I believe in shared leadership. I use my leadership skills in three ways: 1) for my own personal growth and development; 2) for the growth and development of my fire department; and 3) to help fulfill our department mission by achieving our strategic goals and objectives. My leadership philosophy is quite simple: What is most important to the newest and least senior person on my department must be important to me. I use many tools and processes in the daily practice of leadership. Some of them, like incident command, are formal and very autocratic. Others, like our strategic planning committee, are formal but with shared responsibility and consensus decisions. Yet others are like my professional development program, an opportunity to use leadership as a means of developing others’ skills and knowledge.