Leadership and the fire line

There’s a difference between real leadership and the illusion of it.

You can get people to follow you through coercion. Through yelling. Through fear. Through rank. But that’s not leadership. That’s control. And it’s fragile.

I learned this on the fire line.

In wildland firefighting, leadership shows up in the middle of smoke, heat, and exhaustion. And what I learned is this: real leadership doesn’t bark from the top of the hill. It walks alongside you. It earns respect by giving it.

Two bosses. Two styles.

I worked under two different types of leaders on the line.

The first was all about control. He yelled during PT runs. Group punishment was the norm. There was favoritism. There was tension. Sure, we got the work done. But people followed him because they had to—not because they wanted to. That’s not leadership. That’s a page from the Machiavellian playbook. Not extreme, maybe, but the same logic: control through fear, hierarchy, and conditional acceptance.

And then there was my squad boss.

She didn’t have to raise her voice. She led through embodiment. She worked as hard as we did. She spoke with clarity, not volume. And she treated everyone with baseline human respect—the kind that shouldn’t have to be earned, because it’s the price of entry for working with other people.

I didn’t just listen to her because she had a higher position. I followed her because she showed me what good leadership looked like. She partnered with us. She built us up.

Guess who got more out of me?

Guess who got me to keep that Pulaski swinging, even when I was choking on smoke and dead on my feet?

Leadership that builds, not extracts

Real leadership isn’t extractive. It doesn’t squeeze people for labor. It builds something with them.

When a leader leads through fear, they get obedience. When they lead through respect, they get loyalty. Not the fake kind. The kind that lasts. The kind that makes you dig deep, not because you’re afraid—but because you care.

There’s a name for this kind of leadership. Researchers call it transformational leadership—leadership rooted in mutual respect, ethical behavior, and modeling the values you want to see in your team. It’s been shown to increase motivation, performance, and satisfaction—especially in high-stress environments like the military and emergency services (Bass & Riggio, 2006).

Compare that to authoritarian leadership, which relies on rigid control and top-down directives. It can produce short-term compliance, sure—but at the cost of morale, innovation, and long-term retention (Cheng, Chou, Wu, Huang, & Farh, 2004).

You don’t need to read a study to know it’s true. You can feel it on the line. The boss who leads through fear gets people to show up. The one who leads through respect gets people to show up better.

You can’t fake the real thing

Real leadership is a partnership between the leader and the led. It’s a loop of energy and trust, not a ladder of dominance.

It doesn’t mean being soft. It means being anchored. It means setting standards while still treating people like humans. It means understanding that people will do more—give more—when they know their effort is seen, respected, and supported.

The best leaders I’ve worked with didn’t demand more. They inspired it. And that makes all the difference.

References

Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cheng, B. S., Chou, L. F., Wu, T. Y., Huang, M. P., & Farh, J. L. (2004). Paternalistic leadership and subordinate responses: Establishing a leadership model in Chinese organizations. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 7(1), 89–117. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-839X.2004.00137.x 

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