#445 Managers Enforce Rules, Leaders Enforce Values with Chris Case

I sit down with Chris Case, a firefighter who spent 25 years in Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service before making the leap to Canada and becoming Fire Chief of Chatham-Kent in Ontario.

This is not a career-timeline conversation. It is a deep exploration of leadership, identity, and the personal cost of doing complex work in complex systems.

We talk about moving beyond the cookie-cutter career, the curse of competence, and what happens when professionalism becomes a golden cage. Chris shares hard-won lessons from counter-terrorism, multi-agency command, senior leadership, and governance, but also from parenting, failure, anxiety, and learning when to stop optimising everything.

We explore why managers enforce rules but leaders enforce values, why undefined expectations become premeditated resentments, and why senior officers eventually trade tools for words. We talk about ambition, burnout, anger as fuel, and the danger of confusing progress with peace.

This episode is for firefighters at every rank who are trying to do meaningful work without betraying themselves in the process.

Connect with Chris Case HERE

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 our partners supporting this episode.

• GORE-TEX Professional Clothing
• FIRST TACTICAL- tactical gear for elite operators
• MSA The Safety Company
• JAFCO
• IDEX
• FIRE & EVACUATION SERVICE LTD