Good article over at FireChief web site

Prepare Fire Leaders Before Their 5 Bugles – From FIRECHIEF
Full Article HERE -

By Glenn Bischoff (glenn.bischoff@penton.com)

Recently, FIRE CHIEF Editor Glenn Bischoff chatted with Jack Parow, immediate past president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, and the retired chief of the Chelmsford (Mass.) Fire Department, about his year in office.

What were your goals and aspirations when you began your term as IAFC president?
One of my goals was to continue the work that has been done to change the IAFC from a five-bugle chief’s organization to more of a leadership organization. Two years ago, the IAFC’s membership categories were realigned in large measure to bring company officers into the organization, to give them a place to go. We now have a category now for company officers, at a reduced rate because a lot of departments won’t pay for the membership, so it’s going to be on their own dime. Today we have more than 400 company officers as members, and it’s our fastest-growing category. We also commissioned a task force to identify the true needs of company officers, so that we can better develop the future leaders of the fire service.

What did the task force recommend? 
One was to form a section for company officers so that they would have input into the IAFC throughout the year. Another was to provide some sort of leadership or mentoring program for company officers at division conferences. They also recommended that company officers be allowed to join the various task forces and committees, so that they would have input into how the IAFC moved forward. The idea is that including company officers in this way not only will help the IAFC to grow, but also will help to develop the chief officers of the future — and the fire service as a whole will be much stronger.

What do you mean?
In the fire service, we tend to do things backwards. We hire firefighters and then we send them to recruit school to train them. We promote officers and then we send them to officer training school. So we’re trying to flip the scales by developing and training these officers prior to them taking on the true leadership role of chief of the department or battalion chief. The fire service is notoriously behind in that.