Firefighter and the man behind the Firefighters Podcast, Pete Wakefield, tells all about his recent visit to W.L Gore & Associates’ European manufacturing base

It was an incredible privilege to be invited to visit some of the Gore team and their facilities.

I got to see the manufacturing process in action as well as witnessing first-hand the authenticity of the company’s people and products.

One of the most impressive, but almost unspoken aspects that I really found interesting during my visit, was the fact that associates and team members didn’t appear to need any motivating.

They weren’t being and didn’t seem to need to be pushed.

There was instead a really strong and consistent feeling of commitment, a kind of self-discipline driven by their own values and purpose.

They are driven to deliver and do the “thing” that they say they would do, the commitment they made to the team.

When I was traveling back from my time with Gore, I was re-reading a favorite book of mine called “The Ideal Team Player” by Patrick Lencioni.

Throughout it is this overarching theme they refer to as “humble, hungry and smart”, and these are considered some of the skills for the ideal team player.

I know it’s easy to connect the dots looking backwards, but this was in fact the template I would easily place over the top of the behaviors that I saw at Gore.

Humble

Let’s look at humble – There was a tremendous amount of acknowledgement and recognition of others vs self, whether when introducing team members, or the subject matter experts as we travelled around the factory.

When we were meeting people doing testing on the stitching, breathability, or in the rain towers for waterproofness, everyone that I was introduced to was preceded by acknowledging their efforts, the knowledge that they have and the contribution that they made to the organisation.

That habit and behavior of constantly giving praise to the people in the organisation, to the partners, to the end-user, but also the ability to take feedback, to take criticism & to take suggestions or improvements for the persons idea, approach, manner or end product.

That aspect of humble was very, very clear as I traveled amongst them.

Hungry

When you look through the timeline of the company, they have most definitely been hungry, they are driven, they are willing to work, they have almost a relentless and insatiable desire to find different applications for this technology.

Everyone is driven to maximise the potential of their company and to share its benefits, with as many people in, as many applications as possible.

Smart

The smart side of it, is probably one of the rarest ones and the one that I really saw stand out with the Gore team.

A lot of organisations reference this, perhaps even write it on a wall somewhere, but at Gore you could see it in the way they communicate.

We could term that as emotional intelligence, professionalism, politeness but really it came down to self-awareness and people’s awareness of how their actions and reactions affect those around them.

The fact that so many people were willing to come and sit down with me and talk about the company, talk about the product, talk about their experiences, was surreal.

Convincing some people to speak on a podcast is not as easy as it seems.

Public speaking is recognised as a number one fear and that’s heightened even more so in cultures where there is a lack of trust, but when it comes to the team of Gore, I was inundated with enthusiastic, fun, interesting, passionate, knowledgeable people that wanted to come and talk to me about their experience at Gore and the projects they’ve been involved in.

There was no script, there was no other person sitting in, checking what they said and what they didn’t say.

People could speak freely about their experiences.

Speak freely about the teams that they worked in.

Speak freely about their successes and their setbacks, but still with a very realistic understanding of the challenges that are being faced in the market, the challenges that are being faced by first responders, by paramedics, police, firefighters, the challenges that we come in contact with every day and how the team of Gore is working diligently & creatively to find solutions to these challenges.

I’m very lucky that I get invited to a lot of organisations and when I visit a lot of them, it’s a common part of the vernacular that “we are overworked, under resourced, pushing hard, missing deadlines & trying to catch up”.

There’s almost a steady backing track of “so and so´s behind “or “We were supposed to have this thing done but so and so didn’t get back to me” or “so and so can’t make it today”.

Not once did I experience any of that at Gore.

On my trip back I reflected on the many items of clothing and footwear that I own and the presence of that small tag that says GORE-TEX.

I think for many years I didn’t know what it stood for.

I didn’t know what it did.

I never thought about the team, the time, the dedication, the values, the effort, the passion, and the creativity that had gone into what that label stands for and what that label does for me.

How it keeps me safe.

How it keeps me dry.

How it helps me perform every single day in my professional capacity as a firefighter and in my personal capacity, cycling, running, climbing, walking my dogs, riding my horses.

I can live my life in a more fulfilled way because of that small label, and it left me with a sense of reassurance, it left me with a sense of feeling safe and left me with a sense of feeling looked after by such a small and often unseen thing that makes such a colossal difference to my quality of life every day.

This article was originally published in the December2023 issue of International Fire & Safety Journal. To read your FREE digital copy, click here.