Section 4 – Risk, Uncertainty and Experience

In the last decade, the public health profession has often been called on to prepare for unprecedented emergency events. As public health officials face off against global pandemics and the threat of chemical/biological weapons, the unpredictable nature of the emergency becomes a grave concern. And to compound this problem, the brain responds to uncertainty in the same way as it responds to a known danger.

In these new and ever-changing times, what’s the best way for an emergency worker to prepare for the unprecedented event?

Section 3: Getting and Staying “In The Zone”

In this section, Goleman discusses new neurological evidence that suggests that humans are more receptive to emotional signals than was previously believed. Therefore, it is very important for leaders to set an emotional tone that will serve each phase of the crisis management. Whatever the emotional tone is at the top, that tends to ripple down through the levels of command. What you as a leader have done (or not done) to establish chemistry within the group, will determine the functionality of the group when there are high stakes.

Section 2 – Four Key Skill Domains For Leadership
In this section Dan Goleman discusses four important areas of expertise that are essential to effective leadership:

1) Emotional Self-Awareness - Recognizing your own inner state is the first step to being able to draw on past successes and failures. Maintaining access to this decision matrix allows for informed, clear-headed decisions in the heat of the crisis.

2) Emotional Self-Management - Because this decision-matrix is non-verbal, staying cool in the moment (and avoiding the “amygdala-hijack” that we heard about in the last section) allows a leader to trust his gut sense of how to handle the challenging situation.

3) Empathy – How adept you are at seeing things from various perspectives can determine your own effectiveness as a leader during emergency situations as well as during the team-building (prework) phase.

4) Leadership style – Of the five styles that Goleman mentions here (Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, Consensus, and Command & Control), there is no one single style that will serve you well in all situations. Knowing how to utilize them in different situations is the key to tapping into the potential of every person and improving your team’s Group IQ.

Section 1: Applied Emotion

In this first section, Goleman describes why effective emergency response requires “the intelligent application of emotion.” He offers a neurological explanation for why cognitive intelligence is often rendered irrelevant in our response to highly stressful situations. During these events, the brain’s decision-making center shifts from the left prefrontal cortex (which usually governs logically and analytically) to the amygdala, the brain’s emergency response center. Since they are rooted in deep-seeded biological survival tactics, reactions typically generated by the amygdala are strong, sudden and emotional, and they often lead to poor decisions. In order to be effective in emergency situations, responders must learn to resist the “amygdala hijack” and remain calm and focused enough to draw on necessary expertise to devise an innovative solution.