Challenge #18 - 2023 WFLDP Campaign

 

Challenge #18: Leaders know their core (those they will not change for anything), personal (those they live by but may change), those of your team, and those of your organization.

• Facilitate the Sawtooth IHC values exploration exercise with your team.
• In your journal, identify your core, personal, team, and organizational values.
• Dig deeper on the Wildland Fire Learning Portal.

Aligning Values

Each team member has personal beliefs and interests. Individual points of view can work for or against the team result.

Challenge 18: 2021 WFLDP Campaign

Challenge #18: Leaders help their people establish strong staff value systems, team cultures, and command presence.

• Lead your team through the following values exploration exercise.

What Is Your Why?

(Tumwater Falls, Olympia, WA, where fish jump up the falls; photo: Pam McDonald)

Three to six months ago, our world was rocked when the smallest of enemies attacked Earth's inhabitants. A novel coronavirus emerged as a deadly foe to, at this writing, over half a million people. We learn more and more about this virus on a daily basis, but many of us remain steadfast in our response. Why are we so divided on all things Covid-19? Why does wearing/not wearing a mask seem like a salmon swimming upstream to return to their spawning ground?

IGNITE: Living Our Values

Values aren’t something you declare; they’re something you live. ♦ Piyush Patel, author of Lead Your Tribe, Love Your Work ♦

[Photo: Union IHC]

#fireleadership #values

IGNITE: Perspectives

“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.” ♦ C. S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew ♦
[Photo: BLM FOG @ Seminary Ridge, Gettysburg Staff Ride]

#fireleadership #perspective #values

IGNITE: Value Your Values

Value your values.

They are the stuff that character is made of.

Bill Treasurer & Captain John Havlik, “The Leadership Killer”

[Photo credit: Kari Greer/USFS]

#fireleadership

#values

Doing Core Values

Does your team have the Wildland Fire Leadership Values and Principles hanging on your wall? Maybe you give Leading in the Wildland Fire Service to every member of your team or print them on a sticker and affix it to your hardhat.

Exercise: Values Exploration

John Hain/Pixabay

Values Exploration Exercise

How would you define your personal values?

Before you answer this question, you need to know what, in general, values are.

Values are what drive your decisions and actions in life.  They are qualities that are considered worthwhile and represent your highest priorities.  Values are learned through your life experiences by witnessing, imitating, and accepting/rejecting.  Values are subjective and defined by one’s self.  Your values are the things that you believe are important in the way you live. This is why making a conscious effort to identify your values is so important. When you define your values, you discover what's truly important to you. A good way of starting to do this is to look back on your life – to identify when you felt really good, and really confident that you were making good choices.

This is an exercise in getting to know who you are. Putting some time and thought into what drives you is helpful in understanding different interactions you have and how you integrate with others. It is a discretionary tool and can be accomplished with or without the content below as long as you have three (3) identified personal values listed. 

The Value of the Work

The Value of the Work from The Smokey Generation on Vimeo.

Why do you work? Do you get value from what you do?

The answers to these question vary among fire personnel. Adam Hernandez shares his reflections on the values he has experienced as a hotshot.

Kudos to Adam for applying lessons and the core values of duty, respect, and integrity well beyond the fireline and into his personal life.

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What is your story? We challenge you to become a part of this amazing project and share your leadership stories. Bethany Hannah began The Smokey Generation: A Wildland Fire Oral History and Digital Storytelling Project for her master's thesis. All members of the wildland fire service, not just hotshots, can share their stories by following her example. Click here for potential leadership questions. Visit The Smokey Generation website for complete information.

Our Values!

Duty, Respect, Integrity

Are you a values-based wildland fire leader? Do you live by these yourself and instill them in others?

