Leadership Level 5

For leaders of organizations, the challenges grow to looking broadly and further ahead. These leaders manage the most complex and high-profile emergency incidents.

Organizational leaders plan for future operations and mentor promising people for key roles in our organizations. They represent the face of the wildland fire service to cooperators, stakeholders, and the general public. Decisions made by these leaders have significant and far-reaching impacts.

Description

• Function as a senior-level organizational leader.
• Foster exchange of knowledge and experience in the art of leading large organizations during high-risk and complex incidents.
• Provide long-term strategic vision for the future of the organization.
• Promote a workforce where differences are valued and leveraged. Establish effective, positive, and long-term organizational culture.

Behaviors

• Utilizes foresight to anticipate the need for organizational change.
• Mentors Leaders of Leaders for key roles in the organization to ensure organizational succession, stability, and longevity.
• Anticipates, plans, responds, and executes within the social, security, political, infrastructure, information, and economic dimensions of the incident/organization while setting conditions for success.
• Establishes highly-effective incident response structures, using decentralized command and control models and intent-based operations.
• Establishes and communicates long-term vision to drive organizational change.
• Applies critical thinking to strategic-level planning.
• Effectively promote a varied workforce, allowing for differences of thought within the organization.
• Develops new insights into situations, questions conventional approaches, encourages new ideas and innovations, and designs and implements new or cutting-edge programs/processes.
• Encourages creative tension and differences of opinions. Anticipates and takes steps to prevent counter-productive confrontations. Manages and resolves conflicts and disagreements in a constructive manner.
• Ensures available resources are in alignment with vision, organizational goals, and the needs of their people.
• Ensures a common operating picture is maintained to align organizational decisions.

Knowledge

• Identify successful traits of senior leaders to continue to develop self.
• Identify how to benchmark and collaborate with outside organizations and apply within the organization.
• Continue to develop personal and professional leadership skills to keep pace with current and future workforce needs.
• Understand the importance of developing and utilizing political capital for organizational benefits (winning a battle vs. winning a war).
• Understand how to develop a healthy and resilient culture for a large organization.
• Understand how to mentor future leaders within the organization.
• Identify how your organization can handle an event beyond capacity or worst-case scenario (e.g., San Diego Mega Fire, Camp Fire).

Development Goals

• Complete L-580, Leadership Is Action.
• Read Wharton Leadership Digest or other academic publication.
• Read four books from the Professional Reading Program.
• Serve as a lead instructor at a Geographic Area Training Center.
• Develop or facilitate a local staff ride.
• Write a leadership article for the Wildland Fire Leadership Blog.

Self Study

• Leadership Self-Study - Level 5