When the Fire Turns: Leading Before You Need To

Imagine you are standing on a steep slope in Montana, 1949. You are one of fifteen elite smokejumpers parachuted into a remote canyon to fight what looked like a routine wildfire.

Within an hour, the wind shifts.

The fire has crossed the gulch and is moving uphill toward you at a speed no human can outrun. Your foreman, Wag Dodge, does something you’ve never seen. He stops running. He strikes a match. He lights the grass at his own feet and lies down inside the burned circle, gesturing for you to join him while the main fire passes over.

What do you do?

In that split second, you have to make a decision. 
Do you trust the man and his match, or do you run for your life?

           

Most of his crew kept running. Thirteen of them didn't make it out.

I hadn't heard of Mann Gulch until Doug Crandall and Tom Hustead M.D. ad told me about it. Doug and Tom have spent their careers, military and civilian, in the rooms where leadership gets tested. They teach Mann Gulch because it sits at the heart of what The Referent Group up believes about leading: That what you've built with the people around you, in the small, daily moments long before any pressure hits, is what determines whether they follow you when the conditions turn. Not your title. Not your technical answer. The trust you've already laid down.

In late May, just weeks before our June 3 and 4 conferences in Bellevue, I'm walking that ground in Montana with Doug, Tom, and the rest of the team. Some leadership work you can read about. Some you have to stand on.

The Fatal Gap Between Strategy and Trust

Wag Dodge had the perfect technical solution.

He read the fire correctly. He invented a tool nobody had seen before. He saved his own life with it.

And his crew still ran.

The gap that killed his men wasn't a strategy gap. It was a trust gap. In a crisis, people don't follow what is right. They follow what is clear, and what is trusted, and what the relationship has already prepared them to follow.

The leaders I work with aren't literally fighting fires. Their fire is something else.

A diagnosis. A loss. A child in crisis. A marriage that's been quietly cracking under work that never stops.

Or it's the office version. A reorg. A board losing patience. A trusted leader walking out the door at exactly the wrong time. A team that fractures under pressure no one saw coming.

In any of those moments, the people you lead don't decide whether to follow you based on the plan you've written. They decide based on what you've already built with them. Quietly. Daily. In a thousand moments that didn't feel important at the time.

Are You Building or Diminishing?

This is the heartbeat of Doug Crandall's all's upcoming book, Building or Diminishing.

Every interaction is either building or diminishing the people we lead. There is almost no neutral ground.

Not most of the time. Every interaction. Every email. Every meeting. Every glance across the room. Every silence that lasted a beat too long.

Doug maps four leadership instincts onto a simple grid of two axes: how high you set the bar, and whether your communication makes the person across from you feel bigger or smaller.

The Builder. High expectations paired with communication that makes people feel more confident, capable, and valued. People walk away knowing exactly what's expected, and feeling more capable of meeting it. This is where excellence and trust live together. The destination.

You've probably worked for a Builder at some point. You remember exactly how it felt.

The Driver. High expectations delivered with pressure that wears people out. The standard is clear. The cost is high. Drivers can carry a team through a mission. Only Builders sustain a culture.

You've probably been a Driver this week. Most high-performers have.

The Cheerleader. Warmth without challenge. People feel seen, but quietly underdeveloped. They like working for you. They aren't growing under you.

People enjoy Cheerleaders. They rarely become their best under them.

The Belittler. Low expectations and communication that diminish. Erodes trust and initiative every time. The team learns, fast, that bringing their best is risky.

Nobody thinks they're this leader. Some of them are wrong.

Most of us have lived in all four boxes at different moments.

The work isn't to declare yourself one type and stop. It's to keep coming back to one quiet question:

Am I building or diminishing this person?

Not as a test. As a habit. Until eventually, it becomes who you are.

The Referent Group up doesn't believe in leadership experts. They believe each of us is the expert on our own leadership. How you build the capacity to be a Builder is as individual as you are. The question stays the same. The way each leader answers it does not.

A Mission Inside the Message

Doug isn't just writing about Builders. He's structuring the book itself as a building act.

Every dollar of net proceeds from Building or Diminishing will go to Tunnel to Towers, which builds mortgage-free homes for the families of fallen first responders and catastrophically injured service members. The foreword was written by a longtime friend of Doug's who is now an executive at the foundation.

Notice what Doug didn't do. He didn't write a book about Builders and then market it like a Driver. He didn't perform humility. He didn't bolt a charity tie-in onto the cover to help it sell.

He asked the question his book is built around. Am I building or diminishing? And he let the answer shape the entire container.

That's what walking the walk looks like when nobody's watching.

Why I Joined This Team

Doug and Tom kept doing the daily work of building people up long after the credentials would have let them stop. That's why I joined them.

In late May, I'm walking the ground at Mann Gulch with this team, before we gather in Bellevue for our 2026 Leadership Conference on June 3 and 4. The conference is small by design. Practitioner-led, interactive, and built around the work, not the theory.

If the Mann Gulch question haunts you a little, whether the people you lead would follow you when conditions stop cooperating, that's the room we're building. Bring the leader you've been thinking about. Come be in it.

The next time someone fixes a small thing for you and never mentions it again, pay attention. You may be standing next to a Builder.

𝐉𝐨𝐢𝐧 𝐮𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐁𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐯𝐮𝐞

▸ Dates: June 3 and 4, 2026 ▸ Location: Glendale Country Club, Bellevue, WA ▸ Focus: Core values, journey lines, and what it takes to build excellence on a team

🔗 Register: https://www.thereferentgroup.com/conferences

Doug joins me live on The Healthy Leader Expert Forum on May 14 at 11:00 a.m. ET. We'll go deep on Mann Gulch, the book, and the question before the conference. Register here: https://traci-fisher.mykajabi.com/expertforum

#TheHealthyLeader #TheReferentGroup #BuildingOrDiminishing #LeadershipMatters #ExecutiveLeadership #TunnelToTowers

Traci Fisher is the founder of The Healthy Leader Group, a leadership development company committed to building healthy cultures by starting with healthy individuals. A West Point graduate and former Army helicopter pilot, Traci works with high-performing leaders and organizations to foster sustainable success, without sacrificing wellbeing. Through coaching, teaching, and community, The Healthy Leader Group helps leaders reconnect with their values, build inner confidence, and lead in a way that’s both effective and deeply human. 

Learn more: www.thehealthyleadergroup.com