Tell me about the hardest thing about your job?

One challenging part of my role is establishing good relationships and communications quickly and effectively at an incident. I must remain calm, assertive and be clear on sharing information and obtaining it. I must build a working relationship fast as in times of incident there can be no barriers in finding a solution. Sometimes in the early days of my career this could be tough.

My coping mechanism for overcoming this is my 6 golden rules for incident interaction. The overriding principle is, be confident.

1. Understand the person or teams intentions. They will be there to help also.
2. Get some perspective from them. They might have more experience.
3. Let everyone know where you are coming from. You have a job also.
4. Build rapport. Being on the same level really helps.
5. Treat everyone with respect.
6. Focus on what can be actioned. Try to jointly get things done.

Hope that helps.