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Fire Chief Eric Saylors
Introduction
Hey, everybody. We talked a lot about leadership being under pressure at times, and psychologists tell us that we inevitably have an alter ego that shows up when we are under pressure. But what if your whole job was fundamentally under pressure? My guest today is a fire chief that’s been in that hot seat, no pun intended, his whole career. He’s going to talk to us about how you shape your leadership style and effectiveness for being your best self, when you really do need to show up when the stakes are high. His name is Eric Saylors. Eric, welcome to the show.
Thank you. It’s good to be here. I’m excited.
Yeah. Share with the folks a little bit of your backstory and your career journey at this point.
Eric’s Path Into the Fire Service
Well, I’ve been in the fire Service for about 32 years now. I came out of college with a degree in finance and got a job with a small fire department, and I fell in love with it.
I just fell in love with the idea of helping people. I had a few critical calls in the beginning of my career where the outcome or the survivability of the patient really relied on whether I was effective or not in the few tasks that I was doing. And then that just hooked me. So as I worked my way through my career, I’ve climbed through all the ranks, and those have always come with scars and learning lessons that have set me back on my heels, humbled me quite a bit.
And while that was happening, I was always pursuing additional education. One of the things I was asking is, why am I failing at this? How can I do better? What other people know about this domain? What tools can I pull from? So through that process, I wound up with a master’s degree from the Naval Postgraduate School and Security Studies. I have a doctorate from the University of Southern California, in leadership and organizational change. All of this is kind of revolved around one of the things I hate to do, which is go to funerals.
And I say that with the gravity that it’s meant to be said. I really do not like burying friends, and I don’t like having events that go sideways that kill firefighters, so that education is a backstop for me to try and figure out what we can do better, what we need to learn about our changing environment, what tools are available to us now so that when we are faced with these massive, catastrophic problems that we didn’t choose, they just showed up on our doorstep one day.
That’s the unfortunate part of the fire service — in crises they’re usually not part of your planning process. What tools do we have to prevent that loss of life, those failures in those situations?
When the Alarm Goes Off, Training Only Gets You So Far
It presents to me an interesting question. And that is, again, in the general frame of leadership we often talk about what leaders can do in a moment of crisis. And for most business leaders, a true crisis of a big scale, and literally where people’s lives may be at risk, is honestly few and far between, especially in the peril of life kind of equation.
But for folks in your profession, I mean, the bell can go off at any time, and that’s the whole point of being there. So I know you train, you work with the teams to develop skills for certain situations. But I can only imagine that when a specific alarm goes off, the situation you train for may not be the exact fit for what you’ve got to do.
Now, very, very rarely is it what you expect to do. However, there are significant parallels between what happens in my leadership and what happens in the private sector for leadership, and it didn’t dawn on me until a few years ago. I saw a quote from Ginsberg, who wrote a ton of books about strategic planning. And he threw this quote out there that 78% of a leader’s job is talking. I remember seeing this as a young tactician, because I was a doer. I was a very effective doer. And when I saw it, I said, well, that’s weird.
The 78% Rule: Why Leadership Is Mostly Communication
That’s not what I want my leaders to do. But he was right. I was wrong at the time, because it is all about communication. And that gets pulled to the surface over and over again, study by study. If you’re going to ask what does a leader really do effectively, it is communicate. You communicate up to the people that you ultimately work for, because whether you’re the CEO, you’re working for a board; whether you’re a fire chief, you’re working for elected officials. You have to constantly tell your story.
You have to constantly be able to pull your values together and explain where we came from, where we’re at, and where we’re going. You have to constantly communicate down to the people that are coming onto the job, and communicate the values of what we are here to do — why we do this — so that they can carry that forward. You want them to be able to make value-based decisions without you standing by their side. And that takes you communicating the story and the values of the agency.
So as I’ve learned that and worked my way through this, I do coaching for a leadership academy in this area, and I’m never coaching other firefighters or fire chiefs — I’m always coaching civilians. The parallels are still there: if you’re in charge of something, ultimately communication becomes one of your strongest skills. Unfortunately, it’s not a skill that we’re frequently taught, so sometimes we stumble through it. We like to lay out, well, here’s all the skills and knowledge you’re going to have to do to do this job. Very rarely does somebody get a bonanza fide class in effective communication.
So I’ll relay that with a story, as it slapped me in the face. When I was at USC, I had a class on economics, and the economics professor was phenomenal, but it was co-taught with a professional actress, and that really caught me off guard. I’m classically a quant — I like numbers — but here’s this economics class, cool professor, and she’s a professional actress. Well, she was there to critique our ability to tell our story when our studies were done.
