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)

How This Book Is Organized

My research has been conducted in the fire service. The examples and stories herein are mostly from this research. However, the concepts I present are applicable to all uniformed services, and can actually extend to other organizations. My hope is that you will glean understanding applicable to your own organization from these fireground lessons, and that this book will motivate you to employ the ideas herein in a strategic way. In many cases, this framework will require a culture change. However, a commitment to change will not only increase the skill and well-being of public service professionals, it will also result in better situational decision making, and hopefully, help reduce the number of accidents and deaths in the line of duty.

Chapter 1 provides a history of the study of flow. It breaks down the components of flow and gives concrete and compelling examples of how being in a flow state facilitates situational awareness and critical thinking...