Shownotes
What does leadership look like when lives are on the line? In this episode of the Leading Visionaries, host Anjel B. Hartwell sits down with Mark Andrew, 30-year fire service veteran and author of Leading Through the Heat. Mark shares how his childhood dream of becoming a firefighter led him into a decades-long career serving in dangerous, high-stakes environments where leadership decisions carried real consequences. He also opens up about the unexpected journey of becoming an author and why he felt called to write his book, Leading Through the Heat.
This episode is packed with practical leadership wisdom for entrepreneurs, managers, team leaders, and anyone navigating responsibility in challenging environments.
What You Will Learn:
Why effective leadership starts with self-awareness.
How firefighters use failure as a tool for growth and improvement.
The importance of decisiveness in leadership roles.
What it means to protect your team as a leader.
How after-action reviews strengthen communication and performance.
Why leadership requires continuous learning and adaptation.
The difference between managing people and truly leading them.
How real-world pressure reveals leadership strengths and weaknesses.
What aspiring authors need to know about promoting a book.
Why leadership principles from emergency services apply to every industry.
FAQ:
Why is self-awareness important in leadership?
Self-awareness helps leaders recognize their strengths, weaknesses, and impact on others. Leaders who are self-aware can adapt, improve communication, make better decisions, and create healthier workplace cultures.
How do strong leaders handle failure?
Strong leaders treat failure as an opportunity to learn rather than something to hide. By reviewing mistakes honestly, identifying lessons, and improving systems or training, leaders help teams grow stronger and more resilient.
What is an after-action review?
An after-action review is a structured discussion used after an event or project to evaluate what worked, what didn’t, and what could improve next time. These reviews help teams continuously learn and improve performance.
Resource:
Mark Andrew
Book: Leading Through the Heat
Join the Leading Visionaries Community
Transcripts
LVP 135 Mark
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Ad: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Leading Visionaries podcast, featuring stellar conversations with emerging and established leading visionaries. Thanks for joining us today as we celebrate and spotlight the leading visionaries who are thinking differently, seeing new possibilities, have the courage to dream big, take inspired action, and create conscious change all around the world.
Now, here's your host, Angel B. Hartwell
Anjel: Welcome to another episode of the Leading Visionaries podcast, where we celebrate the ingenious, insightful, innovative, and inspired leading visionaries of our time and provide our listeners with world-class examples of the kind of courage, clarity, and confidence it takes to bring visions into reality.
This is your host, Angel B. Hartwell, and today we welcome our special guest, Mark Andrew. Mark is a 30-year fire service veteran, paramedic, [00:01:00] and fire company officer. Throughout his career, he has led teams in high-risk, high-pressure environments where decisions matter and leadership is tested in real time.
He is the author of Leading Through the Heat, a leadership book that draws from the fire ground to deliver practical lessons that apply far beyond emergency services. His insights translate the realities of leading firefighters into principles any current or aspiring boss, supervisor, or manager can use in the workplace.
I'm excited to have you here today. Welcome to the show, Mark.
Mark: It's a pleasure to be here.
Anjel: All right. Well, I love to start these episodes talking either about leadership or vision, and since your book is all about leadership, I think we're gonna start with vision. So- You know, what was your vision when you were a little boy?
Was it to be a firefighter?
Mark: Actually, it absolutely was. My dad worked in the fire service, and coincidentally for the same department that I worked for, uh, [00:02:00] and it was the town I grew up in. It was very competitive back then, so I didn't have any aspirations to only work here. Uh, I applied for years and years to every city in our area bouncing around civil service test to civil service test, going back to school, upgrading my medical licensure, going back to school, picking up more certifications, and building my resume, working for a private ambulance.
And eventually Dearborn called, and I would've gone anywhere, but, uh, it was the city my dad worked for. And after a lot of years of plugging away, Dearborn called, and I had a wonderful 28-year career there. Beautiful. I love it. Well, let's talk about your vision for writing a book. Tell us where that came from.
I always enjoyed writing as a creative outlet. I just wasn't successfully ever published. I did a little bit of writing for some local newspapers as a stringer back in the, back in the day, and that was always fun. And I always played [00:03:00] around writing essays or magazine articles that I would make submissions to and never once got published, but I always plugged away at it.
And in the last couple of years, I got one of those GoPro fire helmet cameras,
Ad: and,
Mark: uh, as luck would have had it, we had a string of fires that year, and so I got some really good up-close footage. And so I started putting it out on Instagram, and a lot of other fire Instagram pages were sharing it and reaching out to me because there's a very vibrant community on YouTube and Instagram about fire video, helmet cams, and the comment section discussion of tactics and strategy, and it's this really fun, vibrant community.
