Unplanned Leadership Moments: The 5 Decisions That Define You

When something changes on the job and the person in charge isn't around, most people freeze and wait for instructions that never come. 

In this episode, Brad explains how the same snap decisions firefighters make when a fire jumps the line translate into the five decisions that separate leaders from followers when a business crisis hits without warning. 

You'll learn how to read a changing situation fast, make the call without waiting for permission and step up the moment your team needs a decision.

Transcript

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Welcome to Leadership in the Line of Fire with your host, Brad Hauck. Join Brad as he dives into the heat of leadership challenges where the flames of business uncertainty meet the hard earned lessons of firefighting. Embrace change, master agility and become the trusted leader guiding your team through the smoke. Get ready to ignite your leadership journey. There's a moment in leadership that no training room can fully prepare you for. It's the moment when something changes. The boss isn't around, the plan doesn't fit anymore and everyone is looking at you, wondering who's going to make the call. On the fire ground, that might be a wind change, a missed radio message, a spot fire over the line, or a crew suddenly realising that their escape route isn't as safe as it looked five minutes ago. In business, it can be an angry client, a failed system, a staff issue or a multitude of problems. The real issue is that your manager, your boss, your leader is not available. These are unplanned leadership moments. They don't wait for your title, your rank or your permission slip to say that you're in charge. They reveal whether you've been trained to think or trained to wait. You don't become a leader when the boss is watching you become a leader when something changes. No one is there to tell you what to do and the next decision matters. So let's look at five decisions that you're going to face when you're in that position where those unplanned leadership moments happen. Firstly, do I wait or do I act? When your leader's not around, many people freeze. They wait for permission even when the situation's clearly changing and that delay can be really dangerous. If the wind changes or the smoke thickens or crew loses comms, things will become dangerous really quickly. And in business, this happens. When staff wait for a manager before fixing a customer issue or solving a delivery problem or making a call that protects the team, you need to be able to actually make a decision. Waiting is a decision in itself and sometimes it's the wrong one. The better question is, do you have enough information to make a safe and useful decision right now? So you can't afford to wait. You need to be able to act and that's where your true leadership shows through. Many people will wait until someone else steps forward. That's fine. In some situations, you might not be the senior person in the team and you're giving them the chance to step up. On the other hand, sometimes it is the smartest thing to do is to step up and lead. You can always hand over to someone else, but at least start the conversation. I hate it when you're in a situation whereby you're not in charge. And it happens to me too, where I'm not the person in charge, but the person in charge isn't there and a decision needs to be made and suddenly everyone's looking for someone to pick something to do. I will often step up, even though it might not be my place. But I feel like if no one steps up, it's worse. I would rather step up and make a decision or call a group of people together and work on a decision so that it's a little bit of a team effort than to let things just wait. There's no point to waiting. When a decision needs to be made, there's a timeframe. There's an amount of time you've got to actually make a decision before it's too late. So as a leader, that's going to be the first decision you've got to make. The second one is, what's our mission? When you're making decisions, they have to be built around the mission. So we always come back to that. On a fire ground, it might be to hold a containment line or protect a structure or something. The plan can change, but the mission gives you the direction that you follow through to the end or until you're told otherwise. And in business, your mission could be a range of things. Sometimes it could be protecting client relationships or keeping a project moving, or stopping small problems from becoming bigger. We need to understand what our overarching mission is, because based on that, we'll then be able to make the right leadership decisions. If you can't remember the mission, then you need to go back and look it up. This is where you as a leader also need to train your people better. You don't just give instructions, you need to give intent. Instead of saying, stand there and do this, say, our job is to do this and we need to do it by doing this. By this time, give people a mission, a direction they can follow that gives them something that they can work from when you are not there. So if your leader has given that to you, you can then use that mission as a way to make leadership decisions. It gives you some of the information that you can compare your situation to and you can decide, what do I need to do to move forward. So the leadership lesson here is people can adapt the plan if they understand the mission. So the mission is really important. It's funny, in the fire service, we have what we call a smearcs, which Gives us our breakdown of how we're going to fight in a fire. And the second part we've got the situation which is the size of the. And the second part is the mission. The m because it is very important. A situation tells us what's happening, the mission tells us what we need to achieve. Together they give us a really good direction on what we need to do. The third question you need to ask yourself is what are the safety limits? Everything comes back to safety. This is a non negotiable decision. And not every decision is about winning. Sometimes the best leadership decision is to pull back. Sometimes on a fire ground, laces matter. So lookouts, awareness, communication, escape routes and safety. Because we've got people thinking about those things all the time. If they're thinking about them, then if one of something falls apart, then the decision changes. In business, safety limits look different. They might include legal risk, mental health, financial risk, customer trust, brand damage and team burnout. There's