And I say this proudly as an emergency manager who tries to do everything.
I’ve built programs, written plans, developed training, designed exercises, coordinated responses, and developed external communications. I’ve also mopped the floor of a shelter.
Like many of my colleagues, I’ve learned to figure things out because the work needed to get done, and there wasn’t always someone else to do it. There’s a certain pride that comes with being resourceful, adaptable, and willing to take on whatever the situation demands. I don’t think that’s something we should abandon. But I’ve also started to question whether our ability to do so much has unintentionally reinforced the expectation that we should.
Just because we can wear every hat doesn’t mean we should.
The Emergency Management Generalist
Emergency management is an extraordinarily broad profession. Depending on where we work, we may be responsible for hazard assessments, emergency operations planning, continuity, training, exercises, incident management, recovery, grants, public information, stakeholder engagement, and organizational resilience. Sometimes all in the same week. And that’s before we consider the growing expectations around data analysis, technology, financial justification, program evaluation, and executive engagement.
We’ve built a profession that values the ability to move between disciplines, understand complex systems, and connect people and organizations that might otherwise operate independently. Those are important skills. In fact, I’d argue they’re among our greatest strengths. But there’s a difference between understanding enough about a discipline to coordinate effectively and possessing the specialized expertise needed to perform that discipline at a high level.
We don’t expect an incident commander to personally perform every function within an incident management organization. We recognize that effective response depends on clearly defined responsibilities, specialized knowledge, and people working together toward shared objectives. Yet when it comes to building and sustaining emergency management programs, we often seem far more comfortable with the idea that one person should be able to do it all.
Why?
When Resourcefulness Becomes the Expectation
We’ve all heard the stories. The emergency manager who runs an entire program alone. The practitioner who develops the plan, conducts the training, facilitates the exercise, manages the activation, writes the after-action report, and somehow finds time to prepare next year’s budget. The dedicated EM professional who worked through a disaster for 267 days without a day off. We celebrate these people, and often for good reason.
They’re dedicated. They’re capable. They’re making meaningful contributions under difficult circumstances. But I wonder whether our admiration for their resourcefulness sometimes prevents us from asking a more important question:
Should the success of an emergency management program depend on one person being able to do all of those things?
When we consistently find ways to make insufficient resources work, we can inadvertently demonstrate to organizational leadership that the current arrangement is sustainable. The work gets done. The plans are written. The exercises happen. The emergencies are managed. At least until something changes.
Someone leaves. A major incident occurs while another priority demands attention. A critical responsibility falls outside the individual’s expertise. Or the workload simply exceeds what one person can reasonably sustain. Suddenly, the vulnerability becomes apparent. And it isn’t necessarily a failure of the emergency manager.
It’s a limitation of the way we’ve built the program.
Being Multidisciplinary Should Mean More Than Wearing Multiple Hats
We routinely describe emergency management as multidisciplinary. And it is. Effective emergency management requires us to understand how infrastructure, healthcare, public safety, government, business, transportation, communications, and countless other systems interact.
During an incident, we bring together people with different expertise because no single person or organization has everything needed to manage the situation. But why aren’t we equally intentional about bringing that diversity of expertise into the work we do before an incident?
Consider the challenge of demonstrating the value of preparedness and mitigation investments. We can identify hazards, recognize vulnerabilities, and explain why a particular capability matters. But developing credible estimates of potential consequences, evaluating competing investments, or measuring changes in organizational risk may require expertise in economics, financial analysis, engineering, statistics, or program evaluation.
Those aren’t necessarily skills every emergency manager should be expected to master. They’re skills our programs should be able to access. The same is true of technology, organizational change, communications, behavioral science, and other disciplines that increasingly influence how effectively we prepare for and manage disruption.
The answer isn’t necessarily to make emergency managers better at everything. I think the answer lies in building better teams around them.
Better Teams Don’t Always Mean Bigger Departments
I recognize that suggesting more specialized expertise can sound unrealistic, particularly to practitioners operating in small jurisdictions or organizations with limited budgets. Many emergency management programs are fortunate to have even one dedicated position.
I’m not suggesting that every department needs to hire an economist, engineer, data analyst, communications specialist, and continuity professional. I’m suggesting we rethink what constitutes the emergency management team.
Sometimes that expertise already exists elsewhere in the organization. A finance department may have analytical capabilities that could strengthen risk assessments or investment proposals. Engineering teams may help quantify infrastructure vulnerabilities and evaluate mitigation options. Human resources may contribute expertise in workforce continuity, organizational behavior, and change management. Communications professionals may help translate complex risks into messages that influence decisions and behavior. In other circumstances, expertise may come through partnerships with universities, neighboring jurisdictions, professional associations, consultants, or other organizations.
Emergency management doesn’t need to own every capability, but we should be intentional about identifying the expertise required to achieve our objectives and establishing ways to bring it into the process. And that requires something more deliberate than knowing whom to call when we need a favor. It means building relationships, defining roles, establishing expectations, and integrating those partners into planning and program development before their expertise becomes urgently necessary.
