Hearing Aids: Practical tips, tricks & anecdotes that will help you level-up your listening & leadership skills
Hearing Aids
Practical tips, tricks & anecdotes that will help you level-up your listening & leadership skills.
By Pat Dale
B Shifter Buckslip, Sept. 30, 2025
Many people in fire service leadership positions want to improve their public speaking capabilities. It makes sense. Addressing governing boards, community groups, animal clubs, and members of their own organization is a big part of the job. So they sign up for lessons on public speaking with consultants and coaches—even Toastmasters.
Recently, while helping to distill Blue Card’s Silverback Leadership content, I was reviewing Alan and Nick Brunacini’s book, “The Anatomy & Physiology of Leadership.” When I got to the Ears chapter, I started thinking about, well, listening! I don’t think I’ve ever heard of leaders taking lessons on listening. How does listening fit into my own leadership experience?
Zip It & You’ll Get MORE Out of Meetings
Sometimes the best way to lead is to shut up and listen. When I first became a fire chief, I was joining that department as an outsider. One of the steps I took early on was to hold what I called listening meetings. I wanted to hear from as many of the members as possible, their issues and concerns—and I knew there were many. (Of course, I had listened to the concerns and needs of the board members during the hiring process.)
I started with the senior management team as a group, then the union’s executive board. Next, I went to all stations and all shifts, meeting with groups as small as possible, conducting these meetings with a reminder written in the palm of my hand: STFU. It was amazing what happened when I stopped talking and started listening! Along the way, I developed certain habits to help myself critically listen.
I didn’t take my cell phone into the meetings. Cell phones can be a rude distraction. There’s an almost irresistible temptation to check and see who is texting, emailing or calling. When your focus is on your phone, it sends a clear message to the speaker that what they have to say isn’t important to you.
I asked an administrative assistant to come with me and take notes. It’s impossible to actively listen while writing everything down. (I never did believe in multi-tasking.)
I tried to be deliberate about making eye contact while listening to the speaker. Eye contact conveys to the person speaking your focus and attention. It allows us to listen carefully and with intent to our speaking partner.
I paid attention to body language. Looking for body cues, energy, tone and hesitation helped me to better discern what wasn’t being said.
I embraced seemingly awkward moments of silence, pausing and observing. I tried to resist my lifelong habit of filling in the voids with what I might be dying to say at that moment. After all, if I started talking, I wasn’t listening.
I intentionally drew everyone into the conversations. Newer members would often have important perspectives, but didn’t always feel they could speak up.
The listening meetings were excellent for helping me identify patterns. They also allowed me, as an outsider, to come up to speed quickly (again, coming from the outside) and, as I later learned, helped me build trust with the members.
Don’t Tune Out!
The tender story revealed a recurring theme that surfaced throughout the meetings: Many members felt the administration wasn’t listening to them. They believed they were undervalued, unappreciated and unimportant to the organization. This disconnect fostered a palpable us vs. them mentality—so much so that they even referred to the administration as “The Regime.”
I had heard numerous times about the condition of the department’s tender (aka water tanker in some regions/systems). Most of the workers believed the vehicle was unsafe. It had issues with its brakes, emergency lights and radio. The members felt their concerns had fallen on deaf ears, and no action had been taken. Out of frustration, they just stopped writing it up.
The administration believed the tender needed to remain available on an as-needed basis because it was the only tender in the fleet. They also thought it had a positive effect on the department’s Insurance Services Office rating, which, of course, is important for financial reasons, but should never be prioritized over safety.
“Critical listening is a major boss capability.” —Chief Alan V. Brunacini
I had the tender taken out of service to be inspected by the mechanics, and it never saw service again. This event offered a great opportunity to talk with senior leadership about resisting what I call white noise—the things we hear so often that we stop listening and they eventually fade into the background. Leaders must develop critical listening skills as a major boss capability, especially when it comes to worker safety and welfare.
This short story isn’t about the tender. It’s about listening with follow-up action and making workers feel heard. A characteristic of trust is connection. Listening intently is one of the most powerful forms of connection we have. Conversely, bad listening signals to people that you don’t care about them, and people don’t trust someone who doesn’t care about them.
Listening Can Heal Rifts Between Factions
Another dynamic that was palpable during the listening meetings was the tension, confusion, frustration and distrust that existed between the floor and management. For example, each member of the senior management team had a TV in their office. I started to notice that when people (including me) came into their offices to talk to them, the TVs were a clear distraction to their listening capability. I broached the topic in a management team meeting. We discussed the message we were sending our members—that they weren’t important, that we didn’t care—and it was compromising trust between our members and the senior leaders. We discussed the need to develop the habit of giving others our full attention while listening. As Chief Bruno said, “Control your own hearing distractions.” The TVs were eventually removed.
One of the best examples of the return on investment in deliberately improving critical listening skills comes from the relationship between labor and management. Early in my tenure as chief, I asked the union president how often the two sides met. He told me the meetings were supposed to happen monthly, but only occurred when there was something to argue about. I suggested we meet weekly—and at a coffee shop, on neutral ground. Again, my goal was to build trust. It bears repeating: A characteristic of trust is connection. Listening intently is one of the most powerful forms of connection we have.
“As a leader, continually improve your critical and active listening capabilities.” —Chief Alan V. Brunacini
At first, I suggested to our management team that we focus on listening—truly listening—to the labor leaders. Stephen Covey once said people won’t listen to what you have to say until they feel understood, and that idea really resonated with me. For the next five years, we kept meeting weekly, steadily practicing and improving our critical listening skills.
The labor/management relationship greatly improved over time. In my opinion (and I’ve said it often), when the labor-management relationship is healthy, the department as a whole is healthier. We didn’t always agree on every issue, but we valued each other’s presence at the table.
Listening Is a Habit We Build Over Time
The higher I advanced up the food chain, the more deliberate I was about listening more than talking. I didn’t always get it right, but I tried. At times, I sucked at listening—still do. Sometimes I fade out, and sometimes I fade back in. For me, it’s a lifelong work in progress.
Pat Dale has spent 42 years in the fire service. His formative years were spent at the Kent (Wash.) Fire Department, where he progressed through the ranks to battalion chief. He then spent nearly 17 years as the Assistant Chief of Operations at the Olympia (Wash.) Fire Department. He was the Fire Chief at Graham (Wash.) Fire & Rescue for five years before spending 2 years as the chief of Redmond (Ore.) Fire & Rescue. He briefly held the position of Director of Fire Service Training at Bates Technical College in Tacoma (Wash.) He has been a proud Blue Card Lead instructor since 2010.