Last weekend saw us start a new leadership program with SA SES and our focus was positive stakeholder engagement strategies for emergency service organisations. Unfortunately reviews of significant incidents around Australia have highlighted the need for agencies to continually assess the efficacy of their stakeholder management processes.
Scrutiny of agency responses during emergencies have demonstrated how inadequate communication processes and poor linkages with stakeholders have undermined efforts at operational levels during critical phases.
Unfortunately on occasion, the gaps and barriers to building those effective stakeholders relationships were known, or should have been known by the agency, and addressed prior to the emergency.
Many thanks to our guest speaker @Oshanna Alexander who specifically discussed community engagement as part of a broader stakeholder plan. Participants were encouraged to reflect on the diversity of their local community, their current levels of engagement and what strategy is most effective to meet their objectives such as driving behavioural change to build genuine community resilience.
From there we looked at the broader stakeholder landscape and participants discussed strategies to overcome cultural barriers, procedural impediments and clarification of roles which are all factors that continue to pose challenges in terms of delivering on public safety obligations.
Recent experience reminds us that the community is depending on all leaders in the emergency management sector to be proactive and committed to resolving the issues that impact at operational levels as part of driving better outcomes.