A Class Co-Taught by a Professional Actress
So they had recognized that many doctoral students and many postdocs had a challenge with communicating the findings of their story. Right — it’s kind of the failure of modern day science. They find the answer, but boy, they sure as heck can’t explain it well. So that became the high point of the class. It wasn’t actually the economics part of it — the high point of the class was to get critiqued by the professional actress that would watch our presentations.
She would catch our tone, she’d catch our body language, she would catch the words that we chose. She would back us up and say, do that again, you did not effectively tell that story. And it was a shell shock to me and most of the other doctoral candidates, as we’re getting pulled apart in front of the rest of our classmates. But it was the first time that I had ever really encountered actual professional training on communication and how to work your way through that process, and that is something that many leaders learn the hard way, if they learn it at all.
But boy, what a head start, if you actually understand what your task is.
Clarity, Connection, and Buy-In
Well, and if I may paraphrase and add a thought to that — I think I know for a lot of my clients, when they say I want to work on my communication, what they’re ultimately starting with is how do I package my material better to get it across. But what they’re missing is the real goal of that communication is to deliver clarity of the message so that people understand it and get it, and connection so that they are willing to weigh in and buy in, to move forward. Whether they agree with it or not, they’re there — they’re going to buy in and go forward in a more unified way. And so I’ve always said that yes, I agree that communication is a leadership skill that is not taught formally. It’s seldom focused on in leadership development, other than people feel the tug, or they’ve been told they don’t communicate well. And so trying to figure out what you’re doing is really important.
And I would imagine that the clarity part of it — when in your case, when you’re out on that accident scene or event scene, and it’s fundamental chaos by the casual observer — you’ve got to be very clear in your direction to the troops on the ground and what you’re going to have them do and how you’re going to deploy your resources. And it’s got to be rapid communication. But it’s got to be clear at the same time.
Authenticity Starts With You
It does. And the communication has to start with you. It has to be authentic. So many people will say, well, I need to learn how to communicate better. They’re frequently telling a story that they don’t themselves believe in. That’s the challenge, right? Because they’re saying, hey, tell me how to package this better. Well, your authenticity is falling apart, and your people that are following you are great BS readers. They’re not going to buy in. So a lot of times it has to start with you. You’ve got to have your values aligned with what the agency is doing.
Then it becomes easier for you to dig out what you really want to say, because reading a script doesn’t always work. Especially in my career, where it’s time compression — I don’t have time frequently to study a script. I have to be able to say what I need to say, and it has to come from authenticity and reality.
A Damned-If-You-Do Decision in 2013
So I remember this was about 2013. I was stuck in a critical position. I had to make a decision that was damned if you do, damned if you don’t, because I was getting screwed one way or another — it’s just the position I found myself in. And I remember taking this quick brief and thinking about it: what do I care about? What is most important to me? Because no matter which path I’m going on this, I’m in trouble. And it came down to, okay, the thing that I care most about is the victim — I’ll call it patient care. The victim, that is number one, that is why we are here.
Every decision we make is going to be revolved around that. I cannot let that get clouded, I can’t muddle that — that is decision number one. The next thing I care about is the health and welfare of the firefighter, which means I want them to go home. I want them to survive this event. Now, every decision is going to be based off of those. And when I make this damned-if-I-do, damned-if-I-don’t decision, I’m going to be able to stand in front of my boss, or the subject matter expert, or the court of law, and I’m going to say yes, because these were the two things that I stood on for those values.
Now I say it starts with you, because that anchoring in 2013 allowed me to navigate more and more difficult situations as time moved on, whether it was discussions about life-and-death decisions on scene, or budget cuts. It was always back to, okay, this is going to be based on the victim — what is best for the person that dialed 911 — and now, what is best for the firefighter. That anchoring turned my story into not only effective and clarity, but it also gave me authenticity, because anybody that’s ever stood in front of me, or worked with me, or been around me, knows that that is real.
This is why we do this. This is why I’m here. Now, a lot of leaders have a hard time finding that — they’ll confuse themselves sometimes. They’ll have the voices in their head that will clutter their thinking, and they’ll go down some weird rabbit holes, and that falls apart on them. But boy, it starts with you. And frequently, if I’m coaching leaders, I will ask them: go back and bring me the top three things that you stand for. Right, and let’s build off of that. Maybe you haven’t figured it out for yourself — okay, well, I need you to go think about it, because that is really going to help you when you have time compression.
