Ep. 58: Heather Marques, Division Chief - Leading with Love

Summary

Leadership Conversations @ The Kitchen Table
Episode 58: Heather Marques, Division Chief - Leading with Love
Release Date: November 26, 2024
Host: Berlin Maza
Guest: Heather Marquez, Division Chief of Medical Services, Alameda County Fire Department

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Introduction

In Episode 58 of Leadership Conversations @ The Kitchen Table, host Berlin Maza sits down with Heather Marquez, the Division Chief of Medical Services at the Alameda County Fire Department. The conversation delves deep into Heather's leadership philosophy, her groundbreaking work in human trafficking protocols, and her insights on recruitment and retention within the fire service. Central to Heather's approach is the concept of "Leading with Love," emphasizing positivity and mentorship as cornerstones of effective leadership.

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Heather Marquez's Background

Heather Marquez brings a rich tapestry of experiences to her role. Born in Linwood, California, and raised across various regions including Guam, Chicago, Spokane, and Astoria, Oregon, Heather's diverse upbringing has deeply influenced her leadership style. She holds multiple degrees, including an associate in photography, an associate in paramedicine, a bachelor's in anthropology from UC Berkeley, and a master's in security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School.

"Leadership is not about power, it's about influence. So it's influencing the outcome of a situation."
[00:01]

Heather's career spans 18 years in the fire service, where she has risen to oversee medical operations, training, certifications, and special events across a vast 500-square-mile district. Her academic pursuits and passion for anthropology have enabled her to view the fire service through a unique lens, treating it as a living laboratory for studying human behavior and organizational culture.

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Leadership Philosophy: Leading with Love

At the heart of Heather's leadership philosophy is the principle of leading with love. She believes that genuine leadership stems from care, respect, and positivity rather than authority or command.

"I think leadership is about influence. So if you feel like it's important to advocate for somebody who's been unrepresented, now you have the influence to do that."
[00:01]

Heather emphasizes the importance of creating a positive work environment where individuals feel valued and trusted. She challenges the prevalent culture of defaulting to negativity and anger, advocating instead for authentic friendships and supportive relationships within the firehouse.

"Those are the people who everybody wants to work with. Those are the stations people try to bid into. Those are the teams people want to be on."
[32:58]

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Human Trafficking Protocols

One of Heather's notable contributions is the development of human trafficking recognition and reporting protocols within the fire service. Recognizing a significant gap in EMS training, she spearheaded the creation of protocols that enable EMS professionals to identify and report signs of human trafficking effectively.

"I created a suspicious activity report, sent it to our Northern California Regional Intelligence center, the Fusion Center. FBI evaluates it immediately. We just provided the final puzzle piece."
[21:25]

Heather recounts a pivotal moment when one of her Battalion Chiefs reported suspicious activities leading to the bust of a Mexican drug cartel involved in sex trafficking. This success validated the importance of her protocols and underscored the critical role fire service personnel can play in combating human trafficking.

Furthermore, Heather has been instrumental in rolling out a statewide training module, ensuring that these protocols are adopted across California and shared internationally.

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Recruitment and Retention in Fire Service

Heather addresses the persistent challenge of recruiting and retaining women in the fire service, highlighting that despite numerous efforts, the percentage of women remains stagnant at around 4%.

"The research shows that since 1974, we've never gone beyond 4%. Before 1974, it was illegal for women to be firefighters."
[42:28]

She identifies four primary barriers—or "gates"—that women face in the fire service:

1. Physicality Gate: The demanding physical requirements of the job.
2. Sociocultural Gate: Overcoming societal and cultural expectations.
3. Childcare and Parenting Challenges: Balancing family responsibilities with demanding work schedules.
4. Promotional Challenges: Navigating the hierarchical structures to attain leadership roles.

Heather advocates for enhancing physical training without lowering standards and fostering a supportive environment that accommodates the unique challenges women face.

"Women in fire. I am not talking about all ethnic minorities or anybody else, but women in fire. We need to break down some of those barriers."
[45:00]

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Mentorship and Culture in Firehouses

Heather underscores the crucial role of mentorship in retaining firefighters and fostering a positive organizational culture. She critiques the prevalent negative culture where anger and frustration are the default modes of interaction, advocating instead for a culture grounded in love and positivity.

"I challenge people to just default to positivity. Like, it's hard. It's actually harder."
[32:34]

By applying Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to the fire service, Heather illustrates that fulfilling basic needs of safety and security allows firefighters to attain higher levels of fulfillment and self-actualization. She emphasizes that mentorship should focus on building trust, advocating for others, and maintaining psychological and physical well-being.

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Advice for Leaders and New Firefighters

Heather offers practical advice for both emerging leaders and new firefighters:

• For New Firefighters:
  "Envisioning. I'm all about visioning. Allow yourself to whatever you walked into this job with. Write down your why."
  [56:10]
  She encourages newcomers to document their motivations and keep memorabilia like thank-you notes to stay connected to their purpose.

• For Company Officers and Leaders:
  "Your words have weight. Your words matter. Be intentional about being positive and leading with love."
  [59:09]
  Heather stresses the importance of company officers setting the cultural tone of their crews, fostering an environment of respect and support.

• For Chief Officers:
  "Always be a lifetime learner. Don't live in a state of constantly striving for the future, but be present and open to what's next."
  [65:15]
  She advises chief officers to plan for retirement well in advance to ensure a smooth transition and maintain a sense of purpose post-career.

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Final Thoughts and Recommendations

Heather leaves listeners with a profound reminder of the continuous journey of learning and leadership:

"Still I am learning."
[55:29]

She encourages fire service professionals to embrace lifelong learning, maintain passion, and nurture relationships both within and outside the firehouse. Heather also recommends connecting with other leaders like Chief Eric Sailors and Chief Willie McDonald to further enrich one's leadership journey.

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Conclusion

Episode 58 of Leadership Conversations @ The Kitchen Table offers invaluable insights into effective leadership within the fire service. Heather Marquez's emphasis on leading with love, fostering mentorship, and addressing systemic barriers for women provides a roadmap for building resilient and positive fire service organizations. Her dedication to improving protocols and advocating for a supportive work culture underscores the transformative power of compassionate leadership.

Listeners are encouraged to implement these principles in their own leadership roles, ensuring a more inclusive, supportive, and effective fire service community.

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Notable Quotes:

• "Leadership is not about power, it's about influence." — Heather Marquez [00:01]
• "They’re more likely to bring something with them. They’re more likely to help clean up afterwards." — Heather Marquez [49:54]
• "Still I am learning." — Heather Marquez [55:29]

Recommended Reading:

• Heather Marquez's thesis: "Working Fire Recruitment and Retention of Women Firefighters," published in the Homeland Security Journal.

Suggested Contacts:

• Chief Eric Sailors: Division Chief known for his expertise in tactical medicine.
• Chief Willie McDonald: The longest-serving training fire chief in California.

---

Be sure to implement these leadership strategies to create a more positive and effective environment within your organization. Until next time, be safe, be intentional, and stay curious.

Transcript

[Heather Marquez]

Because leadership is not about power, it's about influence. So it's influencing the outcome of a situation. So if you feel like it's important to advocate for somebody who's been unrepresented, now you have the influence to do that, right? You have the influence to change policy. You have the influence to change the behavior in the room or the tone of a conversation. And so if you feel like you're a good problem solver, you should be a person who is, you know, looking, looking up, looking at your path forward into leadership roles. And I think we shy away from it. When I first came in, I heard always people say 10, 10 and 10. 10 years fire, 10 years engineer, 10 years captain. But now I realize, like, we have a we. There's no room in that for chief officers. Why would you imagine a 30 year career that you don't actually bring yourself into? When you find yourself as the elder in the room or the designated adult in the room and the person who's gained all this knowledge and experience, it's actually your duty to pass it on. It means nothing if you don't share it. You have to communicate it. Because if you just hoard it for yourself, you're going to die with it. The First Responder Liaison Network is proud.

[Berlin]

To present to you the Kitchen Table podcast. Join us as we explore leadership from.

[Heather Marquez]

Perspectives around the globe. From firefighters to fire Chiefs, civilians to.

[Berlin]

CEOs.

[Heather Marquez]

Our conversations have one simple goal. Build more leaders.

