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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the 911 Shift Ready podcast. This is episode 26. We are going to dive into promotions and leadership leading teams in your service. So if a promotion is in your future or you’re already working your way up the ranks, you may not be working your way up the ranks. You may be like my husband, where he is staying at the rank that he’s at, but with his service being such a large service. There is a lot of lateral movement.
He can get into a lot of different specialized units and there’s a lot of working on teams with what he does and teaching and training and leading others, even when he was on the road, he was a coach officer. So a lot of what we’re talking about today pertains to any of you who are really looking to influence those that are around you, be your actual teammates, being teams that you’re leading and other situations that are in your service.
So do you feel that you have all of the leadership skills under your belt that you require in order to be the best leader that you can be?
You may know a lot about the tactical day-to-day of the job and what is required of you as a leader. And you may be one of top experts in a certain specialty in your service and you may be able to really bring that specialty to your team.
But the one thing that I do know about good leaders, the thing that I have seen over and over again is where your team looks up to you and respects you and wants to learn from you. And those leaders know that there’s actually always more that they can learn. They don’t feel that they have learned everything.
There’s no way that one person can be an expert in all of the things that it requires to be a leader. Or a good leader, you wear many, many hats. You may be mentoring or teaching, as I said, being a coach officer.
You may be teaching certain tactical expertise that is in your zone of genius. You maybe leading a lot of different seminars and courses based on experience that you have had in your service. You may also be a student yourself, where you are continually learning from others when you are a leader. You maybe learning from your team. Those that work under you, if you are working ways up the rank, if you are a good leader then you are even looking at what you can learn from those that are under you as well.
Then tactically, as I spoke of earlier, you need to be an expert in the tactical to be a good leader. You need to be an expert in relationships, behavior, communication. Without being an expert in these it is hard to be able to relate to different personalities, to different communication types, to different behaviors that you are seeing in the job, in your team, in working with one another.
You need to be able to not only know your communication styles but theirs as well, to teach them how to communicate with one another as best as possible.
You need to be an expert in health and fitness in order to be able to keep them strong.
You need to also be a disciplinarian and that comes with different ways of communication.
There’s no way that you can be an expert in every piece of the puzzle that makes up a good leader. And a leader is someone who is always learning in order to be and do better.
Some in your service may believe that your service will give you all of the training that you need in order to be promoted or when you are promoted. And they may believe that once you become that leader that they’re going to give you all of the tools and everything that you need in order to be an expert in that position.
But I know that that’s not you.
If you are listening to this, you know that in order to get that upper edge to do better each and every day to become stronger and more focused that you do need to take in all that your service is going to provide you. They will give you so much good information and good training but we also need to look beyond that.
There’s so many different courses out there. I know even once you start moving up the ranks, there’s different courses on just how to fill out forms and different things, all the different paperwork that comes along with your job. There’s all different courses on different things to do with leadership, different things that will all compliment what it is that you do.
Conferences. I know my husband is going to a phenomenal conference. He’s really excited about in Florida in the next couple of weeks, that is all about, I believe, emergency management from the operational side. There’s so many different experts that are at these conferences from different services where they have had different experiences than anyone in your services had that you can learn so much from them.
From reading. There’s books that I know I was just speaking of in one of our coaching calls the other day where they were talking about some of the recommendations that I’ve given them. Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss and Ego Authority Failure by Derek Gaunt. Both of those guys were former FBI hostage negotiators who now teach business sales, business leadership.
And do you know that they speak at conferences for services for first responders as well? In order to be able to give you the tools and the skills that were used in their hostage negotiation and use those actually in life, use those with your team. I use a lot of these skills with my kids, with my husband.
There’s different podcasts as well. Jocko Willink and Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman has had some phenomenal books out there as well to be understanding different behaviors and things that may happen.
I know that you are somebody who takes action and goes that extra mile to make sure that you have the skills required to be the best that you can be. Tactically from a leadership point of view, communication point of view from all of these.
The responders that go through my 911 Elite Performance Program, I’ve been finding that the things that they’re learning in my program are not only helping them become stronger and more focused and calmer but it’s also helping them get promoted and become better leaders even before being promoted.
It’s so great seeing posts in our private members community when they get promoted. Many of these posts, they have these thank yous for things that they’ve learned in 911 Elite Performance because it not only helps them stay focused and have that clearer brain. And they need that for studying for these exams, for some of the specialized positions that you guys are getting into the training and knowledge that you need to learn.