The OODA Loop: Deciding With Zero Time
My job is all about time compression. So to your point, when the bells ring and I’m driving code three to a large fire that is out of control, I have zero time. I have to make a decision with limited information. I do not get all the answers given to me, but I have to make a decision, because pausing is a recipe for disaster. I always have limited resources — there’s never enough there that I want in time. So it’s all opportunity cost. Every decision I make is going to be something I couldn’t do.
And I am stuck in a rapid-moving OODA loop — that’s an acronym for those who don’t have a military background or a fire background. It’s a decision loop that was borrowed from the Air Force and a combat pilot. It’s about Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It’s a decision process, it’s just a framework to think about how we make decisions. We observe something, we orient, or we figure out what we’re looking at, we decide, and we act. And every time I’m in the seat of command, I am stuck in this OODA loop that just goes faster and faster and faster and faster, and I have to decide and act and start over again.
I don’t ever get the luxury of pausing, which means I’ve got to start from a good foundation. All right, what is most important right now? We’re going to save the victims.
Have You Ever Written Down What You Believe?
I am so glad you shared that, because that basic scenario that you’ve described about finding that anchor thought in your entire being as a leader is the very thing that I probably do the most work on with my clients. In fact, my latest book, “It’s Above Me on My Shoulder, Here Steady,” is a synopsis of over 1,000 interviews and about eight years of coaching work. And when I ask leaders — I typically start with a new client, I’ll ask them the question: have you ever written down what you believe in as a leader? Can you define your framework of where you’re coming from as a leader? And 99 out of 100 say no, I’ve never done that. You know, one or two will every now and then say, yeah, we had a class and we did that, and I’ll say, great, can you name them? Well, no, I’m going to go find my notebook. And it’s like, no, we need to bring this up, and we need to have that awareness of those values and principles every day.
And as you start to work — what I do with people, when we start defining that, is I give them an assignment to self-grade every day. Take 5 or 10 minutes at the end of the day and grade yourself on how you did with exerting or asserting those values. And in every moment you’ve got a chance to demonstrate that authenticity. Do you just get busy, or do you intentionally show up with those values? And it’s a real kind of moment for most people when they really lean into that idea and establish that hard center.
When Firefighters Violate Policy to Save a Patient
And if you’re confused, everyone around you is confused as well. That’s the thing that you miss — if you’re not clear, they’re unclear. Your goal is to be very clear, so that they can make decisions without you. Because I don’t want to make every decision, I don’t want everything to come through me. I want empowered execution. I want to have trust — I trust you. I want to have transparency, you know everything I know. I want to have a common mission — this is the mission of this organization. Now I want you to make decisions aligned on that. But if I’m confused about it, they’re going to be confused about it too.
So I’ll give you an example. When you are clear about what you care about and what the mission is, people below you should be able to make decisions aligned with that. And I had a scenario — this was about 2020, when I was an executive chief — and I had some firefighters break massive policies at the local and state level, violated some huge policies. Now here’s the interesting thing: I got the phone call, early in the morning, from one of my chiefs that works for me.
And I’m seven layers of rank above this event, right? But that’s how it works — it starts trickling its way up, like, oh my gosh, we better call, we better call — gets to me. And I took a breath. I said, okay, I understand, let me talk to the firefighters. I want to hear their side of the story before we make any assumptions. Get them on the phone. And this is what I hear from a person that’s maybe met me once — I’m pretty far up, this firefighter’s met me maybe once — and he says, chief, we know that we violated these policies and these state laws. But we also remembered what you said. You said that you care about patient care. That was your number one thing. And we were faced with a scenario where no one would take care of this patient, and we were the only ones that could. And the only way we could take care of this patient was by violating these policies.
And we actually looked them up to understand what we were doing before we took our actions. And we took our actions for the patient. And the outcome of the patient was okay. And we’re willing — we are willing to take whatever consequences there are. But we know that the patient was okay. I said, you know what, thank you very much. Hung up the phone, got on the phone with the state regulator, and said, I got this, I got their back, this is what happened. It wasn’t a failure of my firefighters. It was a failure of the system. It was a failure of the policies written outside of the context of what they were faced with. And they did exactly what I expected them to do.
