Supporting Aid Professionals Everywhere
Original ‘best practice’ papers on all aspects of disaster management, including risk, coordination, epidemiology, economics and cash.
Please contact the Aid Essentials curator for comments and submissions at: [email protected]
The success and quality of your meetings rely on everyone being given the space to contribute their views and information without fearing the consequence of anything they might say and without making them look stupid in front of their peers.
Conducting meetings entirely in either the relevant international language or the local language reduces effectiveness as it excludes key stakeholders. There are four options for interpretation:
Aid workers struggle with the concept of leadership as it tends to be confused with personality rather than authority. Clusters are no different. Partly, this stems from the fact that everyone involved in a Cluster is here today, gone tomorrow. Also, a Cluster is not like an aid agency or a business as everyone works for, and therefore has loyalties to, someone else. So, while training courses have ideas and theories of leadership on the curriculum, they find it very difficult to teach. So do business schools. This is not because those doing the teaching are defective; it’s because leadership can’t be taught in the classroom. Nevertheless, we all recognise good leadership when we see it.
A post like this will not transform you into a great leader. What it can do, though, is show you some of the consistent patterns of failure and success regularly faced by those in the humanitarian world that are expected to ‘lead’ … which includes Coordinators and Disaster Managers. If you have some concept of what these challenges are in advance, you’ll be better able to deal with them at the time.
The first thing to acknowledge is that you are not a technical expert. You may be a doctor, an engineer, or an architect, but you are not an expert at management. And even if you think you are, it will only take one inter-sectoral coordination meeting to realise that you are not, as everyone will be using their own particular form of techno-babble and management-speak most of which will be largely incomprehensible to you.
REALITY CHECK: A short while ago I had to give a presentation to over 500 people at a conference in Bangkok entitled ‘Language Kills’. With such a provocative title, the opening had to be powerful. It was. The slides showed alright on my laptop monitor but that all-too-familiar ‘no signal’ sign was all the audience could read on the vast screen behind me. Once we sorted out the technical glitches, I started again. But not only was the opening – me speaking in Russian – ruined, but somehow the slides had reset themselves to advance every fifteen seconds regardless of what I was saying.
First, a bit about Powerpoint. Senior military commanders despair at the amount of time their junior officers spend preparing briefings using this tool. They argue that the medium, with its ability to move all manner of colours, shapes and sizes around the slide often tends to obscure the message. They also argue that the simplicity with which complex intellectual constructs can be reduced to a series of two-dimensional bullet points and multiple map overlays obscures the superficiality of the purported strategic thinking.
REALITY CHECK: Go on. Admit it. You spend most of your time in a coordination meeting texting or answering e-mails. That’s OK. Disaster managers are good at multi-tasking. But if you’re doing it during a genuine coordination meeting — i.e not one of those larger zoo-like information sharing meetings — then you’re either the wrong person or you’re in the wrong room. Or maybe you’re the right person in the right room but the meeting is so boring that it’s difficult to engage (in which case, it’s up to you to change the situation).
REALITY CHECK: This text is from a recruitment ad for the CEO of an international NGO which appeared recently in The Economist magazine. It could just as well have been written for a disaster manager or coordinator … “To ensure effective decision-making, you will have proven strategic communications skills, including the ability to create consensus through active debate and logical argument in a challenging environment, and effectively resolve conflicts.”
The key word in this advertisement is ‘create’. Building consensus requires that Cluster participants share information, air differences, work together to analyse challenges and find mutually acceptable solutions. After a decision has been reached, all those participating should feel that their viewpoint was heard and understood, and that they heard and understood the viewpoints of others in the group. They will support it because it was arrived at in an open and fair way. Yet reaching such a consensus is difficult in “standing-room only” coordination meetings attended by representatives of 50 or more agencies. In such large unwieldy groups, it is