[Berlin]

Welcome to Leadership Conversation 58. The kitchen table is brought to you by the First Responder Liaison Network. The network is organized for the development, implementation and ongoing support of mentorship and professional development programs, inspiring our youth and young adults to mature into engaged civic leaders and resilient community sentinels. Our core mission is to mentor underrepresented urban and rural youth interested in public safety careers. Music and graphics are brought to you by Cutelephant Productions. We bring you the conversation today from the Bay Area of Alameda County, California. Joining us is Heather Marquez, Division Chief of Medical Services. Today we're talking about leading with Love, defaulting to positivity, retention and recruitment as well as mentorship. Our guest is a division chief for an all risk fire department in the East Bay of the San Francisco area. Her agency's district covers over 500 square miles and runs about 48,000 calls for service a year, providing fire suppression, ALS, Emergency Medical Services, fire prevention and public education. She oversees all medical operations, training and certification, special events, and the tactical medicine teams. She is trained as a nationally registered paramedic Hazmat specialist, confined space rescue technician, water rescue specialist, and teaches at the fire Academy. She also teaches paramedic level courses and is a certified instructor and lead skills evaluator and certified chief officer with a California State Fire Marshal. She holds an associate degree in photography, an associate degree in paramedicine, and a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. Our guest is a graduate of and the class speaker for the Los Angeles Fire Department Leadership Academy. She holds a master's degree in security studies from the center for Department of Homeland Security at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Her thesis is titled Working Fire Recruitment and Retention of Women Firefighters. She is the author of a history book, Alameda County Fire Department, and published in the Harvard Public Health Review. Establishment of human trafficking reporting protocols, mandatory specialized training, and the development of a human trafficking liaison officer. She has developed a statewide training module to address human trafficking education for the California Fire Service. On the 58th episode of the Kitchen Table, I welcome Division Chief Heather Marquez of Alameda County Fire Department. Good morning, Chief. Thank you so much for joining today on the Kitchen Table. How are you?

[Heather Marquez]

I'm doing great, Berlin. How are you?

[Berlin]

I'm doing well, thank you. I know we just talked about the windstorm that happened that actually, that we're in the midst of up here in the Pacific Northwest, and I didn't know this, but obviously it affected the area in which you live.

[Heather Marquez]

There still is. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm in, like, basically San Francisco Bay area is in basically the central part of the state of California. And so our whole north state is both under flood watch, and we got feet and feet of snow in the mountains. Yeah, we're still feeling it. And we have a few more days of it to go, I'd say.

[Berlin]

A few more days. Okay. Yeah, we have our last wind part of it ending some point today, we think, and we hope, but yeah, I guess before talking to you, I had no idea that it was affecting that far south of us. All right, well, I hope everyone recovers and gets back to norm soon and not days from now. So.

[Heather Marquez]

Yeah, you know how it is. We end a. Well, our season, and we go right into.

[Berlin]

Into exactly. Into the next thing. Awesome. So, again, thank you for taking up Chief Gray's leadership challenge. That's how we're able to connect today. And after reading everything that you sent me, you sent me over your thesis paper. Thank you for that. That was a very, uh, inspiring read. And, uh, we'll lean into that a little bit. I want to lean a Little bit on the article that you sent me as well, the human trafficking division. Like, I had no idea. So I want to get into that as well. But before we jump into the leadership conversation and topics, would you mind sharing a little bit about Division Chief Heather Marquez and then we'll jump into the rest of the conversation today?

[Heather Marquez]

Sure. Well, I mean, we started this conversation today talking about the weather. And I was just telling you I grew up in the Northwest, but my father is Canadian from British Columbia, and he joined the US Military. So when I was little, I was born in Linwood, California. That's in, you know, Los Angeles. Moved immediately to Guam. And then I, I grew up on Guam. So you're, we're talking about the cyclone that just hit. My very first memory in life is this like super typhoon that hit the islands when I was like 3 years old.

[Berlin]

Oh my God.

[Heather Marquez]

But yeah, it's. So Guam led us into Chicago, where he was a drill instructor. And then, then I was in Spokane, Washington for a while in the big snow. And then I grew up ages like maybe 7 years old to 13 years old in Astoria, Oregon, right at the mouth of the Columbia River. So my family is very much Northwestern based and we're still, a lot of us are still up there. So now I'm in California. I came back here when I was in high school. So graduated high school around here, moved immediately away to Central America where I lived in between Costa Rica and Nicaragua and spent some time down there on the road. And then that's where I realized I wanted to study anthropology. So I came home and got myself into UC Berkeley and ended up kind of settling. You know how that is when you go to college somewhere, you start, you know, making friends, meeting people, having relationships. And then, you know, I scored a beautiful little, little spot that I call the compound in city of berkeley. So I'm 26 years later, I'm still there. So it's been sort of my base of operations. And since then I've lived up in McLeod, which is right at the foot of Mount Shasta, which I was telling you today is buried under several feet of snow.

[Berlin]

Oh, my God. Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

I've got two little girls, they're 9 and 11 years old. I'm married to a retired firefighter. He was from Gig harbor and retired out of California fire service and Navy corpsman and a nurse. And now he's an educator and he's just finishing his master's degree. So we got a pretty busy household. But I've been 18 years in the fire service And I love my job, which is. I think the. I think that's my guiding. That's my guiding light is I still. I still love what I do, and I love the people I'm surrounded by.

[Berlin]

Amazing. So Chief, Division Chief of Medical Services, correct?

[Heather Marquez]

Yes.

[Berlin]

What would you say are your major? Because as I read through this, I see that you wrote a thesis, you went to the naval postgrad Academy, and then you also write articles. How did you get into doing all of that? Like, what inspired you to start writing articles? You know, going to the naval post grad school. And then obviously, you already have a bazillion things on your plate that you continue to just do.

[Heather Marquez]

Well, I think that's the truth is I think I. I grew up rough. I grew up rough. So I've always been a bit of a hustler. And so I have. And I'm interested in a lot of things. I have passion for a lot of things. And so I kind of just put my teeth into things and don't stop till I finish. So when I first got into the fire service, I came in, like I said, with this anthropology degree and I studied cultural anthropology. Right. So the. The life ways of people, of just how we've developed and humankind for like 30,000 years. So the fire service is like a little laboratory for those kind of studies. It's fascinating. Like, it's all the things that we find in the fire service. We have rituals and ceremonies, honor challenges. We have hierarchy. We have in grouping out, grouping tribalism. Like, I love. I love looking at the fire service through the lens of an anthropologist. So I call myself a participant observer because that's. That's what they used to do when the old anthropologists would embed themselves in. With the tribes in the Amazon. Yeah, they become participant observers and live with the people. And I always feel like even though I'm in this world, I still feel like I'm looking at it with these eyes of an observer. So I really loved photography and film. That's what I was studying at Cal is visual anthropology. When I came into fire, I came into a department that was 100 years old. And then we consolidated into this larger agency, the one I'm in now, Alameda County Fire. So it's one of these regional cooperation models where we have multiple agencies of origin. Our agency is 30 years old now, but we're made up of these disparate parts in these unincorporated areas, cities, and the National Laboratories of Livermore and Berkeley. So it's a very interesting place to work because we have 500 square miles, 35 units, 28 stations. It's like we have all kinds of specialties. There's water rescue because we touch the bay. We call it the bay to the hay.

[Berlin]

The bay to the hay. I love that.

[Heather Marquez]

Water rescue on one side of town. And then we've got, you know, we've got the. Our. Our mountains go out from the Bay area into the central Valley. And that's a super heated grassy area that always gets, you know, tons of vegetation, fires. And also my agency travels statewide for, you know, mutual aid resources. So it's just a really cool place to work. Alameda county fire is awesome. W and so when I came into it, I was coming from Emeryville fire, this tiny little fire department that was right at the east shore of the Bay Bridge. Tiny little city, 1.2 square miles, but 100 years old. It had the first motorized apparatus west of the Mississippi. It was like a little mafia town. It was once referred to as the rottenness city in the west because it's like we had the shore, the Port of Oakland, and we had San Francisco, and we had all like the pirates and the gold rush. Everything that's ever happened in the bay. This little place in Emeryville has always been like where the whorehouses and the brothels were. It's always been where the card house is. And interesting. And so a place with not a lot of schools and churches, if you know what I'm saying. Interesting little city and a rich history. So what I noticed, with that kind of interest in history and anthropology, when we consolidated into this larger agency, we were kind of like Brady Bunch stepchildren coming into family. Right. We're the new add ons into this existing family. So our heritage story was getting lost. People were literally chucking boxes of pictures into dumpsters. And so I had an urge to archive that. And that's what started. So I started. First thing I published was I wrote a history book about that fire department. And so I followed back every single original agency's history and through this, this company that does these really cool books y'all might recognize. Arcadia Press.