Now, that was me being very clear, and that message being handed down. And there I was, so proud at that moment of those firefighters, to know exactly what their mission was and to recognize that all policies are written correctly — they’re frequently imagined by some bureaucrat, written for a context, and you never want to violate your mission because of something somebody wrote down. And they did the right thing. And the state regulator was on my side immediately when I told the story and mapped it out. He apologized to me, said, I’m very sorry your firefighters were put in that position, we just hadn’t foreseen that as being a scenario they would be stuck in. And boom, we’re moving forward.
But that was effective clarity. And you say it so well when you say you’ll get your people that you’re coaching to go write it down, and then they’ll say, well, I wrote it down at some point, I forgot about it. Well, if you forgot about it, then you really didn’t think about it, right? And Simon Sinek says start with the why. Well, we’re all kind of saying the same things, but at some point you’ve got to dig in and figure out, what in the heck are you doing here? Why? Why did you show up to work today? What’s important to you? And if you really found it, you’re going to remember it.
Build Your Own List — Don’t Borrow Someone Else’s
Well, and I developed that concept early in my coaching journey, because when I decided to turn my attention to being a coach for other leaders, I realized that there are thousands of books out there that talk about leadership, and most all of them have some notion of a list of attributes or skills that a good leader is supposed to have. And I was reading through a lot of the popular ones, and I said, wait a minute — number one, a lot of this vocabulary overlaps, it’s interchangeable, it’s the same basic stuff. But wait a minute, we are all a little bit different. And how do you be your authentic self? You can’t take somebody else’s full list and execute on it, because some part of that is not going to be real. So that’s when I said, ding, ding, ding — I need to challenge people to build their own list. And yes, you can read some books and get some ideas and say, yes, I believe that could be me, that’s what I feel, it resonates with me, it works for me. I’ve seen it in other leaders, I admired them for it. Well, if all those connections are already happening, guess what — that too may be an attribute or a principle that you want to grab on to for yourself. But now you’ve got to do the work — I hate this phrase in the church world — to name it and claim it.
But yeah.
But that’s it. You have to identify what those things are, just as you did. You identified those two chief principles: patient care and firefighter care. And when you center everything else around that, you’ve got a very solid launchpad to do everything else.
Anchors, Accountability, and Word Salad Mission Statements
Yeah. And I will be — when you’re in the seat of command, you’re faced with an unsolvable problem that is moving faster than anything that you have, and you know that you’re going to be held accountable for everything that goes wrong, whether it had anything to do with you or not. You also know that you have to make decisions very quickly, and all of that has to be anchored into something, so that when you do get called before the media, or you get called before the court of law, you can explain what the heck you were doing and why. The outcomes — you don’t always have control over. You get put in situations where the outcomes are just way beyond what resources you bring to bear. But if you don’t have those anchors, you are going to flail, and you are going to look incompetent. And that’s not a good picture for you, your agency, or your mission.
And what you said actually reminded me of one of my other struggles — when people read others’ ideas, and instead of having their own ideas, they latch on to them, it sometimes turns into word salad. It reminds me of all the mission statements that we went around and created for so many years, that you would read, and they would go from like two phrases to seven sentences long. And then you’d ask anybody in the agency, what’s their mission statement? I don’t know, go ask the leader. What’s your mission statement? I can’t remember, it’s written down somewhere.
Well, then it’s not really a mission statement, it’s exactly — it’s a bunch of words that you put on paper. And we’ve got to ask ourselves, is this useful? Because it may sound nice as it was assembled together by a committee, but my God, is it useful? Can we recall this when we are put in times of peril? Because the mission statement doesn’t exist for the easy days. The easy days, we just cruise along. The mission statement exists for when everything goes wrong and you have to back up and say, okay, this is why we are here. My goodness, if it’s word salad and you can’t remember it, well then you have just diffused everything that you stand on.
Values Written on the Back of a Badge
Yeah. You’re spot on with that summary of it. And I certainly see that in the corporate world — people spend a lot of time, they hire consultants, they go through, they come up with a mission statement, a vision statement, and some idea of values we believe in, and all that. And these tchotchkes get purchased, and T-shirts, and chains, and all this sort of thing.
Posters go up on the wall.
But, you know, it’s interesting — I’ll tell a story, and it was a serendipitous moment. But I was working with two different client companies simultaneously, and lo and behold, the subject of company culture came up. And in both cases, the people I was working with, they took their security badges and said, oh, our values are written on the back of our badges. And in both cases, they were generally something to do with we want our people to be safe, and you get down 3 or 4 and you finally get to sort of customer experience and all that, which is fine — depending on your business, that’s an important consideration. And the eye-opener for me was, at one company, they said it’s written on our card, but nobody lives by it. We go to meetings with execs and decisions are made and nobody’s checking the boxes, nobody’s looking at things.
