<script> With incident management, you, as the Emergency Manager want to maintain the safety of the people that you’re working with, or working for you — your disaster workers. Remember they change from regular employees to disaster workers in a time of emergency. All relationships and normal means of doing business become moot. You want to provide clear leadership and organizational structure when selecting your emergency management team beforehand.
For times that you may not be on-site or become tired or incapacitated, other Emergency Managers must be available to step in.
In that selection or training process, you don’t need somebody on your team that’s really laissez faire. You need somebody that can take charge, make decisions, while primarily keeping your people safe.
You want to improve the effectiveness of the rescue efforts. If you don’t have clear leadership and organizational structure, then the effectiveness of your rescue efforts is going to be hurt in the process, plus you’re going to lose the confidence of your people working for you. And, others won’t follow key direction.
You want to have a well-defined management structure and you want to make sure you convey to people, who’s in charge. They all need to know where you or the Emergency Manager is going to be: “I’ll be here at this pickup truck” or “I’m going to be at the corner of this building” You’ve got to have a well-defined, intuitive plan built for your facility. You’ve got people working for you and they have people working for them, you want to make sure that this structure is understood by everybody, and again, it’s well-defined.