When you are tired, when you don’t have the focus and the sharpness when you need to be studying then it is hard to take in all of that information.
And they’ve gained that in order to score higher on their promotional exams but it’s also given the tools and skills that can help keep their team strong through all that is going to be thrown at all of them operationally.
We have an officer in our program, she’s been with me now two, three years, I think it’s three years now that she’s been in the program.
And she worked the first while on making sure that she was strong being a mom. Also, her spouse is an officer as well. And she has worked really, really hard to make sure that her sleep is maximized. Making sure she was more focused, more calm, being able to get all of these tools and tactics in order to be able to be as strong as she can be while her and her spouse are working around one another’s shifts and then being there for their kids as well.
A lot of her colleagues have asked her what she’s doing and she’s been helping them out.
There were times where she was noticing different things with colleagues where they were more frustrated or there were certain behaviors that she was noticing and she would bring those to coaching calls and we would talk through how to have certain conversations with them. Crucial conversations in order to allow them to feel in control of the conversation and take action while she was actually leading the conversation in order to get them into a better place where they were more of team players and able to help out.
And then she was working towards her promotion.
She did get passed up on one but she took that as an opportunity to learn how to be stronger of a team player, had team member and how to be able to bring out the best in each of the members of her team.
That really benefited her when she did her next promotional interview. And in that promotional interview, she really did talk a lot about the skills and things that she did acquire in our 911 Elite Performance Program. And now that she’s been promoted, she’s on a completely different shift schedule so we’ve been working with her on how to adapt her sleep, how to change things, because the tools that you need are different based on the shift schedule that you’re on.
How you tweak them, how you refine them, how you work with them is different based on what’s being thrown at you.
She still is working on some of the cases from her prior job as well on her off time. So making sure that her brain is as focused and clear as possible and she still has the energy left for her kids as well.
It’s been fascinating because the questions she’s coming to us with are, okay, I’m seeing these stress signs in certain of my teammates.
How do I approach them? How do I work with them on it?
She’s gone from somebody who. Worked on these things herself. And then now is learning and adapting them to new shift schedules, to new jobs, new duties, and also implementing them with her team.
It’s been absolutely amazing watching all that she has gone through in order to become stronger herself but also to become a stronger leader.
If a promotion is in your future, if you are looking to work your way up your ranks or get on specialized units, special tactical units that may physically be taxing you or ones where you need that brain focus. And you would like to find out what 911 Elite Performance is like.
If you want to find out if it’s for you, you can email me at support@911lifesytle.com and ask for my link to my calendar and we can schedule a 25 minute call with me where we can do a 911 Elite Performance Assessment and we’ll see if you are a candidate for best results in our program. If our program is right for you right now. You can email support@911lifestyle.com if you’re interested in that.
Now, what is it about 911 Elite Performance that did help with promotions with this specific officer and with others that have promoted that we work with. There are two top points that we are going to focus on. The first is how 911 Elite Performance helps when it comes to promotions.
Is that it maximizes your efficiency, so it decreases your time that you need to be studying. It increases your focus and your preparation.
You’re already working full-time hours, lots of overtime, lots of operational stress. You may have a lot going on at home and you’re not often able to get eight hours of sleep. Even when you do, understanding how to maximize it based on your shift schedule will give you more focus and allow you to be calmer. And have more energy so that when you are studying, when you are preparing for these tests and all of the learnings, the courses that you all are doing, it allows you to not have to reread paragraphs multiple times over in order to retain it.
You retain things a lot easier when you body is healing and repairing and you’re able to maximize the quality of your sleep.
That’s the first thing we work on with you guys is making sure that your sleep is in check. Not in the way that we work with the civilian.
Our bodies were designed, so that the sun rising and setting signals sleep hormones and wake hormones to be kicking in. And that can’t happen on a lot of your shifts or when you only have a couple of hours in there.
You want to really maximize that amount of sleep as best as you can. So we need to take out different tools. We need to bring different tools in order to get sleep on track, in check for whatever amount of sleep that you’re able to sleep based on what your shift has demanded of you.
If we think of this like a pro athlete. A pro athlete, they’re not going to go into game day tired and not focused, right?
So why should we?
If you have these shifts really pushing you hard then it’s going to take you longer to digest the information to that next level.
Making sure that everything that you are doing for your sleep, what you’re doing on shift, what you’re doing post shift, in order to make sure that you are recovering as quick as possible is going to keep your brain focused and clear and keep your energy up when you need it.
