A random question for a Friday afternoon:

Has anyone developed a emergency response training for those who hold academic leadership positions? While the emergency response community understands the Incident Command System as its operational process during a response, my experience is that faculty, chairs, deans, provosts, etc. don't understand the expectations related to their leadership role when it comes to emergencies.

They tend to assume that their priorities are everyone else's priorities and may not respond well to being told that they aren't in charge during an emergency situation. However, I believe they do have an important role in leading the community's response, in terms of maintaining reasonable expectations for protection of research assets, resumption of services, and managing the quality of information about the event as it proceeds.

I'm thinking about how to describe realistic emergency response expectations to people who are used to operating in a "community of equals" situation. Academic leaders tend not to have a lot of experience in managing emergencies and I wonder what strategies people have found to be successful in educating that level of academic management around how to respond to bad news that requires rapid decision-making.

Thanks for sharing any resources or thoughts you have on this interesting topic.

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
Environmental Safety Manager
Keene State College
603 358-2859

ralph.stuart**At_Symbol_Here**keene.edu

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