When We Can Grow Our Teams, Let’s Be Intentional
Of course, there are organizations with the resources and opportunity to expand their emergency management teams. And when those opportunities arise, I think we should be more intentional about the positions we create and the expertise we seek.
It’s tempting to build teams around familiar emergency management roles and qualifications. We look for people who can write plans, coordinate exercises, support incident response, and navigate the frameworks that define our profession. Those capabilities matter. But if everyone on the team brings essentially the same skills and experience, are we really building the strongest program possible?
Before creating another position, we should be asking what capabilities are missing, what challenges we’re trying to solve, and what expertise would meaningfully strengthen the team. Maybe the greatest need isn’t another traditional emergency management generalist. Maybe it’s someone with a background in data analytics who can help us evaluate risk and measure program outcomes. Someone with financial or economic expertise who can strengthen our investment decisions. A communications professional who understands how to influence behavior. Or someone with deep experience in organizational change, technology, or program evaluation.
Technical emergency management expertise doesn’t become less important. We do need to be thinking though about how different skills complement one another rather than simply replicating the same competencies across positions.
And it may require us to reconsider some of our hiring practices. Are we so focused on candidates with traditional emergency management backgrounds, specific certifications, or years of experience in the field that we’re overlooking people who could bring valuable expertise from other disciplines?
Could someone without a conventional emergency management career path make our programs stronger? I believe they absolutely could.
But the answer won’t always be to hire someone from outside the profession, either. Sometimes another experienced generalist is exactly what a program needs. Sometimes the gap is leadership capacity, operational experience, or the ability to coordinate across disciplines.
The point is to make those decisions deliberately.
When we have the opportunity to grow our teams, we shouldn’t just ask who can help us do more of what we’re already doing. We should ask who can help us do what we haven’t been able to do well enough.
That’s how we move beyond adding capacity and begin building capability.
The Generalist Still Has an Important Role
None of this diminishes the value of the emergency management generalist. Quite the opposite. Someone still needs to understand how the pieces fit together.
Someone needs to recognize dependencies, identify gaps between organizational functions, facilitate difficult conversations, and help specialists understand how their work contributes to a larger objective. Someone needs to connect technical expertise with operational realities and translate complex information into decisions leaders can act on. That is a meaningful professional capability in its own right. And it’s one that can be undervalued when we measure emergency managers primarily by the number of technical functions they can personally perform.
Perhaps part of our professional maturation involves becoming more comfortable distinguishing between the expertise we need to possess and the expertise we need to bring together. We should understand enough about the disciplines we coordinate to ask informed questions, recognize limitations, and evaluate whether the work is meeting its intended purpose. But we don’t need to be the most technically proficient person in every room. In many cases, our greatest contribution may be making sure the right people are in that room to begin with.
We need generalists who can see the whole picture, specialists who can bring depth where it’s needed, and leaders who know how to bring those capabilities together.
Building Programs That Outlast Us
There’s another dimension to this conversation that I think deserves attention. When a program depends heavily on the knowledge, relationships, and capabilities of one individual, that individual can become indispensable. That may feel like a professional accomplishment. But from an organizational resilience perspective, it should also raise concerns.
What happens when that person takes leave, changes positions, retires, or is unavailable during a major incident? Can someone else carry the work forward? Are responsibilities understood beyond the individual performing them? Have relationships been institutionalized, or do they exist primarily because of one person’s personal network?
And perhaps most importantly, has the organization developed a sustainable capability, or has it simply benefited from an exceptionally capable employee? I’ve spent much of my career building programs and figuring out how to make things work. I understand the satisfaction that comes from creating something where little existed before. But increasingly, I believe one of the most important measures of our success is whether the capabilities we develop can function without us.
That requires documentation, succession planning, shared knowledge, cross-training, and a willingness to distribute responsibility. It also requires resisting the temptation to become the answer to every problem.
Sometimes leadership means doing the work. Sometimes it means creating the conditions for someone else to do it better.
This is also where I see an important connection to a broader conversation about how emergency management professionals grow from performing essential functions to establishing sustainable programs and ultimately influencing organizational direction.
The transition isn’t simply about taking on more responsibility. It’s about changing how we think about our responsibility. At some point, our success has to be measured by more than what we can personally accomplish. It has to include what we’ve enabled others to accomplish, too.
We Can Be Proud of Our Adaptability Without Making It the Standard
I don’t want emergency management to lose its resourcefulness. Our willingness to step outside our formal responsibilities, adapt to unfamiliar circumstances, and do what the mission requires is part of what makes this profession effective.
There will always be moments when the emergency manager needs to roll up their sleeves and do something that wasn’t in the job description.
I’ve done it. I’ll undoubtedly do it again.
But we should be careful not to confuse that willingness with a sustainable operating model. We can celebrate the emergency manager who wears 15 hats while still questioning why the organization expects one person to wear them all.
We can value generalists while recognizing the need for specialized expertise. And we can take pride in our individual contributions while acknowledging that the strongest programs shouldn’t depend on individual heroics.
We don’t need emergency managers who can do everything. We need to build teams that can.