[Berlin]

Yes.

[Heather Marquez]

Kind of sepia toned book. They're all identical. And then amateur authors like myself, you can write these. These books about local areas. So anyway, I published a book called Alameda County Fire Department. And I archived, gosh, I think 25, 28,000 photographs. Wow. And then I published in that book 210 of them. So each agency's like, highlight through the decades. I tried to hit like a decade from each, like from the 1920s as far back as I could go. And one of our agencies even goes back to 1870s. I kept everybody's family story and then I threw it into this book. So that was the first thing I published. And that was. It was kind of again, because I brought my anthro lens and photographer lens into my fire service experience. But once I did that, I guess it made me feel brave about publishing.

[Berlin]

I bet.

[Heather Marquez]

And then I went to Naval Postgraduate School for my master's. And that school is all about, like, don't hold back. That school is what you learn on the very first day at Naval Postgraduate School is the very. The very one thing you need to take away you learn on day one. And that is, how do you know that? And why should I believe you? It's a school that teaches the whole model of critical thinking. So how do you know that Is like, where did you come to this? And then, why should I believe you? Is citations, references, resources. Prove it to me now. And so I love that framework.

[Berlin]

I bet.

[Heather Marquez]

Fun. Try it at the kitchen table sometime.

[Berlin]

I went, well, yeah. Yeah. Good luck. Good luck to all of us. Right.

[Heather Marquez]

Like, okay, where did you learn that? And like, why, you know, and why should I believe you? Try it at the kitchen table.

[Berlin]

It's fun.

[Heather Marquez]

But so that. But anyway, we publish a lot, and I found myself writing about things I knew nothing about.

[Berlin]

Sure.

[Heather Marquez]

Like international policy. Like, I studied how Bhutan responded to the COVID you know, pandemic. Yeah. I studied homelessness in Australia. I studied, like, cybersecurity. Things I knew nothing about because it's. It's the Department of Homeland Security's, you know, academy, essentially. So you get a security studies degree. But I studied. I had people that had worked for MI6 talking to us.

[Berlin]

Wow.

[Heather Marquez]

You know, it was very interesting. My. One of my thesis. Not my advisor directly, but one. Well, my thesis advisor himself had, like, been a security. He was a military. Former law enforcement became military, but he had trained the Mongolian security team. Like, these very interesting people that I was surrounded by. And then one of my guys was a squadron commander for Top Gun.

[Berlin]

Really?

[Heather Marquez]

I had access to these minds, like, people. Like, people that. I'm literally, like a fan girl. Like, I'm in. Awesome. I'm awestruck.

[Berlin]

Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

I mean, I'm in my life now. I'm surrounded in my phone book. I talked to Navy seals yesterday. One of my friends just became a brigadier general in the Marines. I did not think my scrappy little kid life.

[Berlin]

Yeah, that's amazing.

[Heather Marquez]

I'd be Wearing a uniform. And I never thought I'd be kicking it with Navy SEALs.

[Berlin]

Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

So that is cool. That's what I mean about the honor of this job, though. This job is like. To me, it's truly. When we talk about opportunity, it's like the gateway of the network because you start with that essence of public trust where people. People will let you in. And then. Then, you know, if you take up those invitations, you may be surprised what you find. So that led. That led to publishing that paper that you're mentioning now. The human trafficking. Yes, that was an intelligence policy paper that I wrote for Naval Postgraduate School.

[Berlin]

Oh, okay.

[Heather Marquez]

I did kind of a gap analysis and recognized that in the fire service, we are not being trained on recognition of human trafficking. We would, of course, be trained for how to handle domestic violence. Adult Protective Services calls. Child Protective Services calls. So we have all these other directives that we have to. It's not. It's like when we kind of cross over into the law enforcement realm, we have a terrorism liaison officer. If we see something screwy like a bomb threat at a school or a bank, we're going to report that to our local fusion center. Right. Well, I took the same exact model that we use for terrorism reporting, and I tied in the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the, you know, CISA into our human trafficking reporting model. So basically what I did with that paper that I wrote is I created, actually, medical service protocols. So our EMS protocols in our county are now the first, I believe, in the state and maybe in the country to adopt it into. Into EMSA protocols so that we actually now have a way that if you're on a call and somebody gives you either a clue, a sign, a signal, or you. Something like, when you're. When you're folks, this happens to us. This has happened to us. I took this based off anecdotal experience as a fire captain Investigations. You know, we're in the Bay Area. We're, like, at a huge crossroads of humanity, and there's a lot of anonymity in a place like this. You can get away with stuff you can't get away with in small towns when you're in big cities because people are not able to recognize all the subtleties. For example, we had to just go do business inspections in Emeryville, and one of the places we walked into was a massage parlor. We came in the front door, and then suddenly all these naked people were scattering out the back door.

[Berlin]

Oh, wow.

[Heather Marquez]

Police, right.

[Berlin]

Yeah, right.

[Heather Marquez]

They thought it was a raid. And so we Said, well, that was a curious behavior. It turns out that place was later implicated into a huge sex trafficking ring that was busted by the former attorney general.

[Berlin]

And accidentally, because the fire department came in for an.

[Heather Marquez]

We stumbled on it. And the thing is, we usually don't know what to do. Right back to the table, we talk about it. Maybe you're going to write a brief narrative in your RMS report who knows what to do. And we all assume that's up to the cops. Right. But the thing is with the medical calls, and especially when it comes down to the sex trafficking part. Well, maybe true also for labor trafficking, but I'm. My concern is sex trafficking is defined. Human trafficking is defined, you know, as. As this coercion of. Of another human being, like when their rights are taken away. This is different than in sex trafficking. It's different than somebody who's voluntarily prostituting, voluntarily serving as an escort or an exotic dancer. Anybody who works in sex work voluntarily and consensually. Completely different realm. Not. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people whose rights and privileges have been taken away. Their families are under duress or stress. Someone's threatened to take their child away from them if they don't do the following services when someone else's rights are taken away. Anyone under the age of 18 that's doing sex work is considered human trafficked. Right? So that means all minors because they can't offer consent. Anybody who's doing that work, even if they say they're doing it voluntarily, is not a volunteer. So anyway, it falls under this different realm. And what I found out by working through the Department of Homeland Security is there is a massive network of people that spend every day focused on this. They're waiting for the data. They're waiting for somebody to call. What we call it is the puzzle pieces. They say you don't have to. You don't have to act like law enforcement. You don't have to determine guilt. All you have to do is send us the puzzle piece. And so I was speaking to a large group of EMS professionals. I was at the GEMS Innovation Summit. They do that co located with fdic. I was there and I was speaking on how Alameda county had adopted this protocol and that we had created an educational module for human trafficking recognition. And that night when I got back to my hotel room, One of my BC's called and he said, chief, I think this is the thing you're talking about. I gotta lead. I can't sleep. Can't sleep because something happened today. And I need to talk about it. He'd gone to a house the person had called a fake fire in. They called a fake fire. We sent a first alarm. We got there, and the guy was like, hey, can I talk to you? He pulled the battalion chief aside. I couldn't call the cops, but I got to talk to somebody. So the guy had called in a false call. We canceled the rest of it. The BC had the wherewithal to stay on, seen and gather information. He. And he said, basically, he's like, man, they got these kids in this house. This house here has got some activity happening. And he basically received this report, and he was obviously very skeptical. He said the guy was sketchy, the information was confusing. He would have felt embarrassed to go to our sheriffs or our local police.

[Berlin]

It's a good point.

[Heather Marquez]

And give that story because he doesn't have enough information. And his name's writing on it, too. It's like, okay, you're being an alarmist, right?

