When bosses nitpick the small stuff, they lose sight of the big picture.

By Nick Brunacini
B Shifter Buckslip, Sept. 2, 2025

I spent my 29-year government career with one 2,000-member fire department. Despite its size, my organization had only 10 different personality types. (Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of plays about things influencing the human condition: responsibility, duty, ego, fairies, the King, love, incest and patricide—all the makings of a memorable awards banquet.) From my experience, I would guess these 10 personalities exist in every department. I’d also guess that of these 10 different personalities, only four or five rise to the boss ranks. The others aren’t as likely to promote due to anxiety, poor test-taking or simply an overwhelming aversion to being in charge. Of course, this doesn’t exclude less desirable members from becoming a boss. Push the right buttons, and you can transform Susie the Helpful C-shifter Socialist into an Insubordinate B-shifter Warlord.

Bosses are one of the main drivers of workplace harmony, satisfaction and tenure. And while your direct boss/supervisor has the most access to you, they do not have the greatest influence on your employment experience. The bosses above them, along with the organization’s basic employment philosophy, have the biggest effect on your workplace satisfaction. I lived this truth during my time as a company officer, when the majority of my bosses were assholes in some form or another.

Conventional wisdom implies that working for a douche bag diminishes one’s occupational joy and overall happiness. My former department diluted the effects of poor supervision by building a better society, one where each member had fundamental human rights and was empowered to actually do their job. It was a place driven by our mission, not the grooming and uniform standards bad bosses use to fuck with their subordinates.

During the firefighter phase of my career, I worked with a wide spectrum of B-shifters. Many were in perpetual trouble. Some for on-duty shenanigans, others for violating off-duty laws and regulations. A number of these individuals became legendary. Before becoming a firefighter, I used to tend bar with Denis (with one n). Denis also happened to be a firefighter-paramedic with 10 years of seniority.

A few years after I became a firefighter, Denis disappeared for a few weeks without taking the proper leave. Come to find out, he had slipped a few gears and had been living in a cave somewhere near the town of Payson, Ariz. The rumor was that he had married a sow bear after ingesting too much peyote. He denied this a few weeks later when I caught up with him while working on Engine 13. He had been promoted to captain and was my supervisor that shift. When supervising the group of us, he focused on our service-delivery mission and not making any situation worse. Despite losing a front tooth during his bear marriage, he was one of the more effective supervisors I worked with as a firefighter.

Another thing I quickly learned as a firefighter was that there was a fair number of employees who maintained their employment despite doing everything within their power to get fired. These individuals became poster children for third-chance management, and just mentioning any of their names was the fastest way to shut down any conversation about my being a nepo baby. More than a few of these scoundrels were ranking union officers and chiefs—demonstrating that there was hope even for the most dysfunctional among us. Viewed in a different light, running a fire department has more in common with managing a prison than it does a Fortune 500 company (and that isn’t meant as a compliment to Fortune 500 companies or a dis to prisons).

The thing all my bad bosses had in common was that they only went after low-hanging fruit. Using our actual effectiveness as a task-level company to judge our performance confused and mystified them. For a couple of years, I had the same battalion chief as a boss (he had been Denis’s paramedic partner 10 years prior, before Denis married a bear, lived in a dirt hole and lost a front incisor). We got along well enough, but his boss (our district commander) had an issue with the length of our hair and the fact that our station had fun despite his proclamations not to. Everything came to a head when C-shift called him one morning to say we had run the station computer through the dishwasher on station day. This was an outright fabrication. The ensuing kangaroo court found that not only did B-shift have the best response times, zero citizen complaints and the lowest on-duty injury rate, but we also inflicted the least amount of damage and loss to fire department property than any other crew in the battalion. It was also proven beyond a shadow of doubt that we had only washed the keyboard of the station computer in the dishwasher, which Jim Wortham (the chancellor of Phoenix Fire Department tech) proclaimed to be a-okay. Even our union rep was surprised by our efficiency. After two years of being our boss, the BC ended up demoting himself back to company officer.

The takeaway in all of this is that my former department’s best leaders used the department’s mission as the North Star for personnel management. They built a system to train the members in the core services firefighters deliver (firefighting, EMS, hazmat and technical rescue) and to educate and support the task, tactical and strategic levels. Our leaders understood that although core services get us through the door, added-value services catapult our service delivery to new heights and further empower the workforce. Organizationally, we celebrated shining examples of excellent service. The leaders also did not waste time indulging the paramilitary traditionalists in management styles based on subjugating the workforce to feed their small, toxic egos. We used the work to liberate ourselves from asshole bosses. More importantly, embracing the work vaccinated us from developing the asshole virus ourselves.