The Performance Gap Costing Fire Departments Their Best People

A tactical briefing with Robert Avsec, Operations Chief of the Fire Service Psychology Association

46% of firefighters report their own organization as their biggest operational stressor. Not the calls. Not the trauma. Their own department.

That number comes from the annual FireRescue1.com survey and it represents a massive performance leak that most fire chiefs don’t see until their best people walk out the door.

Okaya CEO Gregory Menvielle sat down with  Retired Battalion Chief Robert Avsec who had 26+ years at Chesterfield Fire and EMS, now Operations Chief at the  Fire Service Psychology Association to understand what high-performing departments are doing differently. This isn’t about mental health programs. It’s about operational readiness, decision-making under pressure, and keeping your best operators in the fight.

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The Real Barrier to Peak Performance

Menvielle: When a firefighter’s performance starts declining—missing details, slower decision-making, disengagement—what’s actually stopping them from getting back to baseline?

Avsec: Everyone talks about stigma, but that’s actually number two. The biggest barrier is the lack of culturally competent clinicians. Here’s what happens: a firefighter finally decides to get help, and they spend the first two sessions trying to explain to the therapist what they actually do. I’ve seen too many cases where the therapist ends up in tears. That’s not just a bad session—that’s a performance tool that doesn’t work.

Think about it this way: you wouldn’t send your people to a mechanic who’s never seen a fire truck. But that’s exactly what happens with most employee assistance programs. The clinician doesn’t understand the stressors, doesn’t know how fire stations operate, doesn’t get why living and working in the same place for 24 hours creates unique pressure points.

People lump us together with law enforcement or the military, but we’re different animals. Police and military have the legal authority to take life. Firefighters swear an oath to protect life at all costs. Law enforcement officers are trained from day one to be a single resource—like the old Texas Ranger motto, “one riot, one ranger.”

Firefighters are taught from day one how to operate as a team. You don’t do anything on the fire ground alone. Your life depends on your team. When one person’s performance degrades, it affects the entire unit’s operational effectiveness.

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What Elite Departments Do Differently

Menvielle: If you're a fire chief and you want to reduce that 46% organizational stress number—what’s the highest-leverage move?

Avsec: Start seeing a therapist yourself. And then tell your people you’re seeing a therapist.

I know how that sounds, but hear me out. There’s not a more pressure-packed job than fire chief today. You’re responsible for operations, budgets, regulations, legislation—all while being one cog in the local government wheel. Each crew operates as a tight-knit family, but that bond doesn’t always extend up to your office.

Why wouldn’t you have someone helping you maintain your operational edge? That’s what this is—preventive maintenance for your most important asset.

When your people see that the boss treats this like equipment maintenance or physical fitness, it changes everything. Atlanta Fire Chief Rod Smith opened the 2023 FSPA conference with: “I see a therapist.” He explained that everyone in his department knows this, that he does it to maintain his performance, and that he highly encourages them to do the same.

That’s leadership modeling operational readiness.

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The Tom Brady Principle: Slowing Down the Game

Menvielle: Most people only think about psychology as crisis intervention after something goes wrong. What’s the performance application before things break down?

Avsec: There are four domains of psychology: assessment, intervention, research, and operational psychology. Everyone focuses on intervention—that’s reactive, after-the-fact.

But operational psychology is performance coaching for high-stakes decision-making. Fire officers and firefighters make split-second decisions with limited information while conditions are changing. One of my FSPA colleagues in Canada, James Rychard, writes extensively about training firefighters to make better decisions while under stress.

I use Tom Brady as an example. A reporter once asked what a sports psychologist does for the greatest quarterback of all time. Brady said the psychologist doesn’t teach him to throw a football, but helps him understand what’s going on between his ears. “The biggest thing is he’s helped me slow the game down so I can see all the open receivers, see the cornerback waiting to make that interception. I still only have five seconds in the pocket, but I make the best use of those five seconds.”

That’s what we’re talking about for firefighters. Not teaching you to put out fires—you already know that. It’s helping you slow the game down to make optimal use of your limited time and information. That’s the difference between good and elite performance under pressure.

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Why Current Protocols Leave Performance on the Table

Menvielle: A lot of departments have Critical Incident Stress Management protocols. What’s the gap?

Avsec: CISM is based on getting everyone together after an event to talk about it. That’s based on Freudian theory that it’s cathartic to talk it out. That might work one-on-one, but in a group setting, if I reveal how something is really affecting me, it could change how my team sees me. That’s a performance risk no one wants to take.