so many things that are enveloped in safety, so we need to look at what the safety limits are. So we have our mission, we know what we've got to do. But if we're going to step up and make a leadership decision, we also need to do it safely, within the confines of our working environment. A team member will always need to know from you as a leader where the hard line is. For example, we can offer the customer solution, but we can't lie about it. We might know we can do this, but we can't actually do that. There's no point in lying to a customer just to keep them. You need to be honest with them and in fact they'll respect that more. You can push a team hard towards a deadline, but you can't burn a team out. If you burn a team out, you'll make one deadline, but you won't make the rest. You gotta remember, fatigued people are dangerous people. Fatigued people make mistakes and you can't afford to have mistakes when you're pushing your team to try and achieve something within a tight deadline. Good leaders act with courage, but not with recklessness. And safety is one of those things that stops you from being reckless. When you know what the safety limits are, if you apply them to the situation as part of the information used to make that leadership decision to step up, then you're going to put yourself in a better place. Number four, a decision you need to make when the boss isn't there. Who needs to know? Unplanned leadership does not mean silent leadership. If you have to make a Decision. When the leader's not around, you still need to be able to communicate. You may not be able to do it before you act, but you need to do it as soon as possible after that. So you make your decision, you get things moving, and then you continue to try and communicate with your leader so that they know what you've done and why you've done it. On the fire ground, this could be updating crew leaders or a sector commander or the incident controller. In business, it's about talking to your team leaders, your managers, the owner of the company, whoever it happens to be that you deal with. Who is your leader. This is where many people get it wrong. They make a decision, but then they keep it to themselves and that creates confusion. The team below you knows, but the people above you don't. And then they walk in and wonder what the heck is going on. This is not what I told you to do. Well, things changed. I needed to make a decision. Great. But tell me next time. I mean, how many times have you heard that? My mother's even said that to me. You make a decision. Yeah, that's fine. I understand that. But please tell me so I know where you are, what you're doing, what you're getting up to. I'm sure we've all been there. Okay? When you make those decisions, it's simple enough to update people. The conditions changed. I moved these crews to there. Everyone's safe and we're awaiting further instructions or. The client was about to cancel. So I offered a temporary fix, which is within our policy brief, and I'll explain it to you when you're properly free. The lesson here is you act when you need to, but you must communicate with your leadership team as soon as you can. Number five. What do we learn from this? The final decision that we have to make happens in the moment, after everything has passed. This is where a leader decides whether the moment becomes a lesson or just another storey. And part of that is debriefing it. You need to look at what happened, how you dealt with it, and what the result was. Okay? Don't ask who stuffed up or what went wrong. Ask what did we see, what decision was made, what information did we have, what worked, and what would I do differently next time? In the fire service, we always use what went well, what didn't go so well, and what could we do better next time? They're the three questions we will always ask when we're debriefing after a fire because we want to do better. It's not about blame. It's about admitting that something didn't go as we expected it to on the fire ground. People don't make decisions for selfish reasons. They make them because they believe it's the safest and best decision at the time to deal with the people or the fire or whatever it happens to be. It might not be, in the end the right decision. We all know that can happen, but it was the best decision we could make at the time. So by debriefing it, you know what went well, what didn't go so well, and what can we do better next time? We all learn from that. It's not something we do in isolation. We do it as a team. And you should do that too as a leader. If you want to build your leaders, don't pretend every decision will be perfect. By looking at the decision, you can help people think better next time. And you as a leader, even if you're not the boss, you will learn and you will get better too. You'll learn from the feedback you get from your boss afterwards when you debrief, and also from your team. So don't be afraid to step up and make a leadership decision, but be prepared to discuss it at the end and learn from it. In firefighting, every call teaches us something. In business, every unplanned moment does the same thing. If you stop long enough to learn from it, a mistake with a debrief becomes training. A mistake without a debrief becomes habit. Unplanned leadership moments show you what your team is really made of. When the boss isn't there and the plan changes, people either wait for permission or they step up and they make the best decision they can with the information they have. That's why leaders need to train their people to understand the mission, know the safety limits, communicate quickly and debrief honestly afterwards. If your people can only lead when you're standing beside them, you haven't built leaders yet. You've built followers. If today's episode hit home, take 60 seconds to share it with a friend and please share and subscribe to the podcast. If you want to go deeper into fire ground lessons, please grab a copy of my book Run towards the flames@Amazon.com it's packed with storeys and strategies for dealing with change built around those storeys of my business and the Australian bush. Until next time, stay sharp, stay safe and run towards the flames. Thank you for tuning in to Leadership in the Line of Fire. If today's episode sparked some insights, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Don't forget to hit like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Your support fuels this journey. Join us next time as we continue to explore leadership lessons from the Fireline. Until then, keep leading with courage and agility.