Story 1: Best Friends

There's always a couple of knuckleheads in the bunch—20 people, 20 personalities, there's going to be one or two knuckleheads. I was running a 20-person crew, 20-person AD crew, all first-year firefighters. And I hadn't worked with that crew ever and all of a sudden, bang, here I was running this 20-person crew. They had just formed up freshly out of fire school and we're having a moderate lightning bust, maybe a heavy lightning bust, and we're getting a lot of fires—little fires. One acre, two acres, maybe an occasional five-acre fire. We chased around fires for a couple of weeks.

And it was pretty obvious right out the gate, three of them were best friends together and those three, if they were together, I couldn't get anything done with them. They were essentially useless, they were too damned close. They'd start getting in rock fights, or start arguing with each other over what happened the night before—and they were best friends, don't forget it; they were best friends, but they were best friends that you just couldn't have be together at work. It just didn't work. Kind of like little kids, I put one on one squad, one on another squad, kind of put one on a specialty squad and that seemed to break up a lot of that troublemaking out of that crew. It did come out somewhat favorable results. I wouldn't say it was ideal.

We eventually went off forest once the forest was comfortable with them, we went up to Wenatchee, Washington, on a fire assignment. They were too together. And for the whole assignment we were up in Washington, it turned out, for 30 days. And the whole time, and I had to keep those three separated, because any time they put their heads together, nothing but problems.

Story 2: We Needed To Bring Them Together

I went on assignment back in 2000, I think 2001. We pulled a crew together from the Deschutes and Ochoco, both U.S. Forest Service and BLM. So we got the crew together, and it was like my last—I was hoping for it to be my last crew boss assignment as a trainee, and we went out. And one of the things I noticed right off the bat is that we had folks from Sisters, and we had folks from Bend, and we folks from the Ochoco, and folks from the BLM that had never worked together, and I picked that up right off the bat as there were little groups of people that would talk with each other, and the thing that I found very interesting, and later on very helpful, is that each area that sent folks had either a squad boss qualified person, or a crew boss qualified person. So totally on our crew, there was probably four people that were crew boss qualified; but they still liked to go off as squad boss, or just go off with the crew. So you can kind of see them, the folks that knew the supervisor that they worked with, might be an engine crew or a hand crew supervisor that they worked with, that's where they looked for guidance, and I picked that up right off the bat, and I thought that was very, very important.

Told the squad leaders to set your squads up. It's their choice who they want on their squad. And they were picking folks that they knew on each squad; we had two squads. We were going to break it down to three if we needed to. I noticed that this group was here, the ones that knew each other, and this group was here, the ones that knew each other. Basically what it was, was the folks on the Deschutes were together, and the folks on the Ochoco National Forest were together, and I didn't think that was a good way to work it. I thought about that situation and realized that the cohesion to try to build a team when you have folks that are sitting there that are relying on their supervisor for anything that came down was going to be very difficult. And I think what helped me on that assignment was there was other folks that were crew boss qualified. We got together and we talked about how we're going to pull these people, because I see these little groups talking to each other, and we needed to bring them together.

So what we did is that we figured out how to try to break them up into different squads so that they could intermingle with folks that they weren't comfortable with. I wanted to break it up, mainly because I was thinking of cohesion. How can I build this team fast as I can to get the trust factor that I need as a crew boss? And by breaking them up and splitting them on—you know, I took probably half of them that were from the Deschutes and put them with the half on the Ochoco.

I let it play itself out, and it only took a few days for them to start interacting with each other and talking with each other, and getting that comfort level with each other within that group. And within probably four or five days, we had a pretty good solid team. They were listening to what I was asking them to do. I could talk to any one of those crews. They trusted me; I trusted them. I listened to their concerns; they listened to my concerns. We had a pretty easy assignment, it was mostly mopup, but there was some downhill line digging, we had a couple slopovers, and we just—I got on the radio and told the squad leaders to pull your folks back into our safety zone. They pulled them back; it ran very smoothly. Now, if that would have happened the first 2 or 3 days, three different little groups that we had would have looked for their leader to ask if that was the right thing to do.