[Berlin]

Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

But he had the wherewithal to call me and say, what do you want to do with this? And so I created a suspicious activity report, sent it to our Northern California Regional Intelligence center, the Fusion Center. FBI evaluates it immediately. I got a call back the next day while I was still in session at Innovation Summit, and they said, you guys just provided the final puzzle piece.

[Berlin]

Wow.

[Heather Marquez]

Bust of a Mexican drug cartel that's been running drugs and sex trafficking children in a residential neighborhood. So that. That was very validating to me. I've taken that back to our medical director, who's a big advocate as well. And we've had. We've had three cases now that have actually been. Really instituted it in the last year. We've had three cases with known validity. And I think once people get the feel for it and once fire service starts talking about it a little bit more, we will recognize we've all got a hole in our game because this kind of thing is happening. It's not just an urban environment. I mean, maybe like, big factories full of forced laborers, like sewing factory that got busted in Emeryville that was full of, you know, seamstresses. They. They were brought over from Asia. They held their passports. They were being treated like indentured servants. Their families back at home were being threatened. They had to do the work. So that's labor trafficking also. Very, very, very, very common. But sex trafficking probably gets more attention for people, especially when it involves children, as it should, in my opinion. But anyways, I think the fire service has. It's just like for all the responsibilities that we have, the touch that we have with the public, the access to information. Not a lot of other people, not a lot of other people have the privilege of our view. And people will tell us the truth, will whisper us the truth anyway. It's just up to us to find something to do with it. So I like it because it's like very low. It's very low maintenance. It's like literally call this one person who's the designee and then drop it. You don't have to do anything. Give me the puzzle piece.

[Berlin]

It's hardly. Yeah, it's hardly. It's hardly an increase in workload. Right.

[Heather Marquez]

It's not at all. And it'll help you sleep at night.

[Berlin]

Absolutely. Help us all, you know, the neighbors, the community, everybody.

[Heather Marquez]

Yeah, get it off your chest.

[Berlin]

And I saw that. I was reading it. Yeah, I must have been reading it in the article. And this is your department, all your personnel have some form of mandatory annual training on this, of recognition and reporting of, you know, when they see things or how does that. How does that.

[Heather Marquez]

So in the state of California, this actually, and I'm embarrassed to say I'm not, I'm not there yet, but we've built this out to include it as an access, like a resource into our county protocols. That means all medical professionals in our county would have this access. They now know how to make the link. But we're rolling out a statewide training module, basically.

[Berlin]

Statewide.

[Heather Marquez]

Working on it currently. Yeah, it's statewide. And I. And this is information that we share and give away readily. So anybody else who has asked for it, we've sent it in. We've sent it all across the United States and into Canada because I worked with. One of my classmates was from the Office of Emergency Services here in California. And so he's a full time on this. I'm a. I'm a dahlia in this. I'm a person who just came in and recognized that we had a hole in the game.

[Berlin]

Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

But yeah, we published together. It went through the, you know, published it in the Harvard Public Health Review.

[Berlin]

Yep.

[Heather Marquez]

So it got some legs under it, which was helpful. And then it was easier for me to pass it on to our stakeholders and politicians and they adopted it readily. And I have a very open minded medical director who's helped me along the way.

[Berlin]

That's amazing. That's. That's quite the story.

[Heather Marquez]

That's something random, right? It's kind of random. It's not something I meant to do. I stumbled into it.

[Berlin]

Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

Things we do in the fire service are like that. You get, you do. You. You stumble up things and you just pick it up. Yeah.

[Berlin]

And you run with it. And you never know what. You know, A lot of the things that we do, we don't. It never, you know, turns into. Whether it be a big project or big accomplishment or something. But some do. Some obviously do. And those are the ones that really go a longer ways. And so going along with your articles and publishing. So about your thesis paper. Yeah, you. We do. I do a lot of work up here, at least of some committees and groups up in the Pacific Northwest. I work on retention and, you know, and equity and inclusion, all that. And so you did a portion. Right on. And I like how you put it. It's on retention and recruitment. And your focus was on. Or at least your emphasis was talking more about how do we retain people. So what I want to lean on a little bit is as we talk about leadership, as we talk about mentorship, I'm curious to find out as we talk about retention, there's a big mentorship component of that. Right. When we're trying to retain the people that are here. Right. There's a whole another conversation about how do we bring people, how do we create interest to those who apply to the fire service. But we. We are getting some people right now. We are. Right. So two separate topics, if you will. Recruiting and then retaining. I'm curious on how mentorship takes place at Alam County Fire Department.

[Heather Marquez]

If you don't mind, I'll answer in a more vague way. Yeah. Because again, we're a big agency and there's a lot of different styles of that. I would say that, you know, despite whatever self analysis we have, I travel a lot. I speak to people from all over the country. I have friends in the fire service and in other countries. And I think I hear at our kitchen tables, people saying, oh, this place is a mess. And I look around and I'm like, it's so good. You have no idea. We're doing great.

[Berlin]

Right.

[Heather Marquez]

So many other people have so many bigger problems.

[Berlin]

Agreed.

[Heather Marquez]

No, man, we are well paid. We're nice. Like people are nice to each other. We're one of those huggy departments. The chief hugs you. You know what I mean? For a handshake, he pulls you. It sets this different tone. And my ems, you know, clinical educator, like he. He got. He throws candy at you and you answer questions.

[Berlin]

I mean, could be worse. What you're saying it should be a lot worse.

[Heather Marquez]

Yeah. No, I mean, he'll wear, like a Jedi costume to class sometimes on Halloween. Mean. So, like, we have fun. We have fun, and we have a good department. But I feel like we get myopic because we start thinking. We. We. We analyze flaws. And one thing about group behavior and anthropology view here. One thing about group behavior, especially among men, is I think there's always a comfort in defaulting to anger. So it's safe. Like, imagine, I was a bartender for many years. When you work in a bar and you watch men small talk, it's very safe. Irish are great at this. To talk about the weather. We started talking about the weather.

[Berlin]

Right.

[Heather Marquez]

It's cool that you could talk about the weather and then you can move on to sports. And it's okay to even argue or disagree about sports. Beyond that point, be very cautious about what the next subject matter is. Right. Because it's a safe zone. And so in the firehouse, I see this a lot, is that it's easy in the hierarchy of whoever's leading the conversation is usually the, you know, the senior or a very boisterous engineer who. I also think the engineer is a super potent role in the. In the job. They're kind of like the field marshal to the officer. And I think that in the way that the officer has to be cautious with their words, the engineers got, like, carte blanche to say whatever they want.

[Berlin]

Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

They become that kind of unofficial cultural guide of each little crew. Right. But I think it's easy. I think it's easy to get caught into. Into the comfort of being angry, frustrated. Yeah. This is BS that person doesn't know what they're doing. It's like a safe space to complain. It's actually really vulnerable if you speak about what you believe in. Like, if you say, I actually really like him. I think that. I think she's good for this job. I think that, you know, I think they make a nice couple. You never hear guys say stuff like that.

[Berlin]

No, no. Right, right. But what you're suggesting is that how it should.

[Heather Marquez]

Well, I think it's a happier way to live. Yeah, I think. For sure. And I think that authentic friendships and real trust takes place, especially when people in leadership positions will, you know, be brave and have courageous conversations about the truth, like actually defending somebody when somebody says something that's off color, like actually going, whoa. Like, you got guys up there. I think some of your boys that are up there in Red. Redmond.

[Berlin]

Redmond.

[Heather Marquez]

I believe there's some of the folks that do. Oh, my gosh, I'm forgetting the name of their company. But they, there's one of your chiefs up there who's got the, the company that. It's, it's career survival. It's the career.

[Berlin]

Yeah. Eric Rossoff, he's been up here. He's down from la. Good bit of actually. Eric and LA guy.

[Heather Marquez]

That's right. They coined that term dumpster fire.

[Berlin]

Yes.

[Heather Marquez]

And so they created, they created that idea that you can walk into a fire station and it's just kind of a casual way to say, hey, we're not having this conversation. Stop there. You know, and you can say dumpster fire. And then people will be like, okay, okay, this is stepping over the line. And so it's interesting because we have so much kind of privilege and power in our jobs. We have so much public trust and we actually really expect so much even from our young people when they go from probation into the job. We put a huge amount of weight on their shoulders and make them perform at this super high level. You're of course going to experience people who are like incredibly self assured and, and, and then also feeling quite entitled to their opinions, right?

