Are you a Meta-Leader?

What is Meta-Leadership? Who are Meta-Leaders? Simply put, Meta-Leaders are "leaders of leaders". Over the past nine months, I've had the opportunity to be involved at varying levels of the Greater Columbus Meta-Leadership Summit for Preparedness and Post Summit events. This has been a tremendously rewarding experience, developing connections with other non profit, private sector and government partners.



During the Post Summit event that was held at OCLC on Monday October 18th, I had the opportunity to join Dr. Teresa Long (Columbus Public Health), Nancie Bechtel (Central Ohio Trauma System), Donna Monell (Port Columbus Airport & Columbus Homeland Security Advisory Committee) and Carolyn Carlson (Contingency Planers of Ohio) in a panel discussion about the various systems or programs we represent. When asked what the greatest challenge facing the Franklin County Citizen Corps, my answer was the attention cycle of the citizenry. The public has a very distinct, five phase attention cycle when it comes to Disaster Preparedness:

- Stage 1: The Pre-Problem- where people are aware of the problem but generally disregard it.
- Stage 2: Alarmed Discovery- where people who were aware of the problem, now see that it is something that needs to addressed (i.e. 9/11 & Katrina).
- Stage 3: Awareness of the costs of making significant progress- this is the stage where people see price tags on all of the programs that were implemented to address the problem.
- Stage 4: Interest gradually fades- there are two camps in this stage, camp A is the one that becomes bored with the amount of time a "fix" takes. Whereas camp B just gets bored and moves onto something else.
- Stage 5: The post problem stage- this is where we find the majority of Homeland Security and Emergency Management at today. Continuing to prepare for situations we hope we never have to face, while dealing with the public that doesn't quite understand the importance of what we do.

In my mind, to be a true Meta-Leader, one must not only be able to lead leaders during a crisis, but also must motivate the populace to remain attentive and continue to prepare their families and communities during times limited disaster activity.