One issue that continues to jump out at me as I watch disaster events unfold around the country is how disaster responders somehow are pushed into the roles of disaster managers. There is a difference. The term management is defined in Webster’s as “the act or art of managing” and when you look up managing you get to my point with the definition of “to handle or direct with a degree of skill.” Managers have to have skill and experience to be effective. One of the worse fallacies that we promote in our discipline is that a great responder makes for a great manager. Nothing is further from the truth.
A great responder is just that….. skilled and trained to complete a response task. A great manager has to have more diverse skills and training to not only be able to see the “big picture,” but also be able to see a concise, clear path to an events mitigation. The diverse skills come into play for a great manager to be able to accomplish the mitigation of this event by communicating and delegating to others, his vision and goals, and then motivating them to success. He is not managing the disaster….. he is successfully managing the people who are taking care of the disaster. A great responder may see the “big picture,” but his skills are centered on mitigating the event himself. In a management position, he quickly becomes the “micro-manager” that everyone has worked for at one time or another.
A great responder can evolve into a great manager, but he has to attain management skills and then develop them through experience as a deputy or assistant. Skills such as effective communications, conflict management, situational awareness and even creative thinking are not readily learned in response trainings. Let’s get to work in developing our next cadre of great managers through management training, education, and placement. With today’s complicated disaster events, a great responder that is forced into a management position can quickly become a victim of the disaster himself.
Disaster Management 