Month October 2021

Soft Skills Are Hard to Find

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

Across emergency management, dependent upon specific jobs, we certainly need to apply a lot of technical skillsets. So often, though, soft skills are dismissed, which is quite ironic given that soft skills are really the foundation of what emergency managers need given our emphasis on communication, collaboration, and coordination.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, soft skills are things that are generally applicable to various types of work. These include things like communication, writing, leadership, teamwork, problem solving, organizing, time management, and others. These are skills generally expected of any working professional. They can be honed, but often require some innate ability. Soft skills are different from hard skills, which are those that tend to be more technical and industry specific. These are also generally something acquired more through learning and less dependent upon innate ability.

FEMA’s Professional Development Series (PDS) used to be a cornerstone of emergency management training. Many state emergency management training programs had an emphasis on these courses and the content they provided. The PDS offered soft skills courses, such as Effective Communication, Decision Making and Problem Solving, and Leadership alongside training on topics more so focused on emergency management topics. These courses did a lot to support the professionalism of emergency managers and their abilities to do their jobs in a reasonably comprehensive nature. About 15 years ago FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute made the decision to offer these courses as part of their Independent Study program, a choice that made the content more widely available while also arguably decreasing the effectiveness of the training by removing the dynamics of a live instructor and the learning gained from group activities. While states still had the option to continue delivering classroom versions of these courses, demand severely dropped as people opted to take the courses online.

While the PDS is still available, it’s in a diminished popularity. FEMA’s EMI now offers the National Emergency Management Basic Academy, which provides a great series of courses, and to their credit, they do include some soft skills topics within the courses, especially the Foundations of Emergency Management course. That said, we still need more. Soft skills aren’t a one-off, they need to be built and honed. While FEMA’s EMI isn’t the only provider of soft skills training, they are the go-to provider for most emergency managers.

Having recently had the opportunity to review the participant manual for the new Advanced Planning Practitioner course, I was very happy to see the thought put into providing content on soft skills particularly as they relate to the hard skills involved in emergency planning. Emergency planning at its essence is absolutely a hard skill, with specific technical aspects, but there are several soft skills that are complimentary to the process of emergency planning, without which the planning effort will be less than effective. Consider that so much of emergency planning is consensus building, coordination, meeting management, research, and writing. Communication, facilitation, and public speaking are central to much of this.

I think a lot of people have a tendency to roll their eyes at soft skills, thinking that their abilities are already at peak performance or claiming that they are good because they took a course 15 years ago. As professionals in emergency management, we need to regularly spend time honing our skills. Yes, there are plenty of technical things for us to be trained in and practice such as plan writing, exercises, ICS, etc., but soft skills make us better at doing those things. Both in government service and as a consultant, I see far too many people lacking in soft skills. There may be some highly technical jobs where soft skills have less importance, but soft skills in emergency management are just as important, if not more important, than some technical skills, especially when you consider that one of the greatest values we contribute is our ability to bring people to the table, facilitate discussions, and gain consensus on important decisions before, during, and after disaster. How all that is applied may very well be technical, but we can’t get there without good soft skills.

What do you think are the most valuable soft skills?

© 2021 Tim Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®

Public Health and Public Safety: Step Up or Step Out

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager 3 Comments

So here it is. This is what it’s come to. We are over a year and a half into the COVID 19 pandemic. We have vaccines. We have improved treatments on the horizon. Yet we still have a long way to go. Why? Because people who are able to do so refuse to get vaccinated and even refuse to wear masks and practice other precautions. It’s inexcusable among the public, unforgivable for those who work in public health and public safety.

Those who work in public health and public safety are entrusted with the health and safety of the public. In order to do so we not only need to take care of ourselves, but also do what we can to protect each other and the public. We seem to have a rash of issues lately, such as:

  • A state trooper, ‘forced’ to resign because he didn’t comply with a vaccine mandate, signing off of his last transmission with a statement of ‘the governor can kiss my ass’. From all I’ve heard, this trooper had a great career and made a big difference – yet this temper tantrum is what most people are talking about.
  • Hundreds of health workers ‘forced’ to resign or being fired because of their lack of compliance with vaccine mandates.
  • A large number of attendees of a recent emergency management conference not wearing masks during the conference, despite repeated written and verbal instructions from the host organization to do so before and during the conference.
  • Hundreds of corrections officers potentially being ‘forced’ to resign or being fired because of their lack of compliance with vaccine mandates.

Public health and public safety have never been about individual freedoms, rather they are focused on what is good for the public as a whole. Yes, we should be taking precautions to protect ourselves, but we also do so to protect our co-workers and the public we are entrusted with caring for and serving. While some choose to make this a political issue, I have colleagues across much of the political spectrum who have maintained vigilance and care in the office, with the public, with their families, and even off duty by getting vaccinated and practicing other precautionary measures as appropriate. Some choose to make it a matter of religious freedom, yet the leaders of every major world religion are encouraging their followers to get vaccinated and take precautions.

It seems a simple, and respectful thing to get vaccinated and to also take these precautions when on duty and representing your agency, but also as much as possible beyond that. I’ll grant that some social situations can be challenging, but we can and should maintain an appropriate measure of vigilance, again not just for the benefit of yourself, but also for the benefit and respect of others. Doing so isn’t about ‘being a sheep’ or following some fascist rule of law. It’s about health, safety, and respect.

