3 - Leadership Failures - Sylvia C Kearney

Reference: Kapucu, N., & Van Wart, M. (2008). Making Matters Worse: An Anatomy of Leadership Failures in Managing Catastrophic Events. Administration & Society, 40(7), 711-740.

Theme: Problems With Disaster Relief Leadership Exists and the Lack of Integration Between Development and Planning Must Addressed

 Summary: Disasters come in all types and sizes. They can be natural or man made. “Catastrophic disasters require additional leadership capabilities because extreme events overwhelm local capabilities and damage emergency response systems themselves.” (Kapucu, 2008). Another way to look at exceptional leadership is that if something works out well, due to great leadership, not very many people notice, but when there are leaders who strike out and encounter failure, then everyone notices. Leaders must represent competency like:

o   Decisiveness – a leader must act relatively quickly to the task at hand and he/she must be willing to make unilateral decision while remaining calm and collected.

o   Informing – critical information must be shared with the Incident Commander and the media, and it also includes shaping the mood of the public relations function.

o   Problem Solving – includes recognizing, investigating and resolving problems as they appear.

o   Managing – creating, acquiring, transferring knowledge and creating an environment that allows a flow of timely implementation of innovations.

o   Planning – coordinating with personnel and organizing to ensure that competent people are doing the work that is necessary.

o   Decision Making – is one of the traits that should be mentioned as number one since a leader needs to be able to constantly make choices at a moments notice. A leader however, needs to be able to see and understand the whole picture and be able to actively listen to information that he/she receives, in order to be an effective decision-making leader.

Application: Leaders are people that work well with others and can become your motivational speaker and your teacher. In a catastrophic disaster, leadership is often influenced by other’s effectiveness, and networking. The National Incident Command System for example claims that local, tribal, territorial and open government, have a right to information, however, it is important to know just what the local laws are. Leadership in catastrophic disasters is also political, as well as administrative. “They must lead the way in overarching structures, reporting chains of command,  . . .” (Kapucu, 2008). It is important to understand how widespread the leadership has to reach.

4- Communication Gaps in Disaster Management - Robert Letterman

Robert Letterman

Reference

Paltalla, P., Boano, C., Lund, R., & Vos, M. (2012). Communication Gaps in Disaster Management: Perceptions by Experts from Govermental and Non-Governmental Organizations. Journal of Contingenicies and Crisis Management, 2-12.

Theme

               Communicating during a disaster is always difficult.  This article analyzes the gaps in communications that occur and how to best  enhance communication during a crisis.

Summary

Crisis management and response is gaining interest in the public and private sector.

Much has been researched and developed in the field of crisis management as it pertains to public relations and image restoration.

The basis of crisis communications is to provide the public with information regarding the disaster.  Crisis communication really began in the field of public relations

The method used by the article is to take a more general approach to researching these gaps and not focus on specific singular incidents.

An online questionnaire was set up to collect information and data to determine the nature and frequency of communication gaps.

One of the issues that comes up during crisis communications is the blame game that occurs between public information officers and the media.

The media will often concern themselves with assigning blame to government agencies and responders.

Despite the fact that communications plans are in place but results from the questionnaire indicated that more practice and development in the field needs to happen.

Application to Lesson

Sometimes we can become too consumed with how we respond to disasters and incidents but we must not let ourselves forget the planning of communication that needs to be developed.

Application to Future Work

This article explains the importance of communication planning not just in the public sector but the private sector as well.  As someone who plans to work in emergency management in the private sector establishing and understanding how communication will be executed during a crisis will be beneficial.

4 - Communicating Crisis - Andrea Graff

Andrea Graff

Reference: Isbell, M., Goldstein, R. (2006). Communicating crisis: inter-organizational collaboration among disaster relief agencies. International Communication Association. (p. 1-17).

Theme: Know your key players and communicate before disasters occur.

Summary:
Research was done to "review and investigate where the communicative differences may lie between internal and external crisis communication". Three main themes developed from the results of interviews which are: 1. planning 2. structure 3. collaboration continuum. I'm going to focus on the first, planning. There are three sub-themes to this theme:

• Pre-agreement: Know all of the players and build relationships with each of them. Trust needs to be built way before a crisis occurs and this comes from performance and experience.

• Sharing resources: Working together is key. Knowing who has what and who is bringing what to the table due to prior communication will keep costs lower and help everyone to work together.

• Outliers: Those who are part of the in-group, meaning they had pre-planned and gone to exercises were given larger responsibility during crisis events. Out-group members, or agencies that didn't participate were treated secondary. All help was welcomed, but the in-group had preferential treatment.

Application to the lesson topic:
Knowing the key players and establishing regular communication needs to be a main focus. Practicing for disasters and going over drills and exercises will help everyone to know their roles and be better prepared for the event of a disaster.

Application to emergency services:
As emergency services managers we can plan exercises and drills to make sure not only our staff but all key players will know what to do in the event of a disaster and hopefully work out the kinks beforehand.