Leading a team through a major incident
Take command of a significant operational incident: declare it, assign roles so the leader coordinates rather than fixes, keep a live incident record and decision log, set an update rhythm for staff and stakeholders, hand over command explicitly, look after people, and run a blameless review with owned actions. Life-safety emergencies follow your emergency plan and the emergency services first.
- Level
- Advanced
- Length
- About 55 minutes
- Contents
- 3 lessons · 1 video · final exam
- Status
- Published · updated 1 Oct 2026
Skills you'll practise
- Decide when to declare an incident and take or assign command
- Assign incident roles (commander, operations, communications, scribe) and keep the commander out of hands-on fixing
- Maintain a live incident record and decision log, and send structured updates on a set rhythm
- Hand over command explicitly with a briefing and confirmed acknowledgment
- Run a blameless post-incident review that produces owned, dated actions
Course outline
- 1.Leading a team through a major incidentVideo · 3 min
- 2.Declare it and organizeLesson · 18 min
- 3.Running the incidentLesson · 19 min
- 4.Standing down and the blameless reviewLesson · 18 min
- 5.Leading a team through a major incident: knowledge checkKnowledge check · 15 questions
- 6.Final exam7 questions · passing it completes the course, so people who already know the material can test out
Sources it draws on
The lessons and questions are written from these references, so learners can go back to the original.
- Google SRE book, chapter 14: Managing Incidents
- Google SRE book, chapter 15: Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
- PagerDuty Incident Response documentation: Different Roles
- FEMA: NIMS Components (Incident Command System)
- General people-leadership practice for team leads and managers
See it with your own jobs and topics
Tell us about your team and we'll walk you through setup, from choosing jobs to your first skills check.