Leadership and decision-making

As aspiring disaster managers, you will study many theories of leadership and decision making. One such theory is the Tannenbaum Schmidt continuum. This explains the relationship between the leader and the followers. On the one hand, we have autocratic and on the other hand we have democratic. The autocratic, the leader, takes all the decisions with very little involvement from the followers and at the other end, democratic, the followers take the collective decision. And where we sit on that continuum is determined by the situation at the time. A good example of using the tandem bound Schmidt to help us to explain a scenario, which in essence is another form of situational leadership.

An incident occurred during an earthquake where an urban search and rescue team had entered a collapsed building to rescue a ten-year-old child who was severely trapped by her legs. Now, this team had fully invested itself in rescuing this child and the way that these teams work is very much a collective decision-making process. They bring together the skills and knowledge that they all have collectively under the guidance of the leader.

But at this incident, the leader was aware of a deteriorating security situation outside of the incident and the time came for them to make a decision of whether they were going to stay and try and rescue the child, or potentially risk being attacked and losing everything, and therefore, not being available for further rescue. Now, the leader collected the team together and they collectively made the decision that they were going to leave. That meant they preserved their capability to carry on carrying out rescue but of course, the impact was the child died.

Now, the knock-on effect of this was that everal members of the team experienced post-traumatic stress and one of the reasons was because they felt responsible for this child, that they collectively took responsibility for making that decision. And the interesting thing was that the leader said afterwards that he wished that he had been more autocratic and that he had made the decision alone, because then his team could have blamed him for the child dying and not absorbed that stress for themselves. It’s just another way of showing the limitations of these models. They’re very, very helpful to help us understand decision making and how leadership styles can change, but there are definitely limitations to what they can do.