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)

Facilitate Team Flow

As a manager, it is important to be able to initiate your own flow state and equally as important to recognize and facilitate the abilities of the people on your team to initiate their flow states. To do this requires your attention and the ability to observe objectively. Learn about your people at an individual level. What are their individual goals? What are their hopes and dreams? What are they afraid of? Ask yourself how each person fits into the scheme of things you have to achieve in your role as leader. Does that person need help? Would he or she be better served in another role? What are his or her strengths and weaknesses on the team? What does he or she love to do? Find a place on the team or in the organization where he or she can do what he or she loves. If that person is doing what he or she loves to do, he or she will be less likely to leave the organization, and will take joy in doing his or her best for the team.

Deliberately introduce variation...