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)

Characteristics of Flow

There are eight characteristics of flow:

  • You have clear goals and are receiving immediate feedback within the activity.
  • There are many opportunities for decisive action.
  • Awareness and action merge.
  • You focus on the task at hand.
  • You feel in control of your actions.
  • Awareness of self disappears during the task and feels stronger following task completion.
  • The concept of time has no meaning.
  • The experience is autotelic.

When I conducted my research, I interviewed 16 firefighters: eight men and eight women who had at least seven years of experience in the fire service. After explaining the definition of flow, each individual firefighter lit up in recognition of the concept. He or she may have referred to the flow state as something else (for example, “bringing my A-game” or “being in the zone”), but he or she knew the feeling to which I was referring. This section describes the characteristics...