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)

Honor Individual Creativity to Promote Innovation

While elements of the class stay the same, each class is an evolution of all the classes that came before it. While change occurs from class to class, it also occurs during the class from day to day.

The leadership encourages idea generation. All contributions and suggestions are considered with regard to usefulness and benefit to the students. Anyone can suggest changes to the program at any time. These ideas are reviewed by the command staff daily. Many of the approved changes are implemented immediately, with little fanfare. Other changes that require further research are implemented during the next class. Every suggestion is vetted. Submitters are informed as to the status of their suggestions. If a suggestion is rejected, the submitter is told why.

Changes also occur when events and new research in the fire service call for modification. For example, in September 2012, a student died in the Texas Smoke Diver program due to...