And so a few people invited me to be on their podcast, and I did. And then I noticed that I had a little legal pad filled with my, my notes and talking points, and, uh, one of them I said, "Wow, that, that, that would make a nice little essay. Maybe I could make [00:04:00] a, make that into a magazine article." And then I just started thinking of all the times I got rejected for 20 years and said, "You know, what am I doing?
I've always toyed with the idea of a book. Let's just see if we got something here." And so yeah, I, I knuckled down with those talking points, and before I knew it I had three chapters, and they just flowed right out of me
Anjel: Mm-hmm And
Mark: I said, "All right, I guess we're doing this." And then it, then it got hard.
Then it was really the, the writing process and really mining ideas Mm-hmm But it, that's how it started
Anjel: Yeah. Well, this is really good for our listeners, especially, you know, whether you're writing or whether you're creating a business or whether you're, you know, you've innovated in, in some industry, there is that moment where you say yes to the vision, right?
Like, oh, yeah, I've been wanting to write a book, and finally you say yes, and then all of a sudden you have all this flow-
Mark: Yep ...
Anjel: and then you get to the hard part.
Mark: Yes.
Anjel: So I'd love to have you speak a little bit about how you led yourself, [00:05:00] because the book is about leadership, and this podcast is also about leadership.
How did you lead yourself through the hard part of the writing of the book?
Mark: What I did was I, I wanted the book to always be grounded in real incidents, so it's very anecdote-based. I lead most of the chapters with a real-life story of a success or a failure and then break down the management theory What would you learn in a textbook?
How did it apply to this and how can we apply it going forward? And When going through those anecdotes, those were kind of easy because when I became a company officer about halfway through my career, I had a, um, a, already a mental inventory going of the traits that I liked in the officers that, uh, I worked with and the traits that I didn't like.
And so I, I went into becoming an officer already with an idea [00:06:00] of what worked well and what didn't work well throughout my career. And so I had all these anecdotes as, as just a mental checklist anyway, and so m- putting those on paper were easy. Mining the first page or two of each chapter, like we just mentioned a moment ago, just flowed right out of me.
Mm. Um, it only became work when I get to page four, five, and six of every chapter. That's when I said, "All right, now how do I turn an essay into 3,000-- a 3,000-word chapter?" And, and it was just like any entrepreneur would say, it's, it's a grind. It's work. It's thoughtful concentration. It's talking to people.
It's sometimes just being alone. Uh, whatever, whatever works for you, but it really was just good old-fashioned hard work.
Anjel: Mm-hmm. I love it. Okay. So you mentioned in the book that you write about the successes and the failures. Now, in the firefighting world, a failure is, you know, can be death [00:07:00] for somebody, right?
So, so many people are you know, they wanna hide the failures, or they wanna n-not talk about the failures, or they, you know, are not really interested in hearing about the failures. But I'd love to have you speak a little bit about what the failures have taught you as a leader you know, how you navigated with your team, how you navigated you know, in the public eye because that was part of what you were doing.
Can you talk a little bit about the importance of actually putting some fire light on the failures?
Mark: Oh, for sure. Some of the failures that shaped me a lot were things I witnessed when I was younger because I would see some officers do really, really well, and I would see some officers, whether it was their fault or it wasn't their fault, maybe it was the way that their boss was treating them, but then I just saw leadership failures.
And un- the common ones were [00:08:00] indecisiveness in- unwillingness to go where you're ordering the, the people to go. That's the common thing in leadership. I'm not gonna ask you to do anything I'm not willing to do myself. And so the, the person who would be just Pushing people in to do stuff but be unwilling to go themselves, that was another leadership failure I would see a lot.
So I knew going in those were things I did not want to be as an officer. But I did have to always keep in mind that I'm gonna be learning all the time, and that was something that was drilled into me from the beginning. You never are gonna know it all. You're always gonna be learning, always try to get better.
And so I, I did know I I don't wanna hide my failures. I want to be able to acknowledge them 'cause I gotta get better. And I talk about a few of them in the book and, and some were just really simple just, uh, learning curves of being an officer, um, where I just made some mistakes and I learned from them.
And I said, "Wow, there's, there's a better way to lead people. I'm, uh, I'm, I'm doing this the wrong way." So I, for me it was [00:09:00] always a conscious choice. I had to really, really pay attention to what was working and what was not working when I was leading a crew, and then work on the things that I was not doing well and, and take those weaknesses and make them strengths.