But at the other company, I was told stories time and time again of senior execs being in a meeting where a big decision had to get made, and people would observe the senior leader pulling his card up and going, okay, let’s test this — number one, are we in alignment, number two, number three, number four. And they would verbalize the enforcement of those values. And man, that puts a whole new weight on it when they observe the leaders actually living it in the decision.
And to take that even one step further — one of the stories I was told was this company had negotiated a sale of a facility to another company, but it wasn’t going to close for like 18 months. But it was already done. And an incident happened at the plant — somebody got injured, not killed, but did get injured. So they had their postmortem meeting about what’s going on, what happened, and they determined there was a break in some of the safety provisions, and it was going to cost them about $400,000 to fix this thing so that it never happened again.
And the senior exec looked at his card and said, people first, safety. And he said, write the check, we’re spending the money. And they’re going, but we’re selling the plant, why? Why? Because it violates our principles. Spend the money, let’s get it done, it’ll be better for the people. And somebody actually asked the question, are we going to go renegotiate our closing? And he said, no, that deal’s done, we’re just going to do the right thing and we’re going to move on.
The Infinite Game and the Prisoner’s Dilemma
And that’s a trusted institution, right? That’s the infinite game that you want to play. I love studying it — in my master’s in security studies at Naval Postgraduate School, one of the things that we played with a lot was the prisoner’s dilemma. This idea that two people that have committed a crime have been captured and get put in separate rooms. And if you can convince one of them to betray or testify against the other one, that one will get off.
This idea in the prisoner’s dilemma is: do you betray your friend, or do both of you say nothing? If both of you say nothing, then you get away with this. So the idea is that if you’re only going to get one rep at this, your best action is to betray. However, if you’re going to have an infinite number of reps, then you stick with your values. Now this is interesting — it’s flipped on its head, that you were talking about criminals, but the concept is the same: if you are in an ongoing, infinite relationship, you have to stick by your values. You don’t want to betray people, you don’t want to take the easy way out over and over again, because — like the story you just shared — if you’re a trusted institution, you have to continue to do the right thing. And your mission statement should be clear on that.
“We Save Lives and Property”
So I remember in the late 90s, early 2000s, when we restarted — we started rewriting mission statements across the fire service, because it was the thing to do. We got to rewrite our mission statement, and every buzzword got added into it. I remember when innovation had to be thrown into every mission statement — we innovate, we do this, we do this — and nobody would remember it. But the funny thing is, if you sat down with your firefighters and said, hey man, what do we do here? They’re almost always going to say, we save lives and property. We save lives and property.
Okay, well then, I now, as a leader, am going to trash whatever we wrote down last time. And our mission statement is to save lives and property. Let’s hand that down through our culture. Let’s let that persist long after me, so that we don’t confuse ourselves. What’s your mission statement? We save lives and property. Beautiful. Now, why are we training today? Why are we doing the thing you don’t want to do — you don’t want to train, this kind of sucks — why are we doing this? Because we save lives and property.
Bingo. Because our mission says so. And in order to save lives and property, we have to be good at this really rare skill. So let’s go do it, because that’s part of the mission. That is how decisions get made downstream of you. And that’s what you want.
Empowering People Beneath You Requires Trust
On that note, I want to shift gears a little bit and go back to something you said — that whole idea of empowering people beneath you. And that does require a certain level of trust. And just yesterday I was in a client call, and we talked about that idea — as a leader, you say you may want to have an environment where people trust what’s going on. Well, guess what, you as the leader have to demonstrate trust to get trust.
Yes.
And it all starts with the leader being willing to look at someone on their team and say, essentially, I got you, I trust you, go and conquer. And it’s kind of closely tied to a kind of delegation, which a good friend of mine used to talk about from a parental standpoint. He said, when your kids are growing up, you’re sort of expanding their boundaries — you give permission and you provide protection. You give them permission to go ride the bike to the end of the block, and if they fall, you’re going to protect them. You’re going to go pick them up, and you’re not going to ridicule them for having fallen. You want to be able to do that in a loving way, so that they build the confidence to keep growing.
Mistakes vs. Breaches of Discipline
So you’ve got two things happening here. One, with the metaphor of parenting — you want to make sure that you allow them to get hurt but not injured. Like, hey, I’m going to let you fall off the bike, but I’m also not going to allow you to get hit by a car. There are some guardrails here, because you need to learn on your own. And when you think about that in an organization, it’s useful to make it very clear.