And then when you get promoted, you are coming in strong, right?
If you don’t implement these tools, then you’re not going to be focused. It’ll take you a lot more time and energy to be studying and doing all the things you need to do to get to that specialized unit, to get to that promotion. And then when you get to the promotion, you’re spent.
The second priority that I did speak of that our program does help with when it comes to promotions is understanding how to maximize your sleep on any shift schedule so that you can teach your team what they need for operational endurance, which will reduce the burnout of your team and those that you are leading.
You are the one that gets to create the culture of your team.
When you’re leading a team, when you’re teaching courses, when you are the expert then those under you should be looking up to you.
And if you start your new leadership position on the top of your game with energy, where you’re calm, where you’re focused, so that you have operational endurance then they will start to emulate more of the habits that they’re seeing you partake in.
If you’re speaking of certain things that you do for your sleep, if you’re speaking at the end of your shift, okay, I’ve gotta go home and do this and this so that I can maximize my sleep and I’m ready for tomorrow.
These are the things that they start emulating. And the problem is though, is when they have a leader that doesn’t have these habits that they’re not seeing them implement on shift that they’re not hearing what they implement off of shift then they have a leader who is more tired.
Who is more exhausted.
Who is more frustrated and less able to teach them so they respect them and look up to them less.
But it also means that your team is not gaining these skills. Your team may be gaining more of the skills of somebody who doesn’t have all of these tools.
And that’s when they start burning out.
When you learn the tools that we teach in 911 Elite Performance, you will know the signs when somebody is actually struggling on your team. We’ll teach you the subtle signs, so you’ll even figure it out before they may even realize that they are struggling.
You may be able to nip some things in the bud with your team, with those that you are leading with your colleagues before it gets to the point where they end up medicalled out. And when everyone on your team is more focused, when they’re calmer, when they’re making better decisions, they last longer in their career.
And that means that you have more of a solid team working together cause they’re staying together. They’ll want to stay on your team, stay with you and all of this because you have the skills to teach them. It’s this compound effect.
And that’s why I do what I do is because if I can teach one of you who is a leader and then you can teach 10 people under you or 20 and then they can teach people under them this compounds.
And we can start shifting things in these services where less and less are burning out.
Where more and more of you are operationally strong. You have the endurance for the operations. But when they don’t have somebody to have these skills to show them, when you don’t know these tools in order to show your team then that is when they drop, that’s when the team falls apart.
You see this in professional sports where a new coach will come in and breaks down a lot of the skills and foundations that these people had and build them from the team up. Hoosiers, that’s one of my favorite movies.
So if you think of Hoosiers, the movie or I’m sure you’re thinking of certain teams in sports right now where a coach came in and turned a team around. A team that was struggling and as soon as that coach came in, not as soon as it takes a while to build that team up. That team needs to start learning new foundational skills.
They need to start building things up, building these new habits.
But as this team becomes more cohesive as a team, as the team starts working together, having more energy, less frustrations with one another and they are all stronger, know their roles on their team, what they need to do, and they implement it.
Those are the teams that win and that starts with a lot of the habits that we teach in 911. Elite Performance.
If you don’t go into your promotion, if you don’t go into these specialty units leading teams with these skills, then your team risks burnout.
And more turnover.
And that compound effect sadly, does compound but in the opposite direction than we want it to happen.
So if we recap on what we talked about today, good leaders wear many hats. And you cannot be an expert in everything, so it is important to continue to keep learning and grabbing these skills, courses, resources, podcasts, all of these things that are out there.
Learning the skills that we do teach in 911 Elite Performance has made a huge impact on responders who are prepping for promotion, who work on specialized teams.
It’s helped them to really get through the selection process.
It helps with getting promotions.
It helps with being a better leader once you are promoted.
When your crew follows your lead and learns how to maximize their sleep.
How to stay operationally strong.
Then they gain the skills not only to endure all that the jobs throws at them but they also learn how to manage things at home better as well.
And this keeps your team together.
Your team has less turnaround, there’s stronger bonds and less burnout and you are more successful as a leader.
If you are ready to learn these skills, email support@911lifestyle.com and ask for the calendar link for my calendar, my personal calendar of when you can speak with me to learn more about 911 Elite Performance and assess if it is the right program for you in order to make the impact that you want to make on your career that you want to make on your team, for your colleagues, for your service.
Support@911Lifestyle.com and we can get you started today.
