Fear management is a topic that NYARM continues to stress to building managers. I spoke with Mardi-Ellen Hill, a consultant, who provides an objective approach addressing the natural fears of building staff and management alike about how they will perform during emergencies. Combine that with actually having to deal with the emergency event and how fear in the present affects performance.
Because preparedness is a key mainstay and fear is a significant impediment to performance, it is important to understand the dynamics of preparedness and the impact of fear warrant being dissected.
“Preparedness is working our way back to the beginning of an emergency, and all of the things that have to come into play in that arc,” Hill explained. “Once that emergency starts to tick, all of the things you planned are going to take a backseat to different and more pressing events happening. Then, out of these newly prioritized events occurring, other events are going to flourish. Understanding preparedness is understanding that a storm does not hold a fixed destination.”
Landing a plane where once one assumed there was a landing point is simply not going to work. What is the real meaning of destination in the midst of an unfolding crisis?
The destination is found buried in a uniquely personal time arc we measure as productivity in the course of a day, a week, a month or a year. When you’re in the midst of an emergency, that time arc is rapidly adjusting inside us relative to the rhythm of the events unfolding in-crisis.
How does that fit in?
“Fear and fear management is not only proportionate to a generally accepted level of risk, it is also proportionate to our understanding and characterization of what risk means individually to each one of us,” Hill said. “We perform based on a unique combination of our inner clock and the clock we are taught to abide by. Again, this is a uniquely personal experience. Thus, rehearsal and preparedness are essential work states to carefully execute in order to achieve high-octane performance. Rehearsal also allows us to preserve our strength under stress, reducing fear.”
But the day-to-day management of a building must continue before, during and after a crisis. “It’s quite a difficult thing to balance both what is normal outside an emergency and a crisis, plus extrapolate and think about what that crisis situation looks like,” Hill said. “These two parallel worlds operate simultaneously, in tandem. And since the leader is the one who controls the group clock, to really be effective as a manager, a person in a thought leadership position has to be able to evaluate both worlds and work from both of them simultaneously. This requires a full understanding of the fact that we are conditioned to, and abide by, an internal clock during a regular work schedule. It also requires the realization that each member of a team has a different and unique response duration and that the tandem of the emergency clock and each individual’s preconditioned clock yields a measurable behavior performance.”
From a practical standpoint, is there a silver lining to any of this?
“Because we are living in a fraught environment, fear can be used in a good way,” Hill concluded. “It’s important to be afraid of something that can harm your body, harm your business, your company’s reputation, your data or, most importantly, the safety of your building’s occupants and employees.”
Mardi-Ellen Hill
MEND
www.menduniverse.com
mardiellenh@aol.com
(212) 470-7119
Margie Russell
NYARM
www.nyarm.com
mrussell@nyarm.com
(212) 216-0654
