Leadership & Management

Using his experience on hiring and promotional interview boards, the instructor will break down the interview process into easily digestible bites and straightforward guidelines to help navigate you through basic hiring interviews and promotional interviews. This presentation contains the information that you need to excel including how to prepare a top-notch résumé and curriculum vitae.

Great leaders do more than communicate; they influence. You may have heard that Americans spend 68% of their day bombarded by people trying to affect their decisions, and another 52% trying to persuade others. Those numbers add up to 120% of the day, and that “fact” is false. This presentation will help you learn to quickly identify myths and factual errors like that one and improve your critical thinking skills to avoid falling victim to logical fallacies and other arguments that sound good, but don’t hold water. These skills are crucial to every leader and educator in emergency services.

Identifying and preparing the next generation of leaders for your department is a critical responsibility. What will happen to all of the hard work you’ve put into your organization when it comes time for you to leave? Who will take your organization to the next level? Will they be ready to face the challenges that await them? Will they know how? Training your replacement takes work. Making a plan, finding a candidate, helping them develop, and handing off the reins isn’t just a good strategy; it is the only choice for your organization to survive. It can take time, money, and work and may seem counterintuitive to train people for a job they aren’t currently doing, but the “Train Your Replacement” mindset and the four steps it requires will help your organization get ready for the next set of challenges. This intensively participative workshop helps attendees evaluate their organization and themselves with the goal of “deepening the bench” of future emergency services leaders.

Have you stopped asking “How are things?” at work, for fear that people might actually tell you? It can be said “They don’t have to LIKE it, they just have to DO it.”, but employee morale plays a vital role in job performance. Research links employee engagement with higher productivity, lower absenteeism, and less turnover. Collecting the best “We should do that!” ideas from emergency service organizations large and small, this program presents simple, low-cost to no-cost methods to help make work a better place for everyone.

While leaders are often focused on the management of individual employees, no 911 call is ever answered by one single emergency responder. The team approach that is required on scene must begin in the station. This team-based approach is fundamental to high-performance organizations’ ability to respond to dynamic situations under changing environmental, economic and social conditions. This program gives leaders examples of effective vs ineffective groups and explores the individuals, interpersonal dynamics, organizational structure and leadership strategies that are required to build not just a collection of responders, but an effective, high performance emergency service team.

Conflict occurs in every group, but how it’s managed determines the success or failure of both the individuals and the organizations involved. The goal of successful communication and conflict management isn’t to make everyone happy or to make sure the right person “wins”. Great leaders of every level have mastered the skills to help team members use differences and conflict to move the group forward, rather than to put up barriers or tear down long-term team progress to achieve individual short-term victory. This session will help attendees identify dysfunctional conflict, identify common goals, focus on the team mission, use a variety of tools and techniques to use different opinions and perspectives to build a more resilient and effective organization.

Work in any organization, large or small, paid or volunteer, involves transactions of value where the member gets value from the organization and gives value back. Volunteer and employment exchanges have traditionally focused on the perspective of the organization and what they could get from members. Today, leaders must flip that perspective and consider what the member is looking to gain, rather than just what the organization is willing to give to the employee or volunteer. Getting this "employee value proposition" right can help organizations attract high-quality candidates, engage current members to boost performance, and improve the customer experience and business operations. With quality EMS candidates and providers at a premium, organizations that can provide good employee value propositions will thrive and those that do not will fail to survive.

Crew Resource Management (CRM) provides a structured approach to teamwork and communication, helping emergency services organizations reduce errors, improve safety, and foster an environment where learning is valued over punitive measures. This session offers a practical framework for introducing CRM principles, covering leadership, resource utilization, and communication, to create an organizational culture focused on collaboration and continuous improvement.