Enhancing Emotional Intelligence in a High-Stakes Fire Department Leadership Team

Introduction

When the chief called Spirit of EQ, his description of the problem was short and specific: his leadership team was not communicating well with each other, and they were beginning to form cliques and camps. Nothing about that is unusual in a command structure. What was unusual was that he named it out loud and went looking for help. Three years later he had extended the engagement twice and brought the next layer of his officers into it. This is an account of what those three years involved. The department has asked to remain unnamed.

Background Story

The department is a large metropolitan operation serving a dense and varied urban community. Its technical competence was never in question. Crews were well trained, equipment was sound, and the department met the operational demands placed on it. The problem sat in the space between the officers. Strong personalities, long tenures, and real disagreements about how the department should be run had hardened into something more durable than ordinary friction. Information traveled along lines of alliance rather than lines of responsibility. Decisions were relitigated in hallways instead of settled in rooms. Factions in a command staff do not stay in the command staff. Firefighters read their officers closely — they have to. A crew that senses its lieutenant is at odds with the assistant chief learns quickly which requests will be backed and which will quietly die. Over time that costs a department in the places it can least afford: candor about mistakes, willingness to raise a concern early, and the trust that lets people hand off to one another at three in the morning without needing a conversation about it. The chief could see it. He also knew that no amount of additional tactical training would touch it.

Challenges

Three things made this harder than a standard leadership engagement. Credibility. A good many of the participants did not believe emotional intelligence had anything to do with their job. In the fire service, “soft skills” is not a neutral phrase. The work had to earn its place in the room before it could do anything in the department. There was nothing procedural to fix. Had the problem been a broken policy, a bad schedule, or an unclear chain of command, it could have been redesigned in a week and enforced from the top. The problem was relational, which meant the only available lever was the officers themselves. A department cannot pause. Whatever the program asked of people had to fit around shift work and callouts, and it had to do so without putting a dent in operational readiness.

Solution

The work was built on Engage, Activate, Reflect — the framework developed by Six Seconds, Spirit of EQ’s partner organization. It ran for three years, and each year had a different shape.

Year one — Engage: start with the individual

Every member of the leadership team completed the SEI, the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence assessment, each followed by a one-to-one debrief. Beginning individually was the answer to the credibility problem. A skeptical officer reading his own results is in a different position from one sitting through a presentation about emotions in general. The data was his, about him, and it was specific. From there the team moved into monthly group learning sessions working through the Six Seconds Success Factors and the eight EQ competencies — one layer at a time, applied to the work in front of them rather than to hypotheticals.

Year two — Activate: widen the subject

With the core model in place, the second year moved outward into the territory the first year had opened: wellbeing, and other subjects adjacent to emotional intelligence that the group’s own questions had surfaced. The monthly rhythm carried on. What changed was that the team was now shaping the agenda as much as the framework was — which is the point at which this kind of work stops being training and starts being practice.

Year three — Reflect: pass it down

In the third year the chief brought additional leaders — his lieutenants — into the work, repeating the first-year experience with them: the SEI, individual debriefs, and the monthly sessions on the competencies. That decision is the part of this engagement worth paying attention to. The senior team did not treat the first two years as a course they had completed. They treated the material as something the next layer of the department needed to have, and then spent a year making sure it did.

Why they extended, twice

In the chief’s own terms: they wanted the learning to continue, they had the budget to continue it, and they wanted EQ learning to reach more of their leaders.

What Changed

The chief’s own assessment, in writing:

“Over the course of three years, Spirit of EQ worked closely with our leadership team, and the results have been remarkable. I have seen firsthand how my officers consistently apply EQ principles.”

Two things are worth saying plainly about that. The first is what it claims. Not that the officers understood EQ principles, or endorsed them, or enjoyed the sessions — that they consistently apply them. Consistency is the hard part, and in a command structure it is the only part that matters operationally. The second is what we do not have. We did not run a post-engagement SEI, so there is no pre- and post-score comparison to offer here, and we are not going to manufacture one. What we have is the chief’s judgment, formed over three years of watching his own officers work, and the fact that he committed budget to this twice more after the first year ended. Of those two, the renewals are arguably the harder evidence. A chief who has watched a program closely for a year and then funds it again, and then again, and then puts his lieutenants through it, is making a judgment with his own budget and his own department’s time. That is a more expensive signal than a score.

What We Would Do Differently

One thing, and it is the measurement. We should have run a post-engagement SEI so there was a defensible before-and-after on the individual competencies. We did not, and that is a real gap in what we are able to tell you about this engagement. We would also now recommend Team Vital Signs alongside it. TVS measures the climate of a team rather than the capability of individuals — and the presenting problem here was a team problem. Cliques and camps are not any one officer’s deficit. TVS would have measured the thing the chief called about in the first place. On an engagement of this shape we would build both instruments in from the start.

Conclusion

The chief named a relational problem out loud rather than reorganizing around it, committed to a three-year arc rather than a workshop, and then extended the work to the officers coming up behind him. Skepticism about whether EQ belongs in the fire service is reasonable, and this team arrived with plenty of it. It did not survive three years of the officers’ own assessment results and the work of applying the material to real crews and real conflict.

Start a Conversation

Command staff who have stopped talking to each other is not a training problem, and it does not resolve on its own. We would welcome a conversation about what this work would look like in your department. Book a 60-minute conversation with Jim Vaive: calendly.com/jim-792/60min This engagement was led by Eric Pennington, managing partner at Spirit of EQ. Write to him at info@spiritofeq.com. Or write to Jim at jim@spiritofeq.com.