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)

Leadership Styles

Volumes have been written about leadership and all the different variations of leading. Higher education offers leadership degrees at all levels. Leadership has become a field of study. Leadership theories abound: authentic leadership, transformative leadership, transactional leadership, Renewed Darwinian Leadership, Leadership Theory in the Perspective of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy, servant leadership, responsible leadership, and followership, just to name a few. Dozens of conferences and workshops are available worldwide for developing leaders, in every discipline and industry segment. We discuss, ad nauseam, whether leaders are born or made, and whether one form of leadership is better than another.

I have observed every type of leader in my research in the fire service. I would argue that there is no right or wrong way to lead. You have to find the leadership style that works for you, for the situation in which you find yourself. This requires self-knowledge...