You Are Not a Team Because You Call Yourself One
Most fire service leaders are expected to build strong teams without ever being taught how. Forging Your Team gives you a practical, fire-service-tested framework for turning individuals from a crew into a true team.
A Practical System for Building Your Team
Forging Your Team challenges legacy views of team development and replaces them with a practical system leaders can apply in the firehouse and other high-stakes environments.
Dr. Johnny Torgeson introduces the Group-to-Crew-to-Team continuum, Six Phases of Team Development, Four-Step Team Forging Process, Sphere of Leadership Influence, and Relational Systems Leadership.
Together, these frameworks help leaders diagnose the team they actually have, understand why it is stuck, and choose the leadership response that will move it forward.
What You Will Learn
Novel Concepts
· Distinguish a group, a crew, and a true team—and stop using the labels interchangeably.
· Recognize the Six Phases of Team Development and the leadership risks inside each phase.
· Apply Heating, Shaping, Cooling, and Polishing at the right time.
· Identify informal leaders and understand how influence shapes culture.
· Build trust, ownership, identity, and peer accountability through relational systems.
· Choose leadership actions based on the team’s condition instead of relying on rank, motivation, or discipline alone.
Read the Framework, Then Bring it to Life
Use the book as your field guide or bring Forging Your Team to your department as an interactive workshop built around your organization’s actual challenges.
Forging Your Team
You Are Not a Team Because You Call Yourself One
Most fire service leaders are expected to build strong teams without ever being taught how. Forging Your Team gives you a practical, fire-service-tested framework for turning individuals into a true team.