear the repercussions of their actions, and so they don’t perform to their maximum ability. Then you get only about 40 % of what they’re capable of. But if you have the trust, the support, and the communication, you get people to operate at their utmost capacity. And at that point, the leaders can get the hell out of the way and let their people do their jobs.
