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)

Lead by Example

A flow-based organization enables all of its members—leaders and followers—to be in flow as much as possible. While this is best driven and demonstrated by the highest leaders in the organization, each individual has the ability to implement flow-based decision making using the components described in this chapter. You do this by:

  • Demonstrating your own commitment and ability to live and work in flow;
  • Communicating your vision, goals, decisions, observations, and ideas and giving others the opportunity to communicate the same from their perspective;
  • Mindfully providing the appropriate infrastructure and systems that support and provide feedback to your people (rather than get in the way of their ability to operate);
  • Cultivating trust and a sense of belonging;
  • Honoring individual creativity;
  • Using positive motiviation techniques; and
  • Learning what brings your people joy, so that you can provide them with training and opportunities...