ON-SITE @ FDIC
The Enemy Within
Class focuses on how to combat cultural & career development shortcomings in the fire service
By Shannon Pieper

In March, the Cumberland Valley Firemen’s Association rattled the fire service with its report, “Fire Service Reputation Management.” The report, which billed itself as a “wake-up call,” detailed how the actions of a small minority of firefighters—actions such as firefighter arson, harassment and alcohol/drug use—can tarnish the reputation of departments and the fire service as a whole.

Reaction to the report has been mixed, and I’ll hold back my own views. However, I immediately thought of Jason Hoevelmann, one of the bloggers for our FireEMSBlogs.com site, and his blog, “A Firefighter’s Own Worst Enemy.”

Today at FDIC, Chief Hoevelmann presented a seminar by the same name. Although not specifically focused on the report or criminal behavior by firefighters, Hoevelmann’s class focused on ways fire service leadership can be improved to address problems that continue to permeate fire service culture.

Identifying the Enemy
“I had a BC in my first career job as a firefighter, and he had all these strange euphemisms and sayings,” Hoevelmann says. “He’d say to me, ‘Hoevelmann, just remember that a firefighter is his own worst enemy.’ He never explained what he meant by it, but the more kitchen-table conversation I was involved in, the more I began to understand that in the culture of the fire service, we are typically our own problem. We make decisions that create problems for ourselves.”

Like the Cumberland Valley report, Hoevelmann agrees that the majority of the problem is created by a minority of firefighters. “In the fire service there’s an old-school attitude where old school refers to tactics, strategies and training, and that’s typically OK,” he says. “But then you have the old-school group who get out of the academy and expect to sit in a recliner for the next 25 years and they use every chance they can get to stir up trouble.”

I asked Hoevelmann how to combat this problem. “It has a lot to do with identification that there is a problem,” he says. “You also have to be willing to give your company officers the tools and the environment and the authority to handle their units on a day-to-day basis. It starts with putting the proper leaders in to begin with, and then supporting those leaders. And they have to want to be there.”

The Company Officer’s Role
Chief Hoevelmann focuses a big portion of his class on the role company officers can play in enhancing the development of their crew and in improving department culture—they can identify positive traits in their people and draw on them, develop their skills, ensure their crew is inclusive, steer people onto the right career path and address personnel problems.

“Here’s an example. A captain complained to me that his ‘back stepper’ didn’t know how to pull a crosslay,” Hoevelmann says. “The captain was getting all worked up, saying the firefighter was an idiot. But whose job is it to make sure the back stepper can pull a crosslay? The captain’s. And if the firefighter can’t do it, it’s the captain who needs to take him out in the parking lot and drill on it 10, 12, 15 times until he can do it. Don’t call him an idiot, don’t demean him, just show him how to do it until he learns.”

Company officers also play a significant role in firefighter career development, something Hoevelmann says most firefighters don’t receive adequate amounts of. “I had a discussion with a company officer about how people are coming off the ambulance to the fire truck, and they don’t have the skills, so he wants to create tests for the positions,” Hoevelmann says. “I asked him, ‘What kind of career development do you do to prepare them to be tested?’ The answer was none. In a perfect world you’d have set curriculum for each rank to work on, to gradually move up the ladder, whether you get promoted or not, but ensuring that you’re developing and keeping you excited about the job. We don’t have that perfect world, but we can still create development opportunities for our firefighters.”

Hoevelmann is also passionate about inclusiveness—something we don’t hear a lot about in the fire service. “What it breaks down to is that in the firehouse, you always have the outcast, the guy who’s different from the rest, who either takes a beating every day or is ignored,” he says. “You’ve got to find a way to include that guy.”

Hoevelmann’s right: We may not have a perfect world. But following some of the suggestions from the “Firefighter’s Own Worst Enemy” class could bring the fire service one small step further on the path to perfection.

Shannon Pieper is deputy editor for FireRescue magazine.