[Berlin]

Yes.

[Heather Marquez]

So it could be hard when a person in a leadership role and, and I mean informal leaders too. This is from, this is, this is firefighters, engineers, captains, the B.C. it can be anybody. But really, I think the captain sets the tone of their crew. They decide what they're going to do each day and they decide what we're going to watch on TV and what we're going to talk about. And so I think that mentorship is about really challenging yourself to default to positivity and not to default to negativity because just because anger is a safe space, you will pay for it in so many other ways.

[Berlin]

Absolutely.

[Heather Marquez]

You'll pay for it physically in your body. You pay for it with that tension, that tension that is created between the people who are like not keeping, they don't have the power in the room to state their opinion and they're keeping their mouth shut, but they're simmering behind closed doors, you know, and, and that is a constant decay of trust. Right. So I heard someone at a conference a couple days ago at Cal Jack. They said we would like an emphasis on customer service inside the firehouse. So please try to treat your, your each, your co workers, treat each other as nicely as you treat your customers. Like how sweet you are.

[Berlin]

You know, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't.

[Heather Marquez]

Be as fun in the middle of the night that you've run on three times this week, you know, and you're so nice to them. You're just like, hey, here we are again. How you doing? And we're so kind, and we have that good customer service ethic in the field sometimes, and we don't bring it back to the firehouse.

[Berlin]

So, yeah, that's a great. That's a great. That's a great way. Yeah. I mean, how fun would the firehouse be at that point, though? Maybe less, but it's a good point. It's.

[Heather Marquez]

No, but I mean, you can still talk smack, but it has to. It has to be. It has to come from a place of love because, yeah, you're not at. You're. You're just. You're just participating in an abusive relationship. You're either on the. On the abuser side or on the recipient side, but you're. You're participating in a dysfunctional relationship if you're not, like, if you're not standing up for things that you think are moral and ethical to your own standards, if you're not taking care of the people around you. And, man, this job is all about trust. So you break somebody's trust when you are constantly hurting their feelings, when you are constantly undermining them, and when you need them later, it's too late because you can't gain the trust back. And I think that's the gradual decay. So I challenge people to just default to positivity. Like, it's hard. It's actually harder.

[Berlin]

It is a lot harder. In fact, we did a show just the other day. We talked extensively about everything you just said. We talked about positivity. We talked about how easy it is to be negative, how easy it is to complain at the coffee table, how easy it is to do X, Y and Z. But imagine the environment that you have when you actually went out of your way to try to be positive instead, and what that would look like for everybody.

[Heather Marquez]

We can feel it, and you can feel it when it happens, because those are the people who everybody wants to work with.

[Berlin]

Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

Those are the stations people try to bid into. Those are the teams people want to be on.

[Berlin]

Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

Because highly effective teams are. Are teams where people are allowed. Allowed to express themselves. They're allowed to have bad days. They don't have to keep their wall up all the time. They're allowed to be vulnerable, you know, and they're not embarrassed to bring their families over.

[Berlin]

Right.

[Heather Marquez]

So when I hear guys say things like, oh, I would never want my daughter to be a firefighter, I'm like, what's going to say about what we're doing.

[Berlin]

There's something wrong. Yeah, there's something wrong around here. Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

Like, so we're participating in that right now, and you're telling me in 15, 20 years future, you think we're still going to be so jacked up. You would never want your children to be exposed to this kind of an environment. That's a bummer.

[Berlin]

Something's wrong. It's a red flag.

[Heather Marquez]

Yeah. So one of the things in the. If you got to look at the. The graphics that are in the thesis, there's a pyramid in there, and it's hierarchy of needs.

[Berlin]

Oh, yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

Like, it's used in business studies, it's used in sociology. So Maslow's hierarchy of needs is this basic principle that, like, it's. It's a pyramid shape, and the bottom tier of the pyramid is survival needs. That's food, clothing and shelter. Right. The next level up is safety and security. So when we talk about how people function in the fire service and about, like, specifically when I talk about women in the fire service coming in and having the food, clothing, and shelter, the basic survival needs met like that. That is the very basic. Just grinding it out. You're going to make it through. But we've got to make sure people have the right ppe. They've got to have a safe place to sleep, you know, safety and security. That's moving into that. Psychological security and physical security. So when it comes to women, that's like a door that locks on the bathroom door, you know, so no one's walking in on the shower. You know, if they're. If they're a nursing mother, nobody's walking in on. While they're pumping, you know, like that. Safety and security is a psychological state of wellness where one can actually relax and start to enjoy their lives. And if you're. If you're just, you know, scrapping it out at the bottom levels all the time, you can't get to the higher level.

[Berlin]

Exactly.

[Heather Marquez]

Firefighters totally enjoy a very special culture, which is that the third level up is love and belonging. Right. So if you're always being, like, ostracized in the workplace, you never get to get in that groove of feeling that. That good feeling. And you know it. When you've been at work and you have that crew and you're just like, I love these people. I would die for these people. Because literally you've committed to do so.

[Berlin]

So, yeah, absolutely.

[Heather Marquez]

It's amazing when you have that kind of like, you miss them when you're away from work. Firefighters, I love Those days when you're like, I can't wait to go back to work to see my people. And then the very top of that is that self actualization where you go, I really love this job that I've chosen. I have, I feel a sense of purpose, I feel a sense of wellness. We got to get people off those bottom tiers. And then that mentorship and advocacy, that's where that love and belonging, that sense of security, that's where our mentors and our advocates come can come in. And I say, I say those two words differently. Advocate being the person who speaks on your behalf. Mentor the person who walks in with you and trains with you and sits with you and cries with you. Mentor is a more of a direct relationship of a teacher. But the advocate is that person that walks into the room and puts your name forward or defends you at the dinner table when you're not there.

[Berlin]

Well, so to lean a little bit more on the Maslow hierarchy of needs, as you talked about that, it's, it's something that, you know, we don't, we don't, we don't teach our instructors, that we don't teach our company officers that, for example, BCS Deputy chiefs. Chiefs, right. It's not something that's part of curriculum in the fire service. So when you talk about understanding, you know, why some people are able to bring them whole selves to work, why people don't feel like they could be vulnerable, why some people actually reach potential has a lot to do, exactly what you're saying. So it's hard to not say it's hard unless you actually embrace and understand and believe in the concept of say, Maslow's need, the hierarchy. Right. Like a lot of us don't really understand, like, oh, I don't understand why this person comes to work and you know, they, they don't even say anything. I don't understand why this person doesn't. And it just goes to leadership. Right? I mean, if you embrace these concepts, if you study them, I guess not even a question that I have. It's like if I kind of wish and hope that, you know, that we're actually giving our company officers, our instructors that, you know, this kind of information so they can understand, like maybe these people aren't reaching their potential because of X. Did you ever think about that? But we don't, we don't, we don't do that. Right. So for example, I'll ask the question, where did you study and learn about, you know, human behavior and needs and applying that to the fire service and applying it to the crews that you managed and led and supervised. And how do we get that to be. Not everybody's going to be able to utilize this because, you know, you don't know what, you don't know what.

[Heather Marquez]

We do many academies here when we promote. So there is a leadership academy for the new company officers and the new chief officers and we touch on it. But I would say there's also a big movement in character based leadership. There's a big organization that's between Canada and the U.S. and it's almost like a Brunesini esque kind of model of the basics are just be nice. But what they talk about in that is that you hire people for their competency, but when they get fired, they get let go because of their character. So that's really where the failures take place. And so my friend Kyrie Brown, he's down at LA Fire Department. When I was taking the captain's test, I was real shy about that transition. Like, how are people going to see me going from the back seat to the front seat? Will they trust me? And that really mattered to me, you know, to know how I was perceived and would they, you know, can, can you lead somebody? When you look back and you're leading the charge into a battle, is there anybody behind you? You know?

[Berlin]

Right.