Here’s what elite teams are doing instead: Trauma Risk Management (TRiM). It was developed by the British Royal Marines and is now used by all U.S. military services, the Veterans Administration, and law enforcement across the UK. We’ve got a research project running right now with San Francisco Fire Department and UC Irvine.

The principle is simple and data-driven: if 10 people are exposed to the same traumatic event, after 30 days, eight will have successfully resolved it naturally. After 60 days, typically one more recovers. That means you only have one or two people who actually need additional support.

Instead of treating all 10 like they’re broken, TRiM identifies the one or two who need help. Here’s the protocol:
96 hours after an event, peer support meets individually with each person using a standardized checklist.
That’s your baseline.
Check again at 30 days.
If they’re good, you’re done—no unnecessary intervention.
If issues persist, check at 60 days.
Anyone still struggling gets professional support.

It’s targeted, efficient, and doesn’t waste resources on people who are processing normally.

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The Peer Support Liability

Menvielle: Most departments have peer support teams. What are they missing?

Avsec: Too many departments form a peer support team, check the box, and move on. Insufficient training, no continuing education, minimal clinical oversight.

Here’s my recommendation: turn over your entire peer support team every five years through staggered terms. If you're doing peer support, you're being exposed to the same traumatic calls as everyone else. Why would we expect someone to handle this for 10–12 years without burning out? That’s how you lose good people.

Peer supporters aren’t clinicians. Their job is to recognize when someone needs professional help and make the referral. Your protocol should include this: if you get more than two calls from the same person, they need a referral. They’ve gone beyond peer support scope.

Without proper boundaries and rotation, your peer support program becomes a performance liability instead of an asset.

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Making It Measurable: The Physical Fitness Playbook

Menvielle: How do you justify the investment and measure whether it’s working?

Avsec: Go back and read your own history. What were your challenges with physical health, and how did you overcome them?

In the mid-to-late 1990s, the fire service had too much lung disease, heart disease, obesity. The IAFC and IAFF came together to develop the Joint Management Labor Initiative for Wellness and Fitness: exercise equipment in stations, annual health assessments, objective data tracking.

If you’ve been successful with physical health programs, use those same justification methods for performance optimization.

When we instituted yearly health assessments at Chesterfield Fire and EMS, the occupational health clinic was allowed to share aggregate trends with the department—no personal information, but data like how many people had cardiac issues identified, how many needed stress tests, what the results were. Objective data we could track year over year.

You can do the same thing with performance readiness. One approach is Alison Feinning’s “Neck Up Check Up” program—an annual baseline assessment that tracks trends and improvements over time.

Success might mean identifying that a firefighter doesn’t need therapy—they need to see a sleep doctor. Or someone with an autistic child at home needs family support so their cognitive capacity isn’t already depleted when they show up for shift. When you do good assessments, you identify what people actually need to maintain peak performance.

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The Hidden Performance Tax

Menvielle: Give me a concrete example of how personal issues affect operational readiness.

Avsec: You’ve got a firefighter with an autistic child who’s having difficulty. That firefighter is having difficulty. They show up to work and their defenses are already reduced. They’ve already expended tremendous mental capital at home.

You don’t get to stop at the emotional ATM on the way to work and withdraw another couple hundred dollars worth of cognitive capacity. They’re showing up at 60% capacity, and if you don’t know that, you might put them in a position that requires 100%.

If the chief or battalion chief had visibility into where everyone was at, they could adjust staffing. They could make tactical decisions based on actual operational readiness, not just who’s on the roster.

That’s the difference between managing headcount and managing actual capability.

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What’s Next

The fire service successfully transformed its approach to physical health over the past three decades. The same systematic approach works for operational performance: leadership modeling, culturally competent resources, proactive protocols, proper training, and measurable outcomes.

As Avsec puts it: “Maintaining your mental health is just as important as maintaining your physical health. They’re two sides of the same coin—and that coin is you.”

New technologies are changing what’s possible.
Okaya is an AI-powered platform designed for high-stakes professions—providing firefighters and their leaders with operational readiness assessments and performance insights. It’s not therapy and doesn’t replace clinicians or peer supporters. It’s an early warning system and a force multiplier: helping firefighters assess their own readiness, recognize when they need support, and connect with the right resources.

For department leaders, Okaya provides aggregate visibility into team readiness—the same way physical fitness tracking showed cardiac risk trends. Baseline data. Progress tracking. Performance optimization at scale.

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Assess your operational readiness.
Okaya is now available for individual use—no department account needed.

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