Project Management - Leadership Lessons Learned from a Fire Chief Table of Contents 01:09 … Meet Mark 03:32 … Whittier Fire Incident 07:48 … Incident Command Types 10:11 … Managing Incidents 11:40 … Incident/Project Scope 12:53 … Peer Communication 14:11 … Keeping Motivated 15:30 … Leadership Transition 18:10 … Building trust 20:01 … Delegation 22:48 … Public Communication 27:15 … Resources 28:36 … Lessons Learned 30:39 … Career Highlights 32:29 … Closing MARK VON TILLOW:  But for me, as the leader or as the project manager, you’ve got to know your people, and you’ve got to know all 56 of them in my case. NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. So this is our bimonthly meeting to talk about what really matters to you as a professional project manager, it’s our goal to give you some words of advice and encouragement by hearing the experiences of other professionals and leaders in the field. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me is the one who holds down the fort here, Bill Yates.  So Bill, today’s podcast is a direct result of a request from a listener. By Request! BILL YATES:  Yeah, how about that?  We heard from Amy.  I think she’s in Washington State. NICK WALKER:  Yeah, she reached out to us and asked specifically that we have a guest on our program, someone involved in public safety, particularly when it comes to managing wildfires. BILL YATES:  Right, right.  And we were delighted.  Wendy did some research, and she contacted Mark, it came together with Mark, so we’re delighted to have Mark on as our guest and talk through this in detail. Meet Mark NICK WALKER:  Well, let’s meet him; all right?  U.S. Forest Service Retired Division Chief Mark von Tillow started his career in fighting wildfires in 1986 on the Tahoe National Forest, he’s been a team member working engines, hotshots, and helicopters, and also he was the incident commander for California Team 3 for many years. Mark has extensive fire experience as well as some all-hazard responses such as in Hurricane Rita in Texas, the space shuttle Discovery recovery mission, as well. He was the Commander in 2017’s Whittier Fire in Santa Barbara County, California, and also in the Thomas Fire later that year.  He also commanded the fighting of the Soberanes Fires along the Big Sur coast, one of the costliest wildfire operations in U.S. history. Mark has a passion for this work and wants to pay it forward, and Mark, we welcome you to Manage This. MARK VON TILLOW:  Good morning.  Thanks for having me. NICK WALKER:  Now, I’ve got to ask you, first off, we have just come off one of the most destructive wildfire seasons in California’s history.  Fresh in our minds, of course, is the fire that destroyed the town of Paradise in Northern California, the Camp Fire.  This is obviously a career that takes a special breed of human, what led you to this career choice? MARK VON TILLOW:  So this may seem like a different way to start this conversation, but really it had to do with my father passing away when I was 12. He had a heart attack in front of me, and this was pre-911 days, when you just pick up the phone and dial 911 now.  But I had to run around the block to get to my grandfather’s house to tell him what had happened. He came back, and it just seemed like a long delay for emergency personnel to get there.  That was really my first exposure to that, and I thought, you know, I’d like to be that person someday trying to help somebody, so that’s really where it started. Fast-forward along through high school, graduate, go to work for a company called Hewlett-Packard, but I was also volunteering at a fire station, and that really seemed to resonate with me more.  So I worked nights at Hewlett-Packard, and I worked days doing the fire station and then found out about this Wildland Firefighting thing and decided to apply, and almost forgot that I applied when they called and said,...