IGNITE the Spark for Leadership. LIKE and SHARE throughout your networks. ‪#‎fireleadership‬ ‪#‎fireminis‬ http://www.fireleadership.gov/

Authors of Our Own Lives - In the Space of Hard Choices

"Far from being sources of agony and dread, hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition, that the reasons that govern our choices as correct or incorrect sometimes run out, and it is here, in the space of hard choices, that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people that we are." ~ Ruth Chang

 In Leading in the Wildland Fire Service, we state: "Leaders often face difficult problems to which there are no simple, clear cut, by-the-book solutions. In these situations, leaders must use their knowledge, skill, experience, education, values, and judgment to make decisions and to take or direct action—in short, to provide leadership."

Wildland fire leaders are required to make hard decisions--decisions that affect others. Knowing what makes a decision hard and how to manuever within the decision space requires a leader to reflect upon themselves, to know their values and how their "normative power" creates reason.

Take a moment and watch Ruth Chang's video "How to Make Hard Choices" TedTalk video.



Video Highlights

• Understanding hard choices uncovers a hidden power each of us possesses.
• In a hard choice, one alternative is better ins some ways, the other alternative is better in other ways, and neither is better than the other overall.
• Hard choices are hard not because of us or our ignorance; they're hard because there is no best option.
• We unwittingly assume that values like justice, beauty, kindness, are akin to scientific quantities, like length, mass and weight.
• Each of us has the power to create reasons.
• When alternatives are on a par, the reasons given to us, the ones that determine whether we're making a mistake, are silent as to what to do. It's here, in the space of hard choices, that we get to exercise our normative power, the power to create reasons for yourself... 
• People who don't exercise their normative powers in hard choices are drifters. Drifters allow the world to write the story of their lives.

Hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition. - Ruth Chang

Wildland Fire Leadership Challenge - Digging a Little Deeper

•  Read Mark Stanford's, Fire Chief for Texas A&M Forest Service, blog "Doing the 'Right' Thing."
• Watch Rushworth Kidder's "Where Right Versus Right Dilemmas Come From."

Leading Up and Paying Forward

2013 Eagle Rock School Citizen Science Class

Through their actions, ethics, and traditions the Alpine Hotshots exemplify the firefighter leadership core values of safety, duty, respect, integrity, and teamwork. ~ Alpine IHC Vision

For today's "From the Field for the Field Friday" entry, we share another leadership best practice from the Alpine Interagency Hotshot Crew (IHC).

Eagle Rock School Fire Management Curriculum 

The Alpine IHC partnered with Eagle Rock School of Estes Park, CO and the Continental Divide Research Learning Center in 2011 to provide a mechanism in which to foster relationships with young adults. The program built upon the existing relationship between the school, the park, and the hotshot crew while providing a pilot course of formal educational curriculum for the 2013 winter trimester.

The curriculum focused on history, tactics and objectives, organizational control, and firefighting fundamentals while emphasizing forest health and ecology, leadership, physical fitness, IHC tradition, and NPS mission and values.

The initial idea of the pilot course was to put students through a 40-hour basic wildland fire curriculum, ultimately obtaining certification as wildland firefighters. However, it became apparent that these non-traditional students would gain more from a hands-on, field-based learning environment supplemented by lecture. 

Achievements included:

• Completion of the Fire Fit Challenge.
• Field exercise of firefighting fundamentals through application of handline construction.
• Fuels treatment mitigation efforts demonstrated through live fire activity within the Bear Lake Road Corridor Burn Unit.
• Site visit focusing on fire effects and forest health accomplishments as related to the Fern Lake Fire within Rocky Mountain National Park.
• Lessons learned in relation to fatality fires demonstrated through field application of fire entrapment and deployment scenarios.

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Thanks to Paul Cerda, Alpine IHC, and Jim McMahill, Chief of Fire and Aviaton, NPS - Midwest Region and NWCG Leadership Committee Agency Representative, for this post.

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We know you are doing great things with leadership and want to hear your stories "From the Field for the Field." For more information about sharing your story, contact Pam McDonald, NWCG Leadership Committee Logistics and Social Media Coordinator at [email protected] or 208-387-5318.