Anjel: Well, and that, what that speaks to too Mark, is the idea of self-awareness. And I'm curious, in the years that you spent in the fire service, you know, what were some of the things that the fire service maybe is structured already to do to support growing self-awareness amongst the leadership as well as amongst the rest of the team?
Mark: We're really lucky because we live at the fire station for 24 hours. And so you're there all day, you're there with your crew. So my crew is maybe, uh, 8 to 10 people, and if things went well, I could see the morale of the crew improve, and I would sit with them the rest of [00:10:00] the day. If we had a successful car extrication or a cardiac run or a trouble breathing call or a, a pediatric medical emergency or a house fire that went well, I could actually see in real time the morale of the crew be great the rest of the day.
And if, if we made a mistake or we didn't anticipate something or we had to change gears in the middle of something and we now look in hindsight, "Oh, I wish I would've done this different," w- we have that time in the station not only to, to see each other's moods, but to consciously attack it. And so we do a lot of post-incident reviews or after-action reports, and if not formal reports, at a minimum, tabletop exercises of critical runs.
And so we, we have that opportunity in between 911 calls to reflect, and that reflection is absolutely a part of our culture. And I've heard it's the very same thing in the military, whether you're in aircraft or you're uh, in the Navy or [00:11:00] you are a, a special forces person. Those after-action reports and team reviews are, are critical to what they do, and it's so baked into our culture as well.
So I had lots of opportunities to sit at the table, put up some Instagram video of what the neighbors were filming of this fire and say, "Hey, where we put these ladders, it didn't work out. We should've read the smoke different, and we should've put the ladders over there. That's on me. I should've noticed this."
And then the crew will say, "Yeah, I did this and this worked, but this other thing didn't work." And then now we're tabletopping those strengths and weaknesses 'cause we're all bought into wanting to be better.
Anjel: Mm. Well, and when you're working with people that it's literally a life or death situation where a mistake can, can cost the life of one of your- teammates, um, I would imagine that there's no room for people to hide or shame or, you know, it's, it's really all about the data [00:12:00] more than anything is what I'm hearing there.
Like, let's just look at the data and learn from the data. This is what happened. This is what we could have done differently. That's what it sounds like.
Mark: I would agree with that. And it's very much like that on the medical side, 'cause I could look at very specific heart arrhythmias and drug doses and the time it took us to get fluids into a body or the time it took us to recognize a heart arrhythmia and then mix the drug and get the drug in the body.
They're all timestamped, and so we could look at the national standard or the American Heart Association standard for those drug doses and compare them to our times on the run and then see where c- where can our teamwork have been better to increase those times or to decrease those times? Uh, what patient assessment things did, did we catch?
What did we not catch? How was their documentation afterwards? Did we give a g- good report to the trauma doctors at the ER? And those are all very tangible things that we, we can review. And like I said, it's just, I don't know if it's unique to us, but [00:13:00] it's just really baked into our culture that we, we really want to learn those things.
It's- Yeah ... it's actually taught to us when we're young Don't be afraid to make mistakes. You're gonna be supervised. We're not gonna let you hurt somebody. But, uh, you're gonna learn from your mistakes. Don't be afraid to make them, 'cause we don't want people being hesitant. Mm. Uh, because if you're hesitant your whole career, you're never learning, decisions take forever, and then those re- are when the real failures can happen in, uh, in, uh, in an emergency.
Anjel: Mm-hmm. Beautiful. All right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna let our listeners know where they can find the book and more about you. But right now, listeners, are you a leading visionary or in the role of leading other visionaries? Consider joining our community and sharing your feedback and takeaways from each episode.
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And we will be right back with Mark Andrew[00:15:00]
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Anjel: And we are back with Mark Andrew. You can find out more about Mark and get his book at Amazon. We're gonna have the link for the book right in the show notes. The name of the book, the title of the book is Leading Through the Heat. We will, as, as I said, have a special link for you in the show notes for that book, but if for some reason you can't find the link, just look up Leading Through the Heat on Amazon and Mark Andrew, and it will take you right to the book, and I encourage you to consider acquiring that.
So, Mark, what's your vision for this book? Like when you wrote the book, now of course, you know, the thing about writing a book, everybody has this vision about, "Oh, I'm gonna write a book. It's gonna be great." [00:17:00] And then then you realize that you have to actually go out and sell the book, market the book, talk about the book, you know, be out there with the book.
So tell us who is the book for, and what's your vision for the book?
