From the Fire House to the Penthouse. How Lessons Learned in the Fire Service Can Help Make Great C-Suite Leaders

Working for a big city fire department to leading and operating a real estate team closing in on a quarter billion dollars in total sales may not be the most natural of progressions. Let's be honest, most boys don't grow up dreaming of becoming real estate brokers, but at some point, we do all want to be a fireman; The adrenaline, the brotherhood, the respect and admiration. It's all quite enticing. What's interesting though, is that if you ask many of the top leaders in their fields who they look for when interviewing candidates for C-suite positions, many of them will tell you that prior military or public service experience is a massive benefit. There are a few reasons why this is true:

1.) The ability to remain calm under pressure. Boardroom pitches, share holder meetings, and high net worth real estate clients are child's play when you've spent the last 12 years crawling down smoke filled hallways, rappelling over the side buildings, searching through building collapses, and operating at the bottom of 20 foot trenches. We tend to think about stress a little differently than most.

2.) Leadership ability. My real estate team knows what my shift at the fire house knew for so long. I will never ask them to do something I'm not willing or capable of doing myself. I've been in charge of the first arriving unit on fires where it's been my responsibility to ensure my crew and the others operating on that fire ground make it home at the end of the tour. I've lead teams through night time search and rescue operations, swift water evacuations, and even a few Presidential safety details. Being in positions where mistakes cost lives and not just money, gives us a clearer understanding of when and how to take appropriate risk and affords us a much greater respect and admiration for the people we're responsible to. #servantleadership

3.) We can make quick decisions based on incomplete information. Executives don't always have all of the information necessary before we need to make a decision. We don't always know people's motivations or reasons for making the decisions they've made. In the fire department, we would be en route to a call thinking it was one thing only to arrive and find out it was something totally different: En route to an allergic reaction, show up to a non-breathing. En route to a smoke alarm going off, show up to fire blowing out of the third story window and report of people trapped. These inaccuracies and gaps in information can be addressed by being quickly adaptable to any situation and by being able to clearly see and interoperate all of the cards on the table.

Being able to analyze the data you have in front of you and provide the best possible guidance to your team or client is a skill that can be learned, but it's also one that needs to be practiced and perfected. We will not always make the right decision, but our people need to know that they can trust us to be calculated, analytical, and to always be thinking of any potential outcome.

4.) We know how to put the right people into the right positions. One of the first things you learn in the fire service is that you're not as good as you think you are. You get humbled very fast in this job and if you don't know how to take it, you will have a very short career. To paraphrase former SedDef Donald Rumsfeld, we all have known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Having a solid understanding of what we're good at and the humility to know what skills we're lacking is not always prevalent in the fire house but, the ones who rise up to become leaders are most often the ones who can put their ego aside and find the best person for the job at the right time.