Someone makes an angry comment at a city council meeting about a fire response. A blogger creates a cartoon that makes the fire department look incompetent after a recent event. An anonymous person posts inflammatory comments about the fire department online.
As fire chief, you will be affected by all of these occurrences. You might feel angry, defensive and ready for a fight.
The question is: Should you respond to every attack? And when you do choose to respond, how should you do it for best effect? Some chiefs tend to go to extremes when it comes to responding to public criticism. On one extreme are those who leave no attack unanswered. It doesn't matter what is the source of the attack, the chief meets it head on.
This approach can have the benefit of portraying the chief as a fighter for his or her department. But it is also exhausting, time consuming and not necessarily effective in the long run.
On the other extreme are chiefs who refuse to engage in any public dispute. They put themselves above the fray in a way that may make them look dignified, but will as easily make them seem out of touch and uncaring. What's a conscientious chief to do? It can help to have a plan. A simple approach to strategic response is using a modified version of the old journalist's questions: who, when, where and what.