There are thousands of books, articles, white papers, power point presentations and webinars about leadership. They all provide helpful information. But few address the exceptional leadership challenges faced by emergency managers.
It’s not that the basic principles of leadership don’t apply to emergency managers. They do. But the field of emergency management has some special characteristics that leaders must be aware of.
One of the distinctive features of emergency management organizations is that they are nearly always small. FEMA has thousands of employees and some state EMA’s have hundreds, but county and city EMAs typically have just a handful of employees, often fewer than five. One result of the small size of emergency management agencies is that the heads of these organizations do not always feel like leaders.
In larger organizations, leaders add value by maximizing the productivity of their employees. But in a shop with only three or four workers, local EMA directors must spend their time writing plans, conducting public outreach, developing exercises, and performing other emergency management tasks. Thinking about leadership can seem like a luxury that a growing workload won’t allow.
But leadership is not defined by the boxes on an organization chart. In truth, emergency managers have four critical leadership roles and their performance as leaders in all of these roles will determine how prepared their communities ultimately are.
Two leadership roles for emergency managers are described on agency organization charts, but two others are not. The four leadership roles for emergency managers are:
- Designated leader of your emergency management organization.
- Leader of preparedness and emergency management activities within your larger organization.
- Leader of your community’s formal emergency management enterprise.
- Leader of your community’s overall preparedness and emergency management program.
Emergency Management Organization Leader
As leader of your organization’s emergency management program staff you are filling a traditional leadership role, and all of the familiar rules of leadership apply. You have positional authority and your responsibility is explicit. You are responsible for managing and directing whatever employees are assigned to your unit. As a leader of an identified work unit your primary job is to ensure that your people have everything that they need in order to do their jobs. You set priorities, distribute resources, enforce standards, provide guidance, remove obstacles, and monitor performance. Your leadership role is clear and you have the support of your organization’s HR department and your own supervisors.
Your priority in this role is to ensure that your staff members have the resources to do their jobs to the best of their ability.
Leadership Tips: Take care of your people, train effectively, remove obstacles to performance, motivate, delegate, lead by example.
Organization Preparedness and Continuity Leader
Your leadership role within your organization extends beyond your particular work group. Whether you work for a city or county government, or for a non-governmental organization, regional organization, or a private business, you are your organization’s subject matter expert for preparedness and emergency management. As such, you play a key role in ensuring that workers are prepared for emergencies and disasters and that the organization is fully prepared to resume operations as quickly as possible following a disaster or disruptive emergency.
In this role your authority is less clear, although you are unlikely to be openly challenged. Some organizations will give you formal responsibility for employee preparedness and continuity planning, but some won’t. Even if you have formal authority for the organization’s program, you can expect some level of resistance from other departments when you propose preparedness activities that will consume time or other resources. Your ability to implement effective preparedness or continuity programs will hinge largely upon your professional expertise and your ability to persuade others that preparedness is cost-effective and will benefit the organization. To succeed in this role, you must be fully supported by your organization’s top executives. The good news is that most people want to be prepared for disaster, especially if they receive appropriate guidance and sufficient resources.
Your priority in this role is to ensure that your organization’s personnel are fully prepared for emergencies or disasters and that your organization is able to resume operations as quickly as possible following disaster.
Leadership Tips: Communicate effectively, assess risk, prioritize, identify benefits, exert influence upward and laterally, get your leadership on board.
Emergency Management Community Leader
Your third leadership role is widely acknowledged throughout the community, but you will have to work hard to achieve your objective. As the leader of your community’s emergency management establishment, you will coordinate the emergency management efforts of all the organizations, agencies, groups, and individuals who have a role in your community’s emergency management program.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of organizations that will participate in your community’s mitigation, response, and recovery efforts. Some will have a seat in your EOC, but most won’t. Together, these organizations will provide the actual emergency management services that you will coordinate, including search and rescue, first aid, evacuation, sheltering, provision of emergency food and water, debris clearance, and so many others. Their roles and responsibilities should be described in writing in your operational plans and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
As the senior emergency manager in your community, your job is to coordinate the efforts of these organizations to ensure that your community is as prepared as possible to manage the consequences of disasters or large-scale emergencies. Consider all of these organizations and groups as members of a very large team, and you are the team leader. Your job is to build the team, prepare it, direct it, monitor its progress, and keep it on track. While all of your team members will accept their roles, you need to remember that emergency management is not the primary mission of these organizations. Their day-to-day priorities are going to be very different from yours, and they may struggle to find the time or resources to fully support your program.
Your priority is to build and shape an effective team that works together to efficiently and effectively implement your community’s emergency management program.
Leadership tips: Plan diligently, identify capability gaps, share information freely, train effectively, exercise frequently, build relationships, encourage collaboration, manage conflict, create and maintain a sense of urgency.
Community Preparedness Leader
Your final leadership role is to spearhead community-wide efforts to increase preparedness of individuals and businesses and to build community resilience. The better prepared residents and businesses are, the more resilient your community will be and the quicker your community will be able to bounce back from disaster.
Your position as the senior emergency management official in your community, your professional knowledge, your relationships with other community leaders, and your experience in preparing and disseminating public messaging make you a highly credible and trusted advocate for preparedness.
Your priority is increase disaster preparedness of your community by providing accurate information and motivating community members to act.
Leadership tips: Develop positive messaging, ensure messaging reaches all members of the community, build trust, use multiple communication channels, be persistent.
And finally
As an emergency manager, your actual work unit might be quite small. But your position as the senior emergency management professional in your community gives you important leadership responsibilities that affect every resident and organization in your jurisdiction. Your willingness and ability to perform as a community leader will make a significant difference in your community’s ability to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from disaster.
January 22, 2019