FDNY: It’s the Culture, Stupid
Break up the conspiracy
Skipping responses is a symptom of a broader work culture crisis.
Leaders avoid key responsibilities through deception — shirking and lying are always an ugly combination.
Oz or the Big Apple?
What factors (leadership, labor, management, group dynamics, socialization, hiring, peer pressure, etc.) allow for such a fundamental failure?
One of my former bosses, an FDNY Assistant Chief, would sometimes say with irony, “You can tell any lie you want but you’re really in trouble when you start believing them.”
The presumption that FDNY firefighters have a universal commitment to public service is one such lie.
Skipping runs and the lying and silence which makes it possible suggests that FDNY is more like Oz than the Big Apple where the public reputation hides a tawdry private reality.
It also proves that long-term company assignments, a vestige of the continuous duty days when firefighters often lived in the neighborhood and walked to work and even went home for dinner, is a breeding ground for decay and deceit.
It Takes a (Dysfunctional) Family
Faking responses takes the cooperation of whole teams of people and that means that a street-level conspiracy of silence is at work, including firefighters who didn’t make the decision but went along with it.
Fine officers they’ll make some day.
Speaking of that, if lieutenants, captains and battalions “grew up” in such a culture, it’s easy to see how it comes to this.
Either the most senior uniformed leaders at 9 MetroTech broadly approve of the prevailing culture or are impotent to stop it.
Both unions, the UFA and the UFOA, are complicit as they are tasked with effectively defending the indefensible as part of their charters. Members have rights and the unions protect them, perhaps to a fault.
A Simple Fix: Follow the Military (and other departments)
A conspiracy requires a group of willing participants with a common goal who trust one another.
The tighter the group, the greater the trust, the more effective the conspiracy.
The FDNY conspiracy is to defraud the public by making firehouses the protector of toxic cultural norms where top leaders are just along for a cushy ride.
The military long ago learned that the advantages of routine reassignment every two to four years far outweighs any disadvantages because it prevents stagnation and the breakdown of discipline while re-energizing commands.
We’ll know that Commissioner Tucker is serious when he begins a comprehensive program to bust up the conspiracy by busting up firehouses where members spend an entire career or decades strengthening negative norms and grooming future adherents.
It works in the military and it will work in FDNY.
Time to retill the soil and pull out the weeds — citywide.
Replant the best and the brightest — the results might be surprising.
Anything else is just more fraud and deception.
Oh, and when you start up with the bullshit about the loss of critical first-due knowledge lost--save it — you can’t even get these guys to leave the firehouse.
Cheers.
