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)

Conclusion

A strict command-and-control mindset no longer works in today’s world. Flow-based leadership, by definition, involves using the appropriate leadership style for the situation. Knowing what type of leadership to use depends on training; knowing when to use that type of leadership is facilitated by experience.

Flow is not time-bound. It can occur in rapidly emergent situations, but it can also occur over time. Both the Kyle Wilson story and the Worcester story involved flow-based leadership experiences that had both short-term and long-term aspects. Both incidents have had huge impacts on the fire service and beyond. Even though they occurred many years ago, these stories are still discussed and debated.

There is a program in Georgia called AXIOMS of Leadership. It is a program that focuses on leadership, and consists of both classroom time and team problem solving using props. The props are all based on incidents that occurred in either the fire service or the...