The Prevention Stage of Emergency Management - Why?

You may be asking yourself what is emergency management and why should I care? Well, the unfortunate reality is that at some point in your life you, someone you love, the organization you work for, or your community is going to face an emergency, and we all need to be prepared for it.

At Blue Empress the mission is to help organizations establish strong internal and external communications while honing leadership abilities across the organization in order to thrive through crisis.

Now true resilience is complex and there are many different factors that can impact how an organization overcomes a crisis, but how an organization conveys information to their team and beyond can play a major role in how the organization responds to and recovers from an emergency.

Over the next several weeks, I am going to be doing a deep dive into what you can do throughout the five stages of an emergency (prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery).

First up … The Prevention Stage

Some would argue that the prevention stage is the most important aspect of emergency management since it lays the groundwork for how well a community can respond to a crisis.

During the prevention stage organizations have an opportunity to make lasting changes to how they operate and stop crises from happening.

Unfortunately, most of us spend a lot more time reacting to an already active crisis than taking the steps necessary to stop the crisis from happening in the first place.

If it ever feels like you and your team are always reacting to a crisis then the prevention step is for you.

Here, as a leader, you get to play an active role in stopping crisis for your organization by doing a few simple things:

• Have one-on-one conversations with your team about the things they could see going wrong in their work and empower them to make the necessary changes to stop it.

• Get your hands on all metrics available and get comfortable reading them. Whether the data are shipping times, table turnover periods, or marketing and sales metrics, being able to know the difference between normal and abnormal trends is critical to identifying when a crisis is at your front door.

• Get to know the names of your employees and what they do. Don’t assume because you are “the boss” that you know everything - you don’t.

• Leave your ego at the door.

These are just *a few* of the things that you can do during the prevention stage, but the most important thing you can do is commit to being prepared for a crisis - I’m here to help with everything else.

Let’s get to work.

Mary A. Pantle

President and Founder

Blue Empress LLC