Mark: I think the book is for anybody in any workplace who wants to be a boss, a manager, and promote up the chain of leadership, and wants to truly lead a team to be high performers, create a work environment where people want to come to work, want to be there, and you're leaving workplaces better than we found them.
Before I got in the fire service or in the fire service, there were always management successes and some management failures, and it's just interesting as I, uh, have navigated myself through a lot of podcasts how many people, uh, in the business world are resonating with this message, 'cause that is specifically [00:18:00] the vision I had.
I didn't want this to be... There's two different versions of it. I didn't want this to just be a vanity project where I wrote a book to say I wrote a book, and I sold it to friends and family. I wanted it to be an actual book involved in the discussion of management, business, and leading people, and to be able to cross those boundaries of just being a niche fire service book.
And so while I, I certainly don't have a ton of sales uh, I have been very encouraged by the amount of people outside of the fire service that are interested in this message, and it's been warming to hear that.
Anjel: Warming. I love
Mark: that.
Anjel: warming to hear that. Well, beautiful. So, you know, I think Leading, Leading Through the Heat is such a powerful title, first of all, and the, the compression of intensity of the fire service i- is so much [00:19:00] more than any normal, quote-unquote, business type management that you, I'm sure, have quite a lot to offer to anybody in those fields.
So I wanna talk now about, uh, learning all the time. So what are you learning now that you're retired from the fire service, and you've become an author, and you're selling books, congratulations and you're out here on podcasts? What are you learning now about yourself, about your own leadership, and about some of these principles that you teach in the book?
Mark: Nobody's gonna put the work in for you. You're gonna have to, you're gonna have to do it yourself. Uh, maybe a few celebrity authors at Random House will have a team of PR people that just book them on the Today Show and go do Morning America, and then you just do a junket where all these interviewers come through.
Uh, that's, that's a very, very exclusive world. The majority of indie [00:20:00] authors uh, you're grinding on your own, and if you're not willing to put the work in, don't expect any sales. And the work is gonna be you getting in your car and driving to book events, and getting in your car and going and doing in-person podcasts, and logging into your computer and doing as many podcasts a week as you could do, and cold-calling radio stations, and posting on social media over and over, uh, topics about you and other authors, and sharing with other authors, and sharing with other people in your, in, in, in your topic.
And it's, it's just a, a, a lot of just engagement. And if you're not willing to put that work in, don't be disappointed, uh, if you don't sell a lot of books, 'cause, uh, it's not the publisher's job to do your marketing for you.
Anjel: Mm-hmm. Yeah. A lot of people have that fantasy.
Mark: Yes.
Anjel: I had that fantasy when I wrote my first book too.
I was like, "Oh." As soon as the book came out, I was, you know, imagining I was gonna be on Oprah, but that did not happen. Yeah. I created my own Oprah [00:21:00] show.
Mark: Excellent.
Anjel: Right. Okay. So, we talked a lot about failure. I'd love to hear you share maybe one of the lessons on failure from the book, like a little bit of the story behind the failure, and, um, what it taught you.
Mark: Oh, yeah. Um, I, I lead the book with three anecdotes of just a boss that was struggling. And I know one of them... Uh, this, this one's resonated a lot in business. Uh, we got tasked with setting up a little, uh, computer form with some scheduling, and we have different types of days off that could be bid for in the fire service.
There's extra leave days, there's straight-up vacation days, and, The battalion chief delegates our station to do it, and my station's captain, uh, tells the lieutenant to handle it. The lieutenant says, "Hey, I want you to handle it." Not a problem. I was right in the middle of [00:22:00] seniority. I'm happy to be given this project.
I want that responsibility. And this is before Google Docs, and so we've got this, this shared computer file with this little calendar, and all of a sudden, three people all put in for the same timeframe off, and, and then it all gets approved, and then we gotta th-three days later tell two of them, "Hey, your, your day's off canceled.
The form got messed up." And then it becomes this big fiasco, and then these people are complaining. And then I figured out, oh, they're saving separate copies of this form. They're not uploading it to the shared directory. I figured out the problem. Isn't this great that we s- found what the problem is?
We've devised a solution. Isn't this good news? Well, apparently to the chief officer, it wasn't good news at all. He was furious that the mistake ever happened in the first place, and so he calls up the lieutenant and starts chewing him out. And r- I'm sitting right there in the room, and the lieutenant says, "Yeah, yeah, just a minute.
I'll-- Let me get him for you," and he hands the phone to me. [00:23:00] And I could hear the chief yelling through the phone before the phone even gets to my ear. And all I hear is, "Nah, huh. Yes, sir. Sir, I'm so sorry, sir. It won't happen again, sir." And then I looked at the lieutenant and I said, "Why aren't you taking this phone call?"
