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)

Use Positive Motivation Techniques

Does your organization have a strategy for motivating its employees? People feel motivated when their personal reason for being aligns with the organization’s purpose. In addition, people are not necessarily motivated by money or things. Money and things are short-lived. The joy associated with this type of reward dissipates quickly, and is often replaced with a sense of entitlement. People come to expect the bonus or the trophy and are upset when, even after doing mediocre work, they don’t get it.

According to Daniel Pink, “When contingent rewards aren’t involved, or when incentives are used with the proper deftness, performance improves and understanding deepens.”97 Assuming that people are being compensated with a living wage, initially, people performing in service to an articulated higher purpose achieve more than those who perform for tangible rewards. Therefore, it is important they understand why they...