Meta-Leadership and National Emergency Preparedness: A Model to Build Government Connectivity

Abstract

Effective emergency preparedness and response requires leadership that can accomplish perceptive coordination and communication amongst diverse agencies and sectors. Nevertheless, operating within their specified scope of authority, preparedness leaders in characteristic bureaucratic fashion often serve to bolster the profile and import of their own organization, thereby creating a silo effect that interferes with effective systemwide planning and response. This article describes a strategy to overcome traditional silo thinking: "meta-leadership," overarching leadership that intentionally connects the purposes and work of different organizations or organizational units. Thinking and operating beyond their immediate scope of authority, meta-leaders provide guidance, direction, and momentum across organizational lines that develop into a shared course of action and a commonality of purpose among people and agencies that are doing what may appear to be very different work. Meta-leaders are able to imaginatively and effectively leverage system assets, information, and capacities, a particularly critical function for organizations with emergency preparedness responsibilities that are constrained by ingrained bureaucratic patterns of behavior.

Outcome-Based Workforce Development and Education in Public Health

“…People who reach the top become more similar in the way they think and act than their primary professional identities indicate (Figure 2). Thus, leadership training in public health often focuses on these core leadership competencies, regardless of the professional discipline (48,83) because the nontechnical, often affective, leadership skills differentiate effective leaders from other professionals (16,34,41,42,59,83). The CDC Initiative for Leadership Enhancement and Development (I LEAD) uses a Dreyfus-like approach, dividing the target audience into four tiers of public health professionals (48).…”

Decision-Making: Preventing Miscommunication and Creating Shared Meaning Between Stakeholders

“…However, representatives from government departments and emergency services agencies, whose routine culture is characterized by generally higher levels of hierarchical relationships and reporting, tend to be predisposed towards maintaining their own agency-based independence. This fosters an emergent culture of rivalry among organizations in ways that work against information sharing between agencies during a crisis (Waugh and Streib 2006;Iannella and Henricksen 2007;Marcus et al 2006;Marincioni 2007). Furthermore, these predisposing cultural features can result in relationships that are characterized by in-and out-group differentiation.…”

A theoretical framework for negotiating the path of emergency management multi-agency coordination

“…These include but are not limited to role clarity and cultural differences between agencies (Marcus et al, 2006), information uncertainty (Doyle et al, 2014;Van de Walle and Turoff, 2008), fast action requirements (Janssen et al, 2010), and inter-organizational (Harrald, 2006) and inter-jurisdictional complexities (Paton and Auld, 2006). These challenges can be 1 For the purpose of this paper the Australian term of bushfire shall be used which is comparable to the term of forest fire in Europe and wildfire in North America.…”