Welcome back to The Flipside of the Firehouse. This is where we talk about what doesn't always make it into reports, policies, or training manuals. The real conversations, the tension and the leadership moments that happen in the bay and around the kitchen table. The things that actually shape a crew, for better or worse.

If you spend enough time in firehouses, you'll eventually hear somebody say the same thing. It might come from a firefighter sitting at the table. It might come from a company officer after a rough shift. It might even come from a chief trying to figure out why people are frustrated with the department's latest decision. The words are almost always some version of this: “Our biggest problem around here is communication.”

I have heard that statement echo at departments across the country, and I am willing to bet most of you have heard it in your own department, too. Communication has become the catch-all explanation for almost everything that goes wrong inside an organization. Morale is bad because of communication. People do not understand a new policy because of communication. The shifts are frustrated with administration because of communication. Administration is frustrated with the shifts because of communication. Somewhere along the way, communication became one of the easiest words we use to explain some of the hardest problems we have.

But I have started wondering if we are using the wrong word.

What is communication?

Think about how many ways your department can communicate today. We have email, text messages, department apps, scheduling systems, printed and digital policies and standard operating procedures, shift briefings and meetings, training sessions, electronic bulletin boards, social media, group chats, and more. Some departments have so many ways to send information that the real challenge is figuring out which one you are supposed to check first. And of course, we still have the firehouse rumor mill, which might be the fastest information delivery system ever invented.

The point is that most departments are not suffering from a lack of ways to communicate. In fact, we probably communicate more information to more people through more channels than at any other time in fire service history. That makes me question whether many of the problems we keep labeling as communication problems are actually something else.

I think a lot of them are clarification problems.

For the sake of this conversation, I want to define communication pretty simply. Communication is how we move information from one person to another: an email, a policy, a text message, and the chief announcing a department meeting are all forms of communication. If the information was transmitted from one person or group to another, communication occurred.

But communication does not guarantee understanding.

That is where I think we get ourselves into trouble. Leadership sends an email explaining a change and a few days later, somebody says, “Nobody told us about this.” Leadership immediately responds, “Yes, we did. We sent an email.” Technically, leadership is correct. They communicated the information. But the firefighter might also be telling the truth. What they may really mean is, “Nobody explained this to us in a way that made sense.”

Those are two very different things.

How can you clarify what you are trying to communicate?

Leaders often measure communication by whether they sent information, such as sending the email or updating the policy. Did we mention it during the officer meeting? If the answer is yes, we tend to consider the communication complete. The people receiving the information often measure something completely different. They want to know what is changing, why it is changing, how it affects them, what they are expected to do, and what happens next.

That is where clarification comes in.

Clarification might be one of the simplest leadership tools we have, and somehow it remains one of the most underused. One phrase I encourage departments and leaders to use is, “Can you clarify that for me?” It is simple, respectful, and incredibly effective. More importantly, everyone in the organization should be allowed to use it. The rookie should be able to ask the captain. The captain should be able to ask the battalion chief and they should be able to ask the fire chief. And the fire chief should be willing to ask the people working on the floor when something does not make sense from their perspective. That idea is built directly into the clarification work we use in the Firehouse Freedom curriculum.

We also need to stop treating requests for clarification as challenges to authority. Asking a question does not automatically mean someone is being difficult. Sometimes people are simply trying to understand. If I ask my captain to clarify an assignment, I am not necessarily questioning the captain. I may want to know exactly what success looks like. If firefighters ask questions about a new staffing decision, promotional process, or administrative policy, those questions do not automatically mean they are resisting change. They may be trying to fill in the parts of the picture they cannot see.

🎙️The Firehouse Yak: Flip Griffin – Flipping Fire Service Leadership

That matters because when clarification is missing, something else fills the space. Assumptions, rumors, opinions, or partial information fills it. Somebody tells somebody else what they think administration meant. That person adds their interpretation. Another shift hears part of that version. By the next morning, a simple policy change has somehow turned into evidence that the chief is eliminating an engine company, changing the schedule, freezing promotions, and selling Station 2.

Most of us laugh at that because we've all watched some version of it happen.