I’ve seen some disregard vaccinations and precautionary measures because they are not 100% effective, therefore they must be a joke or the science must be wrong. Consider that careful driving, the wearing of seatbelts, and vehicles with airbags aren’t foolproof preventers of injury or death in a car accident., either. Nothing is foolproof, especially when there are so many fools. We do the best we can with what we have and if we want to be true professionals in public health and public safety we need to lead by example.

My disappointment in public health and public safety personnel who flaunt and disregard these standards is high, regardless of their rank, station, or prior accomplishments. As such, I say: step up or step out. If you don’t have a regard for yourself, your family, your coworkers, and the public; then you should likely seek a different profession. If you are in these professions, but aren’t doing what you can to prevent the spread of the pandemic, I’m not sure what you stand for. This is a pandemic. It’s serious. Though it may not cause something as severe or dramatic as people randomly collapsing to their death in the streets, it has caused over 700,000 deaths in the US alone so far, as well as serious and lasting effects for many survivors.

I’ll close with this… I always encourage and welcome dialogue, discussion, and different points of view in response to my posts. That’s not changing, but I will say that science deniers, conspiracy theorists, and those espousing fuzzy math need not respond. Those aren’t informed opinions and certainly don’t lead to intelligent dialogue.

TR

ICS – Assistant Section Chiefs

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager 2 Comments

Somehow this one snuck past me, but luckily I have some friends and colleagues who brought it to my attention and talked it through with me. The latest ICS curricula (not consistently, however) identifies that Section Chiefs can have Assistants. It’s been a long-standing practice for General Staff to have Deputies rather than Assistants. So where did this come from?

Page 82 of the NIMS document, as pointed out to me by someone at EMI, provides some language that seems to be the root of this. Here are the definitions provided:

Deputies are used at section and branch levels of the incident organization. A deputy, whether at the command, section, or branch level, is qualified to assume the position.

Assistants are used on Command Staffs and to support section chiefs. Unlike deputies, assistants have a level of technical capability, qualification, and responsibility subordinate to the primary positions and need not be fully qualified to assume the position.

None of those I spoke with are aware of the actual source of this change or why it was changed. Of course, I initially balked at it because it wasn’t the ICS I ‘grew up with’. Given some thought, however, it provides some organizational opportunities and certainly doesn’t violate any of the primary tenets of ICS.

There are absolutely some occasions in the past when, as a Planning Section Chief, I could have used this option. Planning Section Chiefs end up in a lot of meetings, and while I always felt comfortable with leaving the personnel staffing the section to their own tasks, it’s good to have another leader there in the absence of the Section Chief, both for the benefit of the section staff as well as the rest of the organization. However, if there was no one technically qualified to be a Deputy Section Chief but still capable of leading the staff and serving as an interim point person for the section, we would be (and have been) stuck in an organizational nuance. By definition, they couldn’t be assigned as a Deputy, but we didn’t have another option. This is a great opportunity to assign an Assistant. This is somewhat like an ‘executive officer’ type of position, whereas they have authority but can’t necessarily fill the shoes of the principal position.

To add to the myriad options for the Intelligence function, I also see the potential in the use of an Assistant, either in Planning or Operations, to be a viable option. This is someone qualified to lead the task, but not necessarily the Section they are organized within. I similarly see possibilities for addressing other defined needs within the incident organization. Sometimes we take some liberties, again for example in the Planning Section, to create Units that are non-standard, perhaps for tasks such as ‘Continuity Planning’, or ‘Operational Planning Support’ – of course being non-standard, you may have some different titles for them. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this, as we aren’t violating any of the primary rules of ICS, nor are we creating positions that actually belong elsewhere (as I often see). Planning is planning, and there may be necessity to have personnel specifically tasked with functions like these. Instead of creating a Unit, which could still be done, you could assign the task to an Assistant. Consider something like debris management. There is a significant planning component to debris management, separate from the operations of debris management. This could be tasked specifically to an Assistant Section Chief to handle.

Another consideration, and somewhat tied to my first example of a de facto leader/point of contact for a section in the absence of the Section Chief, is that an Assistant Section Chief seems to carry more authority than a Unit Leader. That level of authority may need some doctrinal definition, but I think is also largely dependent upon the task they are given and the desires of the Section Chief assigning them – though this can make for inconsistencies across the incident organization. Having someone with a measure of authority, depending on the needs of the task, can be extremely helpful, particularly with the bureaucracies that incident management organizations can sometimes evolve into.

It’s important for us to recognize the need for doctrine to evolve based on common sense approaches to addressing identified needs. That means that the ICS we ‘grew up with’ can and should change if needed. As NIMS/ICS (and other standards) continues to evolve, we need to have discussions on these needs and potential solutions. Every change, however, has consequences, or at least additional considerations. I don’t feel this change should have been made without further exploration of the topic and answering questions such as the level of authority they may have, qualification standards, and support staff assigned to them (let’s be honest – things like this were never well defined for Assistant Command Staff positions either).  I also see a lot of value in doctrine offering best practice examples of use. Once doctrinal changes are made, curriculum changes certainly need to follow. In just examining the ICS 300 and ICS 400 course materials, the inclusion of Assistant Section Chiefs is simply not consistent or adequate.

Where do you find yourself on this topic? For or against Assistant Section Chiefs? What potential uses do you see? What potential problems do you see? How can we address these and ensure good implementation?

© 2021 Timothy Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®