I expect mistakes, but I do not expect or will tolerate a breach of discipline. So let me say what that means. I’m dealing with company officers, captains, and chiefs that get handed impossible situations. They’re going to make mistakes. A mistake is a decision made with limited information — right, and when you look back at it, you should’ve turned left when you actually turned right. I expect mistakes, I make mistakes on a daily basis. I am not going to come after you for that. In fact, if I don’t see any mistakes, I’m going to be suspicious you’re hiding them from me, and I don’t want you to do that. I want you to learn from your mistakes and get a little bit better, a little bit of fine-tuning, because — I’ve still committed 32 years, I still make mistakes on a daily basis, I think, I don’t mess up my calendar from time to time, or say the thing I wish I hadn’t said. It still happens. But I’m always maturing, I’m always going to be better.
A breach of discipline is a choice made for a selfish outcome that I won’t tolerate. Now, the funny thing is, is that both of them, you know, could wind up looking very similar. I will be able to discern whether you made a mistake, or whether you breached discipline for your own selfish action. And those are the things that are going to get you in trouble with me. I won’t tolerate that, because you’re now out of alignment with the agency — you’re making choices for your own outcome, and you need to be aligned with the mission. Making that very clear has made my job a ton easier when it comes to dealing with coaching and counseling versus discipline, and having people trust me to get their back when they make mistakes.
Because I hear the stories all the time — I’m like, hey chief, this is what I thought I was doing, I thought I was doing the best I could, but what I didn’t know was this thing over here, and the outcome wasn’t great. Okay, you know what, I trust you, I trust you, you’re trying to do the right thing. You trust me to get your back, I’m not going to throw you under the bus. What we’re going to do is, you’ve learned a little bit, you’re going to mature and grow. I am going to continue to get your back, because ultimately, I want you to be able to replace me. I want you to be better than me, I want you to do a better job than me. And these are the fine-tuning things that we get you through. There is no possible way to make it through the fire service without getting handed continuous problems that you can’t solve. So mistakes are made. However — breaches of discipline, no.
Closing Thoughts and How to Connect with Eric Saylors
Yeah. Well, Eric, this has been phenomenal, my friend. Tell people the best way to get in touch with you.
Well, they can either reach me through LinkedIn, Facebook, or they can email me directly, E Saylors 8 at gmail.com. I do reach back and hit me with any questions or anything that you need.
I appreciate that, and as always folks, we’re going to have those links in the show notes, so do feel free to check out Eric’s background and other things. But one last time, Eric, thanks so much for sitting in and sharing. Great story, great theory.
Thank you my friend. Have a good one.
All right. Well folks, we’re going to wrap this up. I do want to remind you we’ve got a video version of the show over on YouTube, a channel by the same name, Leadership Powered by Common Sense. Please join us over there, be a subscriber. And we drop shows twice a week, so a lot of content coming at you and a whole lot of golden wisdom in the archives. So please check all that out. But for now, I’m going to sign off, say goodbye, go out there and make it a great day.
Meet Our Guest – Capt. Eric Saylors
Eric Saylors is the author of Quantifying a Negative (2015), Sense Making in Risk Assessments (2022), and The 7-Year Active Shooter Study (2026). He is a Fire Chief with over 30 years of experience and holds a Doctorate in Leadership from the University of Southern California.
In addition to serving as Product Lead for HEN Technologies, Eric currently serves as Fire Chief of the El Cerrito–Kensington Fire Department, having previously spent 25 years with the Sacramento City Fire Department. Over the course of his career, he has served in every rank from firefighter/paramedic to Fire Chief, including engineer, captain, battalion chief, and assistant chief. His operational experience includes assignments on ambulances, fire engines, ladder trucks, a Type 1 HazMat team, and a heavy rescue unit.
He has responded to and managed a wide range of incidents, including high-rise fires, large commercial fires, wildland-urban interface incidents, basement fires, and balloon-frame construction fires. Prior to joining executive leadership, he served as Battalion Chief 1 in downtown Sacramento, one of the busiest operational areas in the region.
In addition to his doctorate, Chief Saylors holds two associate degrees, a bachelor’s degree in finance, and a master’s degree in Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School. He regularly consults with fire departments nationwide on active shooter response, leadership development, succession planning, and post-incident analysis, and has published more than twenty articles on homeland security and fire service topics.
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