Three years into the What Firefighters Want project, surveying firefighters across the United States and Canada, one issue continues to emerge as a pain point: poor agency leadership.
FireRescue1’s 2024 state-of-the-industry survey revealed some alarming statistics related to fire department leadership:
- 76% of respondents reported concerns about their fire department leadership
- 49% indicated that poor agency leadership has a high impact on retention
- 33% have considered leaving their department because of the fire chief
Chief Marc Bashoor offers a sneak peek at a handful of the survey stats.
Download the special report here, and check out more from the What Firefighters Want project here.
Thank you to ImageTrend for sponsoring the project.
What Firefighters Want: More from the Series
While safety and training serve as the linchpins of operational efficacy, problems persist around recruitment and retention, succession planning and the sense of family once so central to fire service culture
Leaders underscore the importance of organizational mindsets like mission-driven culture and personal traits like humility, among several other critical factors
A good leader accepts that they may not have created the problem, but they are responsible for fixing it
True connection demands more than words
‘People don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses’ – and the fire service is no exception