[Heather Marquez]

And that really has to do with authenticity and trust. Right. But he said, don't ever look at, don't, don't shy away from leadership roles because you think it's a power trip. Because leadership is not about power, it's about influence. So it's influencing the outcome of a situation. So if you feel like it's important to advocate for somebody who's been unrepresented, now you have the influence to do that. Right? You have the influence to change policy, you have the influence to change the behavior in the room or the tone of a conversation. And so if you feel like you're a good problem solver, you should be a person who is, you know, looking, looking up, looking your path forward into leadership roles. And I think we shy away from it. When I first came in, I heard always people say 10, 10 and 10, 10 years fire, 10 years engineer, 10 years captain. But now I realize, like we have a we. There's no room in that for chief officers. Why would you imagine a 30 year career that you don't actually bring yourself into? When you find yourself as the elder in the room or the designated adult in the room and the person who's gained all this knowledge and experience. Experience. It's actually your duty to pass it on. It means nothing if you don't share it. You have to communicate it. Because if you just hoard it for yourself, you're going to die with it. You've got to pass on some of your knowledge. Especially when we talk about this fire service that we're looking at that's like, what is it now? Like, 40% of the US fire service has under five years of experience.

[Berlin]

Yeah, 40.

[Heather Marquez]

Come on, man. I mean, somebody's got to be there. Whispering in your ear like a Jiminy Cricket, right? Somebody's got to be there. Like, you need all those uncles and aunties who were like, hey, don't open that door. Don't do that. You better. You better brace your knees before you lift that lady.

[Berlin]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Heather Marquez]

Nobody's got to be there to teach you. And so what. I think mentorship is absolutely what is lacking. And when you did get the gist of my paper, I appreciate that.

[Berlin]

Yeah, I did.

[Heather Marquez]

I do recommend people reduce their. I'm talking about women in fire. I'm not talking about all ethnic minorities or anybody else, but. But women in fire. I emphasize the fact that people should stop putting their energy into recruitment because it feels so futile. Everybody I meet says we just can't find any good candidates. Well, listen, you've got an incredibly small candidate pool. You're always going to have an incredibly small candidate pool. The research shows that since 1974, we've never gone beyond 4%. Before 1974, it was illegal for women to be firefighters. At the time of my birth, it would have been illegal for me to do this job. And then over those years, despite consent decrees and affirmative action quotas, everything else, we've tried all kinds of ad campaigns, education in schools, are high profile on television and media. You're just not seeing any more people showing up at the door. The message that I'm always hearing from recruiters is we're not trying hard enough. But to me, if I look at it from like, let's say the sociological perspective, there's a whole bunch of reasons women wouldn't want to come to this job. Their husbands, fathers, mothers, grandparents, children don't want them to do this job. And there's always going to be this really small contingent of women who do want it. And of those women, they have to pass through those four gates, which I identified, which is the first, the physicality gate. Second is the sociocultural gate. They're going to have to deal with the pregnancy and parenting, child care issues. If they choose to live that life and then, then they're going to hit, hit that, that last gate. That final stage in the obstacle course is the promotional challenges where then they find out that all the things that they did not have access to because they were outgrouped so long, by the time they get to try to be in the leadership roles, they haven't established the trust because they don't have the familiarity or they don't have the, they don't have that open network that, that is kind of crucial for us to build as we grow in this job.

[Berlin]

So my question is, how do we build that? You're saying that the four gates and the challenges of navigating the four gates for women specifically will say, what do organizations, what do mentors, what do current leaders, informal, informal leaders do currently, today, to ensure that, you know, we're breaking down some of those barriers, if you will. Like if you were to. I mean, obviously that's a long winded question. There's a hundred things we can do, but what are some of the big things that we could just say, you know what, we could just start doing that now, today. I can implement that at my level or my organization can start implementing that soon kind of thing.

[Heather Marquez]

There's a slide from Confucius that's at the front of my slide deck when I present this, and it says the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right name. So the first thing that we do is identify the problem. The very fact that I went into Naval Postgraduate School and I was considering what I was going to write about and I had a thousand different ideas, I didn't want to write about this. And when I started to look at the, the research material, because in a master's, and I learned this in grad school, I didn't know this. When you, when you're, when you're in bachelor's degree, like kind of you're learning how to learn. When you're in masters, it's like you're learning how to do gap, collate other people's research. And when you're a PhD, you need to make individual unique research. Yeah. Like you're, you're creating your own research project. As a PhD, as masters, I'm just taking other people's material and re. Reassigning it into meaning. Right. I, I just, I dropped other people's research into my framework. But when I started looking at how much even available material there was on this, I'm like, I'm never going to have enough to validate this, so that in itself became the driving force of, of the project is I went, okay, somebody's got to do something. So what we always say is, you're not going to change the world, but you can move that, you know, you can move the wall a few yards down the field.

[Berlin]

Yeah, right.

[Heather Marquez]

Just move, just move the body of knowledge a few inches down the field. It's okay. So what I did with this was I look back at 40 years of, of material and then, and, and current hiring practices and what the trends are. And actually, so if you look at the size of the American fire service, it has increased in size because our population has increased in size. So therefore we have more firefighters. But, but the ratio, the percentage is still at 4%. So when we say, oh, there's more women joining the fire service than ever, it's really not true. We actually percentage wise have fewer and it's on a steady decline. So as those elders that really fought hard, and I see elders with respect, I just mean the OGs is what I mean.

[Berlin]

The original.

[Heather Marquez]

Yep, original. The original women that came in in the late 80s, early 90s that were really up against the wall job, if they've made it to their full service career, they're gone now. And then the ones that came in just after that, they're retiring out by this point. But we're not getting a huge movement, despite all of our efforts of a lot of women coming into this job. Because I feel like in colleges there's more women getting degrees, there's more women in the workplace than there's ever been. But our industry hasn't changed. So I think that physicality gate remains as the number one. It's kind of an immovable gate. So you say, how do we break it down? I say you don't. I say you go train people up and make them more physically, physically strong and physically capable so they can get through our academy and sustain a 20 to 30 year fire service career. Don't just get them through the academy. It's not just limping them through the academy.

[Berlin]

Right.

[Heather Marquez]

They have to be able to do the job and stay healthy and well and retire healthy. So these people, these are people that have to be kind of exceptionally gritty. I don't mean, I don't necessarily mean big, but I do mean gritty and tough and, and you know when you see it, right. You know, you know when you're like, oh, she's got the thing, totally, yeah, she's gonna be fine. Right. But it also. And then they become gender neutral. At that point, that's when that person can, can meld into the environment. They've meld into their uniform, they meld into the kitchen table. And it's, it's, that's, that's when they're in grouped and that's when you have the, the I part of the dei. That's when you have included.

[Berlin]

Yes.

[Heather Marquez]

So, but I, I'm a strong proponent of not lowering standards. I believe that we need to hold the bar and we need to maintain this as a varsity sport. If that means in your recruitment process, you need to work harder to make people more ready, more physically ready. Because a lot of us, even our young folks, male and female, are coming in not mechanically savvy and not physically ready. Our military is suffering the same with their recruitment, is that we're getting people that are, you know, overweight at young ages and that have never really done any hard work, have never had calluses. They don't even like the feeling of sweat on their skin, you know. Yeah, yeah, we're raising a very comfortable tech generation. You know, that's, that's used to like climate control.

[Berlin]

Here's a question for you, and I'm sure you've gotten a lot lately this question formally and informally. So is a fire service better today in 2024 having. Well, and I know the numbers are showing 4%, it's been that way for the last 40 years. But is fire service better with women in the fire service or a diversified workforce? We'll say it more generally speaking.

