Leadership Training

[docfin]

Are any of your brigades providing Leadership training for new or prospective Supervisory Managers? I am interested in finding out if anyone has had any training which involved practical leadership tasks such as those done on outward bounds courses or any training in leadership styles and their practical application? What sort of things have you done and did you find it of any use? Thanks in advance.

[Kaiser]

My brigade has a local course giving incident command skills for operational scenarios and it also sends the same individuals to do the IMF course at Moreton.  In addition to this, new CM's complete ILM, Institute of Leadership and Management at different levels depending on their role.  Once the ILM is completed, we have several other courses around watch managements issues for JO's.  I like the sound of outward bound courses but I do think it would be difficult to justify the cost to the fire authority and council tax payers.  If we did have the opportunity to do outward bound courses I would try to arrange it so that the people taking part were all on the same colour watch so that they will be familiar with each other at incidents after the course.

[docfin]

Some good stuff there Kaiser so thanks. We also run a CMs Ops command course (we have just extended this and I am currently writing the new format) we also use ILM and others for management training such as counselling and coaching etc etc. Traditionaly our WT Trainee courses complete a group task at the end of their recruit course such as a charity fund raiser for the Benny fund. This aften involved an outward bouds type sponsored event which really let people learn a lot about themselves and how to work within a group.  I would like to try to bring in something of this type at the end of the CMs course but I fear that the altruistic gene is being bred out of many these days. Just had a meeting with senior managers though and looks like we may well go down the route of getting supervisory managers away to a specialist centre for a couple of days where they get some professional feedback on how they perform within groups under a bit of pressure. We can then  see if we can find ways to build on our selection process and hopefuly, in conjunction with the other "soft" skills courses we run, foster good leadership ability in future 1st line and middle managers.
You are entirely right to say that outward bound stuff is difficult to justify as a legitimate use of taxpayers money, and as with anything new we will have to be very sure that we get good value. I have no doubt we will have the usual complaints from the usual suspects that its just a "jolly" and waste of time and money which could be better used. This will of course be followed by complaints that we do not invest in training our ops people to manage difficult situations other than throwing them in at the deep end on jobs. Oh well.