And he says, "Well, it's your mistake." I said, "I-- You were delegated with this. I don't care if I messed up. You handle this call. That's the chain of command. You don't let him yell at me." And I didn't need to process this over the course of days to weeks. I knew right there in the moment-
Ad: Mm-hmm ...
Mark: if I'm ever lucky enough to be a lieutenant, I will never let the chief yell at my crew.
Mm-hmm. The chief will yell at me, and if warranted, you know, we'll, we'll do some training, and I'll handle it. And if it's just noise, then I'll just take it. "Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir." But I would never let that spill down to the crew. The men and women that are working really hard on the front lines, they don't need to be barked at by a chief officer.
I'll take it. I got a, I got a big [00:24:00] badge. I g- It's, it's my shield, and my job is to protect them with it. And so I knew- Mm-hmm ... right in the moment, this is the type of boss I wanna be, and that's the type of boss I don't want to be.
Anjel: I love this story, and you know what I also love is that- The first thought in your mind was if somebody made the mistake below you, you'll do some training.
Mark: Yeah.
Anjel: Right? All the time. You'll do some training instead of traumatizing these people. Yes. You know what I mean? Like-
Mark: Right ...
Anjel: how, how is traumatizing these people actually going to make anything better? Mm-hmm. Do we need training? Yeah, we're gonna learn from it. I love it. All the
Mark: time.
Anjel: Yeah. That's beautiful.
Really beautiful. All right. Well, now we've talked a lot about failure. Tell me about a success in the book that you would like to share, or a success- Oh ... with the book- Mm-hmm ... that you've already experienced since it came out.
Mark: Yeah. Actually, um, I had used one of the anecdotes from the first chapter of just an officer being [00:25:00] indecisive, and I was new as a lieutenant and in the fire service.
We, um, you know, like, if you're in Detroit, New York, Chicago, Philly, Houston, uh, you're gonna have 1,000 people on the job, and you might know 100 of them just because th- it's that big of a city. So when you get promoted, uh, you might get transferred to the other side of town and work with a totally different crew of people whom you've never met.
In a suburban department, even though Dearborn is one of the largest departments in Michigan, we still are a suburb, and we have 150 firefighter paramedics. Uh, but everybody knows everybody. There's three shifts, and we're, we're 26 square miles, and we got five fire s- no, we're about 30 square miles 'cause we merged with another city.
So, uh, we got five stations, but everybody knows everybody. So when you get promoted to lieutenant, they've at least known you for all those years. So I, I, I was Mark for, for 15 years. I get [00:26:00] promoted to lieutenant, and it's just human nature that when people would see me in passing, they would say, "Oh, hey, Mark," rather than call me by my rank.
And I didn't take any offense to it. It's just human nature of just I'm, I'm getting into this. And and then I, I got maybe two months into being a lieutenant, and we got a fire, and it didn't get called in as a fire. It got upgraded to a fire as we're halfway there. So when we get there, we now know it's gonna be a fire, but the rest of the cavalry is minutes behind me.
And so the chief, who normally would lay out a strategic plan and give us some tactics, is gonna be minutes behind me, so all of that's gonna be on me. And then I just picked a strategy. I put the ambulance and the pr- people in the firetruck with me in some spots. We, uh, got some people evacuated from the house.
We got this part of the fire at least sorta knocked down. We got a water supply. Uh, I transferred command over the radio to the chief, told him where I'm gonna be in the house attacking the fire so then the second level of [00:27:00] command could take over w- uh, for me when they get there. Uh, the support staff knew what their jobs were gonna be before they got there.
And not that I'm awesome or anything, but just by, by the luck of everything, the decision I made actually worked the first time around, and that doesn't always happen in a fire. A lot of times you make a decision, and 20 minutes later it changes, and you gotta do something different. This one really worked.
And with everybody just going to work, knowing their roles I noticed the next day it was the last time anybody ever used my first name.
Anjel: Oh.
Mark: I was called lieutenant for the, or captain, the rest of my career, including today. I'm ridden or retired for a couple of months, and they still call me captain.
Anjel: Congratulations. What a beautiful story. Thank you so much for being with me today, Mark. You're a really- This was
Mark: so much fun. Wow.
Anjel: Yeah. You're really special. All right. Well, listeners, we love feedback. Please let us know what you think of the show by joining our community, sharing your takeaways, asking questions, or submitting guest suggestions.
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