Page 13 - InCommand Volume 31

over many years of cordial interaction and trust and are indispensable.
The third pillar, structural capital, refers not to brick and mortar but rather
share, and apply knowledge is critical to success in the market. As public safety agencies we are not pitted directly against the market as in the private sector, but
development, assisting our personnel in weighing various school options and identifying sources of financial aid.
Formally assigned mentoring relationships can be of great benefit
to junior fire officers. Junior officers may not know what they don’t know, and therefore don’t ask for guidance. Learning to navigate the grey areas and apply judgement as a leader can be difficult. Senior fire officers may not offer them uninvited advice. An assigned mentor relationship breaks down the personal or social barriers and lets them know that the organization expects
the senior member to invest time in telling stories, making analogies, and using metaphors to accelerate the junior officer’s acquisition of tacit knowledge.
Similarly, apprenticeships help
retain organizational knowledge. Most firefighter job descriptions conclude with, “and any other duties as assigned by the Fire Chief.” Examples of these extra duties or domains of responsibility might be EMS supply quartermaster, apparatus maintenance officer, software administrator, SCBA maintenance officer, or training coordinator. An apprenticeship program assures that at least two members, ideally with a spread in seniority of five to twenty years, are assigned such tasks. As the apprentice supports each activity over the years, retirement of a senior member does not leave a knowledge gap, and the programs perpetuates when the apprentice steps up to take over, eliminating the need to take two steps back before moving forward.
Does your fire department have a plan for the acquisition, creation, sharing, and retention of knowledge? If not, now is the time to consider developing a plan
to manage your intellectual capital and organizational knowledge as part of your broader strategic plan for organizational improvement.
to structures within our organization designed to generate, retain, and share knowledge. Here is where we counteract the tendency for intellectual capital
to become stored in “silos,” stored vertically in high performing individuals rather than distributed throughout the organization. Mentoring programs and apprenticeship relationships are structures an organization can employ to share and retain knowledge. A culture of openness and collaboration, as opposed to information hoarding and control, is vital to building the organization’s structural capital.
In today’s competitive business world, the ability to acquire, integrate, store,
we should be in constant competition with ourselves, always striving to be better at saving lives and preserving property than we were before. The failure to develop a Knowledge Management (KM) plan is a plan for failure.
It is not good enough to strive to
hire the most qualified candidates, and then simply turn them loose in the organization. A KM plan should promote the acquisition of new knowledge and the sharing and transfer of existing knowledge. As Chief Officers, we should be encouraging our personnel to pursue college, bring what they learn back, and make application on the job. We should act as guidance counselors in professional
JULY/AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020 • www.ohiofirechiefs.org I n C o m m a n d 13