Standing in the Heat
Some houses are known as firefighter killers. Dilapidated interior staircases and door frames, weakened from years of neglect, combine with brick exteriors to create unpredictable oven-like conditions.
A firefighter from my old neighborhood in Detroit once told me about his narrow escape from a firefighter killer. “I was new to the job,” he began, “one of my first runs [fires]. A single-family home. I was charging down the hallway. Pitch black. Thick smoke everywhere. Completely surrounded by fire. Suddenly, someone grabbed me from behind, yelling ‘Get out!’ Before I knew it, I was midair flying out the front of the house. I found myself lying on the muddy, tangled grass, puking up smoke.”
Now, here’s a story I haven’t heard before, I thought to myself. If you’ve hung around firefighters much, you can recite from memory whole repertoires of their stories, replete with long pauses and emphatic hand gestures. “Then I saw three more firefighters flying out the front door,” he continued, the wrinkles around his eyes betraying a fondness firefighters often felt toward my Dad. “And behind them, Sergeant Roger Martin, your dad. With the fire raging behind him, he tossed us out one by one before the fire took us all. That’s the day I learned what firefighting is all about.” The real work of a firefighter is not just putting out fires — it is to serve and protect people from harm, including, sometimes, protecting the protectors.
That fire was one of three hundred in the city of Detroit that night. One of eight hundred that weekend. One of 22,000 that year, 1984 —the year Detroit earned distinction as the “arson capital of the world.” The fires were the natural, unfortunate result of economically destitute Detroiters trying to live as best they could behind boarded-up windows with no electricity, heat, or water and only a firepit to keep them warm.
On mornings when Dad arrived home from the firehouse, the city’s decay wafted into my bedroom in the form of the sweet scent of firetruck diesel and smoke from the previous night’s fires. It drew me half-asleep and blurry eyed toward the thoroughly spent but satisfied man seated at the kitchen table, coffee in hand along with the day’s newspaper and his trusted crossword puzzle book. I’d shuffle slowly toward his silhouette for my morning hug — backlit by the fiery sun rising through our kitchen window. “I love you,” I’d say, to which he always responded playfully, “Not as much as I love you.”
Detroit’s motto, Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus translates to “We hope for better things; it shall arise from the ashes.” It dates to 1805, when a great fire burned most of the city to the ground. Father Gabriel Richard, a French Roman Catholic priest, wrote these words in the hope that the city would rebuild. It reflected the spirit and resilience of the people, as well as a resolve that has endured through the city’s 215 years of tumultuous rise, decline and rise again.
But Detroit was broken long before it went broke. It had been broken my whole life — a reality I was born into, learned to lament, but seldom questioned. It was a city with generations of redlining and racial hostility that poisoned the city’s well of progress. Walking to and from school every day, I witnessed street after street of unfolding neighborhood decay. Liquor stores sold alcohol to children, drug addicts, and prostitutes alike. Kids with nobody at home frequented fast food joints bent on cultivating deadly lifelong eating habits. Houses stood abandoned on every block, including eventually my own house. At one point, one out of every five buildings stood vacant, uncared for and unsecured, breeding grounds for crime and devastating fires.
What was the answer to all of this? And more to the point, what was the problem?
Was it the racism that set ablaze hatred in the hearts of would-be neighbors? Was it the political bullets exchanged daily between the Fire Department and the Mayor’s Office, resulting in chronically understaffed and decommissioned firehouses? Was Detroit itself merely the symptom of a dying automotive industry, an eroding American middle-class, and growing economic inequity worldwide?
Whose job is it to lead change under these kinds of conditions? When the problems and solutions loom larger and far bigger than you. When your usual way of dealing with problems — your own version of putting out fires at work or in your private life — no longer suffices. When the people around you have accepted a less than optimal reality or won’t listen to reason. When the very people who are the problem also need to be part of the solution. These questions have animated my quest to better understand this thing called ‘leadership’.
Had I known then what I know it now, perhaps Dad would still be alive. Old but strong, hugging his four grandchildren, cup of coffee and crossword book still at hand. Instead he succumbed to alcohol to numb the pain of living in decay. It took a lot to kill him. Alcohol did what three near-death “firefighter killers,” three bouts of cancer, Vietnam, and a lifetime of risk-taking couldn’t do.
My life’s work is dedicated to helping people lead change against all odds. My experience and deep belief is that anyone, anywhere, can lead change to improve their livelihood, their community or their organization. Over the past twenty years, I’ve come to know many Roger Martins, their daughters, their sons, and their colleagues in cities worldwide, in Appalachia, in the hardest neighborhoods of Delhi and Nairobi, at Google, at major philanthropic organizations, and even in the White House. People — mostly good people — putting out fires as best they can, but often perfectly solving the wrong problems.
I’ve had the good fortune to accompany many of these people as they consistently and amazingly rise above the fray. They’ve exercised leadership and successfully tackled the deeper, adaptive challenges within their teams, within their communities, and within themselves. Stories about their acts of leadership are ones I tell my own children.
Through my leadership development work I strive to ignite a recognition of our deep similarities, despite our superficial differences. To understand why good people can be compelled to set fire to their own lives and act in hateful ways, why places like Detroit — once the “engine of democracy” — can get it wrong, for all the right reasons. And, despite all of this, how to maintain resilience and hope on the winding road to creating meaningful change.
With this recognition, and a practical framework for leading change, we can create the leadership needed at every level of our organizations and communities — not just at the top of them — to tackle the challenges afire in the world today.
To this day, the old-timers say my Dad, Roger Martin, was one of the best firefighters the city of Detroit ever knew. A legend. A leader. As a child, there was little I could do to stop the fires. But I learned some important lessons. Love your job. Take care of the people you work with. Seek the source of the fire, not the symptoms. And stand firm in the heat — with courage, conviction and passion — until the fire of injustice has been extinguished.
