For this episode, we sit down with Chris Welchel, co-owner of the Towing and Recovery company Welchel Enterprises, to talk about leadership; specifically the concept of “extreme ownership.” What it is, how to walk the walk, and how to get your followers on board. But along the way we also end up finding out that the towing and recovery industry is a lot closer to being like the fire service than we had ever realized.

This is the second part of our discussion on whether this podcast’s focus on the challenges of leadership are discouraging the next crop of leaders from stepping up. If you haven’t listened to Part 1, go give that a listen first.

This episode grew out of a discussion while hiking that maybe we have talked about great leadership to the point where anyone starting out on their leadership journey may think good leadership is almost unattainable. Have we elevated the discussion to mythic proportions? In our pursuit of sharing the challenges of leadership on so many episodes of this podcast, are we actually discouraging people from stepping up and leading?

On this episode, we examine the crash of a B-52 in 1994, and the events leading up to it, through the actions of two of the four USAF officers killed: the pilot whose disregard for safety led to the crash, and the copilot who had tried to have him grounded. This is a story about missed opportunities and what can happen when warning signs are ignored. It’s a story about tolerating things that we shouldn’t. But most of all, it’s a story about copilot Lt. Col. Mark McGeehan’s bedrock belief in the most sacred of leadership principles.

We hijack Daniel Kahneman’s idea of substitution and apply it to decision-making in the fire service. How reliable is your decision-making on scene if your brain unknowingly substitutes a logical question with an emotional one?

A recent discussion with one of our listeners led us on a discussion of what part emotion plays in our roles as firefighters and our responses on this podcast.

This episode is about delaying decision-making. Or maybe it’s not. We really don’t know what to think of Falkland’s Law, but we have a good time not getting anywhere.

We talk about it A LOT, but we’ve never really tried to define what we think leadership is. In this episode, we discuss various definitions of leadership; what we like and what we don’t like.

Photo Credit: Cottonbro Studio

Whenever you lose your way as a leader, you can always ask yourself, “What would Ted do?”

In this episode, we dive into how firefighters’ decision-making process works, and how critically reliant that process is on experience. So, where are we missing opportunities to build experience and convert it to expertise?

We’ve come up with a new concept called DIFOS that is a series of questions that can be asked to really examine how a decision-making process evolved. It can be used on-scene after a fire or in any situation where an important decision was made.