[Heather Marquez]

Well, those are two separate questions, I think. And then. So better is a meta perspective. So I would say I have a thought. As you know, I'm a division chief of medical services, but I came through the line. I came from suppression, I got hired as an emt. I became a paramedic. I think that one of the things that's had a massive impact on us as a, an industry is the introduction of EMS into our world. And you hear this anecdotally, people complaining like, oh, this is everything went to hell when the paramedics came in. Well, in a way, that's an interesting factor. I think that maybe internally, like, it changed the dynamic because we had a bunch of like, military veterans coming in and there was a certain like, way of doing things that everyone had a common understanding about. And then these paramedics came in and they were different and they were more academic and, or they were not as physically tough. And then people have always had kind of a, you know, blue collar jobs, have always had a disdain for education. So you just, you know, some dumb college guy. Right. Just another dumb college guy with his degree. And so. And sometimes that's true. Sometimes people have no. They have no sense about them, but they've got a bunch of degrees and again, you know, when you see it. But I think that ems, when we want to talk about is the fire service better than it was? EMS has brought more women in because there's a lot of places statistically that will measure their numbers of women by their single role. Paramedics and the women that are doing the EMS side, clinical education jobs, those kind of count into their numbers. So I think a diverse workforce, literally, I think even when I go to a party, I think it's more fun when there's more girls there, because I think girls bring a lot of good energy to a party. They're good in social situations. They're more likely to bring something with them. They're more likely to help clean up afterwards. And they're funny, and they're pretty. Women are fun. I like women. They're, like, great in parties. Right. And so think of your workplace as, like, how would it be when you diversify the workplace with that good energy? I think, of course, it's better to have a bigger ray. But I also like a party that looks like a United nations meeting. I mean, I think it's great when you show up at a public event and you're like, check it out. There's people speaking different languages, you know, doing different things, people of different ages, people with different political beliefs. I like that. So when I think of a diverse fire station, I kind of think of that like, well, I don't want to go to a party with just a bunch of monotonous, you know, people of any. Of any one group. I want to go to a. I want to. I want a concert that's got some range.

[Berlin]

Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

So I think that. That. I think that kind of goes without saying, and that's. I'm preaching to the choir. I'm sure that most people would take that as a fundamental belief. Yes, it's. It's better to have a diverse group and they bring all these different skills with them. But I think EMS has really changed the nature of our job in a way that has become, like, unsustainable, because I think now what used to be those kind of small trauma. No, not small. Those infrequent traumas that firefighters would experience. Horrific car accidents, seeing someone burned in a fire, dead animals or children. You know, like those things that we used to see when it was basically a suppression based industry. When we add in auto extrication and then we add in the EMS calls that we run, not only are you experiencing that kind of moral injury where you're witnessing the decay of society all the time, especially in urban areas and we have all this, this blight and this drug addiction and the unhoused populations, it's like it, it, it affects one so deeply. So is the fire service better than it used to be? In so many ways, I would say absolutely yes. But in another way I would say this job is not what it used to be. And so when people of our senior members and our retirees who say people are so soft, everybody's just so traumatized. Everybody's such a snowflake now. I would challenge them to look at the shit that they're going through every day and say, you would be surprised to know like these guys are, they're like quadruple the amount of human trauma and horror that you ever saw in the course of your career. You know, and so now we're just inundating folks. So I think that because medicine came into fire, I think it's made this job like it's, it is, it's kind of an untenable long term plan to expect anybody to be able to do this for 30 years.

[Berlin]

Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

And especially with our, I don't know how it's looking in Washington. We're on a 48, 96 schedule. And then ever since COVID we've just been in the mandatory, we call it, mando here. We've been in the mando lockdown. I mean, constant staffing issues. We have three platoons. I'm seeing that the east coast is moving to four platoons. It's going to be like the one on three off. But the cost of living in the Bay Area has made it, you know, it's preventative. So people are, people are moving far away. You want to keep the schedule, but guess what? The schedule is killing us.

[Berlin]

What's leading with love?

[Heather Marquez]

Yeah, you asked that question about my leadership model. That is, that seems like fundamentally obvious to me and it's something we never talk about. But I think the guiding force between, but behind all the decisions that you make in your career should be about love. And that's like love for yourself, like self respect, integrity, dignity, what's good for you, what's good for your heart, you know, your family. Like how, how will what I'm, I'm doing affect my, my children, my spouse, my extended family? How can I, how Can I be of service to those people that I love and live with? And. And that brought me here. You know, when you bring that into the work place, I just think it's like such a different feeling. I was talking about that hug culture that we have. When you go to some departments, you'll feel that there's a strong, you know, professional barrier. It's very standoffish, kind of confrontational, you know, and they've got their own style of connection. And that's part of their out grouping too, is saying, like, we don't just let anybody in. It's kind of a. It's kind of a different model. But when. When I'm in a workplace where I can feel like this. This place, this house, this house is filled with love, it feels like a family. It feels like people are respected, their words and voices are respected. There's. They're more physically fit, they're more likely to work out together. They're enjoying their meals together. People aren't just going to their rooms or hiding behind their phones. You know, you can feel in a work place where people are leading with love. And I'm even now, like, on the office side of it, you can feel. You can feel when the flow is happening, when people are like, happy to be here. And the energy, it just. It brings everything up. It makes everything possible. And it's kind of. I think it's kind of in line with my belief that don't. Don't hold back on love, but also default to positivity whenever you can. Even if it's hard, even if it's the harder path, like, because people are counting on you to. They want to look up when their heads are down and they're tired and they've been carrying that bag. They want to look up and see that somebody's still leading the charge. Only positivity. And like, literally love. Love for your people. Love. Love for your people will lead to deep protection of them. And that's one thing that people in the administrative role have the capability of managing, which is like that. We create policies and schedules, rules, law that protects our people from. From danger, from harm, from divorce, from drug addiction, from alcoholism. Like, we have the ability, if we're. If we're coming from a place of love, to transfer that into our folks. And this job is different than other jobs. I'm sure you can work at a tech industry and not have to ever bring love to work. Work. But that doesn't work here because our jobs are all about service. And service comes from a Place of, like, honor and, and that quiet thing, I can't think of another word for, but I call it love.

[Berlin]

I love it. And so I guess what I gather from that is everyone has got a responsibility to bring that love to the table, right? It doesn't matter the rank. Firefighter all the way up.

[Heather Marquez]

Yeah. Be nice, be nice. It's simple, like the easiest thing, man.

[Berlin]

Yeah. Remember that. Okay, let's just go here. If you're going to talk to some groups, right, say, chief, there's a bunch of firefighters standing in front of you. They're the first group, and you were giving us some advice. They wanted to start growing as leaders. They wanted to lead with love. These are early, young firefighters. What was something that you'd say to them? To start doing this early in the career to ensure that they become great leaders and they have a long, successful and fun and loving career.

[Heather Marquez]

You know, I do have a chance sometimes to speak to the academies.

[Berlin]

What do you tell them?

[Heather Marquez]

Envisioning. I'm all about visioning. I, I'm all about. Yes. Allow yourself, allow yourself to whatever you walked into this job with. Like, if you see yourself driving that engine or being in the tiller box, whatever, like. Or if you see yourself, if you see yourself in a white shirt sitting in the chief's office, like, write it down now. Like, write it down now. The actual thing that you said, oh, the fire department came to my house when I was a kid and they took care of my grandmother. The whatever that thing is. Make a note now of your, your, your why, the reason that you came here, the, the thing that you tell us when you sit at your interview with tears in your eyes, when you're begging to become a fire candidate. You know, like when people get so emotional when they're like, I'm here today because all I want to do is this thing. Write that down now because you're going to need to fall back on it later. And also, I would always, always advise them, keep a little scrapbook or a little envelope that's got all the love letters that you get from the public and those little crayon, you know, coloring things that you get on the, on the wall when you go to the school. Keep your thank you notes, you know, because there's going to be times when you go into a very dark place and you start to go, what am I doing here? And especially when, like, I talk about mandos and staffing, when you miss holidays, when you miss birthdays, when you have sacrificed yourself to, to the job and your Life is going on without you or your partner leaves you, because they say you're never home, you know, and you start to go, am I trading my time for dollars? And does this matter? I think it's very important to start from the very beginning and give yourself that baseline. It's like baseline vitals. Give yourself baseline vitals. Like, what brought me here? What is it I believe in? And then just periodically, like every five years, checking in and going, like, write it down, write it down. And keep. And keep those dreams and visions. It's okay for them to change. There's so much power in, like, writing down a dream because you acknowledge it and you make it real. Even just writing it down in your own journal makes it like a valid thought and not just a notion. So, yeah, I try to tell people. I mean, it's cliche to say it all goes by in a blink of an eye, but oh, my gosh, it's crazy. It's crazy that it's. It's going to be over. And you also don't know on any given day if you're going home, anything can happen. As simple as step off the rig and, you know, you blow out your lumbar vertebrae.

[Berlin]

Yeah.

[Heather Marquez]

You know, on some. You're on some silly medical call in the middle of the night, you know, and you might get a career ending injury, you know, and then, God forbid, you know, you're on the freeway or on the roof of a building and you don't come off of it. Yeah, it happens.

[Berlin]

It happens.