This is also where perspective becomes important. In our workshops, I sometimes use a beach ball as an example. Imagine placing a beach ball in the middle of the firehouse kitchen table. I sit on one side, and you sit on the other. We are looking at the same object, but the colors I see might be completely different from the colors you see. Neither one of us is necessarily wrong. We have a different view based on where we are sitting.

Departments work the same way. A firefighter may look at a staffing decision and see increased workload, fatigue, crew safety, and another person being moved from the station. A company officer may see apparatus coverage, training requirements, sick leave, and the need to keep units in service. The fire chief may see overtime costs, the city budget, legal requirements, community expectations, and a dozen other factors that most firefighters never have reason to see. The Firehouse Freedom material uses this exact idea to show how the same organizational issue can look completely different depending on where someone sits.

The mistake is assuming that a different perspective automatically means somebody is wrong. Sometimes the firefighter needs more information from leadership. Sometimes leadership needs more information from the firefighter. Clarification allows both sides to see more of the beach ball.

Turning communication into conversation

There is another important point here. Clarification does not mean agreement. A chief may make a decision that firefighters strongly disagree with. Clarification does not require leadership to change that decision until everybody is happy. It simply means people understand the decision, why it was made, when that information can be shared, what is expected of them, and what comes next. People can disagree with a decision and still understand it. In my experience, that is a much healthier place for an organization to operate than disagreement built on incomplete information.

But a third word still matters even more: conversation.

Communication moves information. Clarification helps people understand the information. Conversation allows people to exchange information.

That difference is important because conversation requires participation. Someone talks. Someone listens. Someone responds. Questions are asked. Context is added. Assumptions are challenged. Maybe somebody sitting on the opposite side of that beach ball tells you about a color you did not even know was there.

For major operational and administrative issues, I believe conversation should remain one of the primary ways we lead people. Staffing changes, promotional processes, organizational restructuring, training expectations, station assignments, major policy changes, discipline processes, and anything else that significantly affects our people's professional lives deserve more than simply hitting send.

An email may absolutely be part of the communication process. It just should not always be the entire leadership process.

We are a relationship-based profession. We live, eat, train and solve problems together. We spend 24 hours at a time sharing the same space, and then we walk into some of the worst moments of people's lives together. Yet, when it comes to some of the biggest issues inside our own organizations, we occasionally convince ourselves that a carefully written email should be enough.

Sometimes it is, but sometimes it is not and the challenge for leaders is knowing the difference.

An email can distribute information to hundreds of people almost instantly. But it can't look across the kitchen table and realize somebody is confused. It cannot hear frustration in someone's voice. It cannot recognize that a company officer understands the policy but has no idea how to make it work with the crew. It cannot ask, “What part of this are we missing?” People can do that. Conversations can do that.

So maybe the next time somebody says your department has a communication problem, we should resist the urge to agree or disagree immediately. Instead, we should dig a little deeper.

Knowing when to communicate more

Are we actually failing to distribute information? Then we probably do have a communication problem. Are we sending plenty of information, but people do not understand what it means or what is expected of them? Then we probably have a clarification problem. Are we communicating information and explaining decisions, but rarely creating opportunities for meaningful exchange between the people making those decisions and the people carrying them out? Then we may have a conversation problem.

Those problems sound similar, but they are not the same, and they will not be solved the same way.

Another email will not fix a clarification problem. Another app will not fix a conversation problem. Another policy telling everybody to communicate better probably will not fix either one.

Sometimes leadership does not need to be more complicated.

Send the information. Make sure people understand it. Then, when the subject matters enough, sit down and talk about it.

Communication. Clarification. Conversation.

Maybe the fire service doesn't have as big a communication problem as we think. Maybe we are communicating more than we ever have before. Maybe our bigger challenge is making sure the information we send is actually understood and creating enough room for people throughout the organization to talk about what it means.

Because the goal was never to get the message out.

The goal is to understand each other.

And as always…

If something in this column makes you pause…

If it creates an ah-ha moment…

If it causes you to see something differently…

Or if it is something you dismiss now but remember later when you need it…

Then it is doing its job.

That is why I am here.

That is the flipside.

Until next month.