Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By : Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D
Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By: Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D

Overview of this book

There comes a day when we have to make a tough decision under stress. That decision might change the course of our life. Flow-Based Leadership helps you improve your decision-making skills through the use of some great real-life stories of firefighters. The book first introduces the feeling called ‘flow’—teaching by example its importance in decision-making. Next, you’ll explore various techniques to initiate flow in critical situations and how to respond when flow doesn’t occur as expected. You will learn how to implement flow-based decision making and flow based-leadership within personal and professional circumstances. You will next encounter an extreme, experiential training program called Georgia Smoke Diver (GSD), and how it helps special military forces like Navy Seals and Army Rangers to maintain a calm focus in chaotic situations. Towards the end, the book uses the GSD program to describe the flow-based organizational framework and how it can be integrated into your life and workplace to achieve better decision-making skills. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use flow-based leadership in your personal and professional life maintain clarity and confidence under duress.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Flow-Based Leadership Empowers Others

As we have seen in these stories, flow-based leadership is amorphous. It might be autocratic one minute, and collaborative or transformative the next. When executed with grace, humility, courage, and an outward focus, it instills trust and respect in followers, and empowers followers to be leaders themselves by example. This way of being demonstrates and encourages ethical character.77

Helen Graham‘s commitment to the establishment of a national policy on how firefighters are treated when they receive burns while fighting wildland fires has resulted in the empowerment of firefighters in the field. In one instance, when a firefighter received severe burns to his foot, the captain of his hotshot crew asked Graham if they needed to follow the new protocol, which was to transfer the injured firefighter from the rural hospital to an approved regional burn center. Graham said, “Yes, you do.”

“The captain knows me and...