[Heather Marquez]

You know, so I think leading, being very intentional about what you believe in, setting that path. And then, you know, always people will be very shy about ever saying, oh, I just. They always say, I just want to be good at my job. I just want to be good at my job. I just want to be a good probie. You really have to think beyond that if you're ever going to grow.

[Berlin]

I love it. And so it's okay to have those visions early, revisit them. Remind yourself. Okay, how about a couple of officers? You know, they just want to be better. What would you tell them?

[Heather Marquez]

I would tell them that their role is critical. I think that the company officer, the guy at the head of the table, has the most critical role in the fire service for setting culture. They're like the parents of the family, I think how things are managed in the house from the moment they wake up, to what they eat, to how they treat the public, the conversations that they have, what they watch on TV at night, every single step of the Day is directed by the company officer in one way or another, and they have ultimate liability for it. So I would just empower them to know that their words. Their words have weight, that what they say matters, and that they need to, again, be very intentional about. About being. It's. Being a leader is not just, you know, teaching people great chainsaw skills.

[Berlin]

Right.

[Heather Marquez]

It's. It's really about. It's really about the behavioral health of your organization. Organization. And that starts at our kitchen tables.

[Berlin]

Yes, it does. Yes, it does. All right, Chief officers. Something to continue their growth as leaders as well. Right. I mean, their chief officers are still growing. Right.

[Heather Marquez]

My husband has a little joke that he says, you know why there's ratchets on the helmet? Because the more you promote, the bigger your head gets.

[Berlin]

Right?

[Heather Marquez]

He said, somebody said, how's your retirement going? And he goes a couple hat sizes down immediately or take time, because it's like obsolescence. He said, you're two company. He said, he always says, you're two academy classes away from complete obsolescence. Like, you were never there. You're like, you come in for a cup of coffee. You're like, I built this station.

[Berlin]

They're like, who are you?

[Heather Marquez]

It's true. I mean, this. And that's part of. In grouping. Like, when you're in this job. Like, we're all in. Like, we're. We're all in. And this is our identity. And it's very hard to walk away and turn away from that. That is part of what I would tell chief officers when they're coming near the end of their career. Career start sort of a glide path for what they're going to do next, because you don't want to end up as that person who's still longing for the. You know, for the cup of coffee with the crew feeling incredibly isolated and lonely. Going home to a spouse that hasn't really known you in the house for all these years, maybe kids that are resentful of you because you spent so much time away. Start this glide path of a transition so that five years before you're going to retire, you know what your next thing is. It's like planning for a vacation or a trip. You get excited about the future. And I think that there is such an unspoken trauma, conversion, that when you leave the firehouse and you don't have the support network, you don't have the sense of identity or purpose, and all you have is your memories, and you're alone in your head with them. I think it's really Important to keep your community and really diversify your personal portfolio so that you have friends outside of fire that think it's cool that you were a firefighter. But that's not the only friends you have. You need friends that are now that you're going to incorporate back into. Into kind of the civilian world. And we see it all the time. We write books about it, how when military, you know, veterans come home, they have a hard time reintegrating into American society. It is the same thing for firefighters, but we just don't talk about it. They lose. They lose their sense of tribe.

[Berlin]

I agreed that. Yeah. Tribe. Great book. Yes. So we're here today because of the leadership challenge we mentioned earlier. Chief Rain Gray, who, ironically, I would have thought you guys were friends for the entirety of your career, but it turns out you guys weren't. And you guys met through the podcast. Through a class. Was it through a class you guys were at the conference?

[Heather Marquez]

I think I spoke at the National Fire Academy.

[Berlin]

Okay. That's what it was.

[Heather Marquez]

One of his Arizona colleagues called him up and say, hey, you got to meet her. We one time. But we didn't ever. We didn't connect until the day we did our podcast.

[Berlin]

That's right.

[Heather Marquez]

We have been such best friends. And he's Canadian, and I'm Canadians. We have all these little jokes, but it's. He's definitely my brother from another mother, so I appreciate him introducing me to you today. This is really.

[Berlin]

That's awesome. Well, and perhaps that is the. The coolest part of the fire service, as we talked offline, is just the ability to connect through whatever means, sometimes accidentally, sometimes coincidentally. But the leadership challenge helps us continue this conversation here. Chief, so I'll ask you, is there someone out there that you would recommend for us to reach out to, to see if this person would be willing to share a leadership message on the kitchen table?

[Heather Marquez]

This is such a hard thing to answer because I have so many mentors. I have so many people that I admire and look up to, but one person that has really just, like, he's really kept my mind busy lately as I have listened little coffee meetings in the morning with Chief Eric Sailors of El Cerrito. He is formerly of Sac City. He's a graduate of Naval Postgraduate School and most recently just got his PhD at USC. Yeah, he's done great things with tactical medicine, and he's. He's just a very special individual. And his mind is like. It's. It's, like, awesome. It's a party in there. I just show up. And I'm like, what's going to happen today? We have the most far ranging and interesting conversations. And so I would like for you to meet Eric Sailors.

[Berlin]

Awesome. I'd reach out to him to see if Eric Sailors will. Battalion chief, Fire chief, Fire chief, Fire chief, Fire chief at, in the Bay area. Now he's, you said usc. That's a, that's a rival of Cal, though. That's okay.

[Heather Marquez]

He's, he, yeah, he's not a cow guy. He's a Naval Postgraduate school guy. And. Yeah. Yeah. And he's now, I guess he's now Dr. Saylor's chief doctor sailors. How do you say that?

[Berlin]

Chief doctor, chief doctor, chief sailors. Chief doctor sailors. Got it. Judge. Just so we throw this out there, we talked about your paper, your thesis paper many times. How do people find your thesis paper? It's a phenomenally written paper that I believe everyone in the fire service should read, in my opinion. But how does one get a hold of that to read? They were so interested.

[Heather Marquez]

It's the Homeland Security Journal.

[Berlin]

Homeland Security Journal, okay.

[Heather Marquez]

Yes. And the title of my paper is Working Fire Recruitment and Retention of Women Firefighters.

[Berlin]

Thank you. It was worth a read in my opinion. A lot of knowledge, a lot of, a lot of research, a lot of knowledge and a lot of, a lot of good stuff written in there. Before we close today, Chief, I say this thing, do you have any lasting leadership thoughts to leave listeners with before we just close?

[Heather Marquez]

There's a thing I had written on my whiteboard that I, I just, I, and I had it on a ring that I wore for a long time, but it's a phrase from Michelangelo and he painted it at the end of his life and it's Emparo ancora and it means still I am learning. And he wrote that even when he was like near his deathbed at the very end of his life after all the masterpieces he created, it kind of reminds me of Michael Jordan saying, I just wish I won more basketball games. This idea of being at peace in your life with what you've accomplished, but always striving and being open for what's next. So I think it's really important that you don't live in a state of constantly striving for the future, but so you can actually be present and enjoy where you are. But to always keep your mind open, to always be a lifetime learner, especially in the fire service, especially as the industry and the culture and our society changes around, around us. But you know, keep your, keep your passion alive by being a lifetime learner. There's my fire chief right behind me.

[Berlin]

That's powerful. Hi, Chief.

[Heather Marquez]

Well, thank you so much, Berlin. My fire chief has been chief of five different departments in three different states, and he is the longest training fire chief in the state of California.

[Berlin]

Who is it? Who's your chief?

[Heather Marquez]

67 years old. Talk about a lifetime learner. Willie McDonald. Let me add. Let me add him on to my chief challenge. If you.

[Berlin]

What's his name?

[Heather Marquez]

Chief Willie. He's a humble man. He will not talk about himself. Willie McDonald, fire chief.

[Berlin]

Got it. I will. I will reach out.

[Heather Marquez]

Absolutely. Stud athlete, just incredible. Got out there with our guys at Fire Ops 101. And his turnouts the other day.

[Berlin]

That is awesome.

[Heather Marquez]

He's a beast.

[Berlin]

That's an inspiration right there. That's a. That's a great way to close, get people to say, I want to know more. I want to know more. I'll close here, Chief, and then we'll close it out. So thank you, everyone, for tuning in. Dave, kitchen table. We truly hope you found this time valuable, and we hope we've inspired you to take action, to lead and to spread the leadership conversation. Until next time, be safe, be intentional, stay curious.