Expert Advice

My Approach to Leadership in 'No-Fail' Environments: Core Competencies for Leaders and Aspiring Leaders 

July 16, 2024

🩳TLDR: Lead by Example, employ Transformational Leadership, Follow to Lead, Collaborate, Embrace Change; Story Below About a Canadian HERO.

🤔 In the world of leadership, especially in high-stakes environments, excellence isn't just a goal-it's a necessity. Here's how I have achieved success regardless of the situation or environment:

1. Lead by Example: I believe in seeking and accepting responsibility. I lead from the front and display the qualities that I expect and want from my followers and other leaders alike.

2. Embrace Followership: Effective leaders are also effective followers. Supporting the goals and those leading them are crucial to team success and effective leading is about being able to follow and maintain mission focus.

3. Collaboration: My approach to collaboration is rooted in transformational leadership. It's about accountability, professional excellence, and building relationships that enhance team cohesion and morale and through collaborative efforts, you will achieve things you could not do alone.

4. Embracing Change: Change is inevitable, and we need to understand and adapt to it to remain relevant while keeping grounded. I embrace change as an opportunity for growth, innovation, and continuous improvement while learning from experience and those with experience. 

🧐 By leading with these principles, we can foster environments that not only meet high standards but also promote team retention and morale. 

💂Story Time: When I was a young junior leader, I led with my heart, achieving great triumphs while also stumbling along the way. Having been surrounded by great people and leaders, the one person I will never forget was @John Hryniw, a true subject matter expert, a great leader among leaders, a humble professional, and, to be frank, an unsung Canadian HERO. While I did not know it at the time, the lessons I have retrospectively realized about followership resonate deeply in my perspective of what it means to be a leader.

Challenging Assumptions in Disaster and Emergency Management

July 11, 2024

I had a recent debate on how prioritizing disaster and emergency management (DEM) varies greatly based on stakeholder perceptions of value and benefit, and I challenge two common assumptions on the topic:

💡Scale ≠ More Resources: Bigger [municipalities] doesn’t always mean better resourced. Best practices can and should be adapted to different contexts.

🔄 Contextual Best Practices: DEM strategies from the UNDRR often focus on the developing world, or appear to grand install or too far contextually removed but the reality is that they provide a baseline from which we are able to learn and innovate from.

🇨🇦 Effective Adaptation: In Canada, DEM strategies must be tailored provincially and municipally. Each province’s unique characteristics and regions demand specific solutions. For instance, ‘rural’ in Alberta can mean anything from farmland near urban areas to remote regions each with unique demographics, economies, and needs.

📊 Example: Consider tourism in the Niagara Region: 67.1% of visitors are Canadian, 24.5% American, and 8.4% overseas. This basic demographic data can immediately be applied to targeted risk reduction messaging in English, with Spanish and French, with infographics and innovative technological adaptations reaching the remaining minority. 

🤝 Collective Effort: DEM isn’t about isolated efforts. It’s about mobilizing others to achieve a shared vision. Concepts like ERM and DRR emphasize collaboration over isolation to achieve success.

"Creating victims is what makes a crisis a crisis" 

(Lukaszewski, 2013, p. 1.2.)

July 10, 2024

Any event that harms a stakeholder can quickly become a crisis.

📚 When Does a Crisis Occur?

For a crisis to exist, an external source must say that one is occurring, and through the occurrence of a crisis, victims are created. Lukaszewski (2013, p. 3.2.), who writes on advising CEOs on managing crisis, asserts that "when we create victims, the nature of our exposure intensifies," explaining that a crisis creates victims through the harm done to stakeholders and, in turn, harms the responsible enterprise through crisis.

🛠️ Key Strategies: 

🔹 Prioritize stakeholder needs during a crisis based on their power, legitimacy, and urgency (Mitchell et al., 1997).
🔹 Use the Culture and Capability Framework and the Reputational Risk Maturity Model to assess readiness and improve response capabilities (Barker, 2021).
🔹 “Clear, concise, and accurate” communication can limit reputational damage (Covello, 2006). Tailor messages to prioritized stakeholders.

🧐 Example Case:

🚨 AC vs. victims Andrew and Anna Dyczkowski (Harris, 2024)
🔹 AC chose to appeal a CA$2,000.00 compensation order, escalating the issue into a reputational crisis.
🔹 By taking the victims to court, AC risked alienating them and other customers as the case reached the public via CBC News.
🔹 This decision, though legally sound, seemed unfair to stakeholders, creating a ‘David vs. Goliath’ narrative (Harris, 2024).

✈️ Solutions for AC:

1️⃣ Compensate the victims immediately. 
2️⃣ Issue a public apology. 
3️⃣ Stress commitment to customer satisfaction. 
4️⃣ Implement internal policy changes and collaborate with the CTA.