Becoming ‘Us’

Picture of two people shaking hands

You know the ‘Us’ around you – the people you work with every day.  You know these people and you’ve learned to work with them and trust them.

But an incident has occured, and here you are, showing up to join the response and walking into the Joint Information Center, a room filled with ‘Them’!

Maybe they’re strangers, or barely acquaintances. Where did they all come from? Who is this person from the SOSC? Where did the FOSC communicator come from? Why is the city’s PIO here? You’ve never seen these people before! You want more ‘Us’, but you’ve got a room full of ‘Them’.  Now imagine you’re reporting to a response in another location, somewhere else, where your organization is embroiled in an incident and YOU are the ‘Them’. The other response communicators look at you and see a stranger. They might look at everyone in the JIC and see only strangers.

And who trusts strangers? Who gives ‘Them’ the benefit of the doubt? You’re starting off your response efforts with no reputational or relational gas in your tank. What do you do?

You become ‘Us’

There are two arenas where ‘Them’ must become ‘Us’ – one arena for efficiency, the other arena for impact.  First, become ‘Us’ inside Unified Command, with your response partners. Then become ‘Us’ outside Unified Command in the community as you all, together, communicate with affected stakeholders.

The people you will work with in the JIC are your response partners; learning to work well together with them will impact the efficiency of stakeholder outreach. This is the ‘inside’.

The stakeholders you’re reaching out to are the ‘outside’; the people impacted by the incident. They’re looking for information they can trust, as they try to decide what to do next. Their decision of what to do next will impact your response, for better for worse, much worse.

How will the Unified Command relate with affected stakeholders? This is the job of Joint Information Center; you have to become ‘Us’ to your stakeholders so they can trust the response more easily. This topic will be featured in a later post. For now, let’s focus on how to turn ‘Them’ into ‘Us’ inside Unified Command, in the JIC itself.

How does ‘Them’ become ‘Us’ inside the JIC?

Invest in this new team of ‘Them’ to build a partnership of responders. All of Unified Command is built on the expectation that the organization trumps the entities. Multiple entities come together for a single cause, and the organization provides the structure for people to work together.  So trust the structure. It has actually worked well for decades. Settle into your box on the response organization chart. Introduce yourself to the PIO, the APIOs, and other communicators. Then go to work turning the ‘Them’ into ‘Us’. Exercise some core team building muscles.

All high performing teams share common characteristics:

  • people are good at what they do
  • they learn to be good together
  • they learn to support one another
  • they learn to trust each other
  • they learn to fight, and they learn to make up
  • they learn to defend each other

How can the JIC look like this?

Accept that the people in the room are good at what they do. They may not do everything the same way as you, but they’re in the room because they are good at what they do. The organization that sent them has a reputation at risk in the response, and they chose this person to mobilize. Expect excellence.

Learn to be good together. Adjust your methods to enhance their methods. A winning baseball team doesn’t field nine pitchers, it fields an expert each for every position. Pitchers and centerfielders do a lot of things differently, but it’s their combined competencies that win games. The people around you that do things differently bring the strength needed for every communication task.

Support one another. Don’t reserve your resources for your own people. Offer them to the others. Support ‘Them’. Look for ways to augment others’ actions with your own. Help them excel. This starts as easily as sharing a charging cable, but expands into offering resources, knowledge and experience to each other. Engage with people around you and offer to help them out.

Offer trust. Everybody’s reputation is as stake, not just yours or your organization’s. Expect that each person will do the best they can and recognize that their best is pretty good. Assign tasks, release responsibility and trust the outcome.

Incident Command is built on a core value; the most qualified person will fill the most important role. As responder ranks grow, every person is slotted into the job they can do best. Unified Command expands on this by committing more resources with a common mission. With Unified Command, the best people should be making the best decisions for the best response. The ‘Most Qualified Individual (MQI) doctrine ensures such. Integrate this into your thinking, and trust the outcome.

Sometimes Command Staff (often Incident Commanders) break this rule when they don’t select the MQI, opting instead for familiarity and selecting ‘their’ person. Of course, this is institutionalization of ‘Them’. It is difficult to trust the ‘Them’ around you if they hold their positions because of institutional nepotism.  This topic will be a later post.

Learn to fight. What if your trust is misplaced, and excellence isn’t the outcome? Then fight, properly. Conflict is inevitable, and it is part of the formation of every high performing team. When you want the best, you have to expect it and demand it. And if you don’t get it, you need to push for it. Be sure to apply the core tenet of all effective conflict; what you do is not what you are. Don’t attack the person, address their actions or product. Respect them even when you have to correct them. Keep the discussion focused on the product and the actions; don’t assume or attack motivation or motives.

Then offer grace! Acknowledge the effort made for the outcome. Thank them and praise them for a job (finally) well done. Reinforce excellence.

Defend each other! When you’re working well together and trusting each others’ work, this will come naturally. Stand up for the end product. Push back on recommended edits to someone else’s work with the same vigor you would edits to your own. Protect and defend each member of the team. Don’t offer a human sacrifice unless it is yourself.

Outside

This is another topic, for another post: How do all you strangers in the room become ‘Us’ to your affected public?

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