Leading under Fire

I don’t believe leadership is best served by the parallels drawn to war and sports. It doesn’t capture the sense of service and eldership at the heart of leadership. But I do see one reason why military and sports metaphors are so often used to describe leadership challenges. War and sport have in common the need to develop mental toughness, so what you learn can be done under terrific psychological and physical stress. For an athlete, learning what to do is only part of the preparation; learning to do it on game day is another. That’s the difference between just being athletic, and being a top competitor. The professional athlete’s training includes psychological toughness by simulating game day conditions: high stakes, bad calls, mean crowds, horrible weather, and ruthless opponents. Because every athlete and coach knows that once you cross a threshold of stress, learning and thinking goes out the window. If you get triggered by stress, choking is inevitable.

For leaders, game day is everyday. It’s not the opponent, the ref, or the crowd that creates the stress, but, as I wrote in my earlier post, The fog of war, the pressures of the role, the controversies you’ve been chosen to resolve, the swamp of politics and intrigue surrounding you, and the isolation and lack of trust in the leadership position. So why doesn’t leadership training simulate the fog of war, the psychological and emotional stress that leadership inevitably encounters?

What leaders, athletes, soldiers, and anyone working under fire have in common is the need to learn how to perform under stress. First responders, police, emergency medical teams, firefighters, those who are first to arrive on the scene of a crisis, are trained to perform in high stress situations. When I worked on the Crisis Intervention Training program for the Portland Police Bureau, we used a method based on the Crisis Cycle.

The crisis cycle shows what happens to us under duress. In a so-called normal frame of mind, we talk calmly, use reason and logic. We’re capable of answering questions, thinking abstractly, i.e., imagining what ifs, thinking about the future, reminiscing about the past, using metaphors and making jokes. Abstraction means you can think about concepts and ideas not in the immediate present. Critical capacities for leadership. But as our stress levels rise, and adrenalin and cortisol start pumping, our cognitive abilities reduce. Heading up the curve of the crisis cycle, our thinking narrows dramatically to what is immediately in front of us. It’s tunnel vision. We lose the big picture because our brain is going into survival mode: focusing on the immediate danger and blocking out anything peripheral to the task of staying alive. When our flight/fight instincts are engaged, we can’t reflect, we can only act. This narrowing of attention is perfect for hand to hand combat or running from a mastodon. But for a leader, tunnel vision is a disaster. Unfortunately, it happens all too often.

While some leadership training includes crisis management, it doesn’t include a focus on the emotional and psychological stress of game day. But it should. Because even a slight raise in your stress hormone puts you somewhere on the crisis cycle, and has a big impact on your ability to think. It would be a terrific leadership training that simulated the psychological and emotional stress of the leadership role. The M.A. program on Conflict Facilitation and Organizational Change at Process Work Institute includes this in our curriculum but I don’t see it widely done. But here are my Top Ten Tips for Leading under Stress, undoubtedly ready for revision as soon as you finish reading. How about adding yours to the list?

1. Expand your boundary conditions

There may be a mathematical formulation for this one. Your stress response is in direct proportion to how narrowly you define yourself. This self-definition, or boundary condition, is a limit you place on yourself. It determines what you allow yourself to do, think, and feel. Whatever you don’t want to experience, becomes a stress trigger. Interactions, emotions, responses or events you don’t or can’t accept or tolerate, lie outside your boundary condition, and thus knock you off balance. The wider your boundary conditions are, the more flexibility you can maintain.

For instance, as kids, we saw this with our teachers and parents. You knew what buttons you could push to get a rise out of adults. Without perhaps intellectually understanding it, you knew when your teacher felt insecure about his or her intelligence. When someone asked a wise-guy question, the teacher would get flustered, annoyed, upset. But a teacher who was comfortable with his or her intelligence, could easily admit not knowing the answer to something, and would see if anyone else knew it.

Whatever part of your identity you’re trying to protect or hide is an Achilles heel that will eventually fell you. So, to protect yourself, you have to identify what you don’t like or want to hide about yourself, and then open up to it. Sounds simple. But that’s why politicians admit they smoked pot (and some even inhaled). They’re opening up their boundary conditions to stave off the eventual attack. If you want to be in a public role, your first task is to befriend those parts of yourself which you want to hide or don’t like. Knowing yourself, your triggers, your strengths and weaknesses is the best defense against getting knocked out.

2. Don’t let your role define you

Another boundary condition that can knock you off balance is the boundary condition related to your role. Your role includes responsibilities, pressures, outcomes, expectations, and reputation. You can’t change the job or role but you do have freedom in how you enact it. The more constrained you feel by what the job tells you to do, the less flexibility you have, and the more likely you’ll get triggered by the stress of the role.

When I first started teaching, I noticed I would get grumpy with students who weren’t doing well. I had to remind myself that this was the very reason they were learning: to get better at something. Sounds obvious. My mood was completely inappropriate and unhelpful. But it was a frustration not with the students, but with the role constraints. When I reflected on it, I realized I was grumpy because I resented being in the position of having to deliver bad feedback. I was resisting a part of my role. Parents do that too. Some of their anger at their children is not only about the child’s behavior, but also resentment at having to discipline them. In my case, I felt trapped by a too narrow definition of my role and didn’t have a pattern for how to be corrective or challenging in a way that felt right to me.

I could have looked to a really good customer service representative for help in learning how to deliver bad news. The best are absolute masters. When I call up complaining that my gadget doesn’t work, even if my warranty has expired, the representative steps outside the limits of her role, not in what she says, but in how she says it. She has been taught to identify with my pain, not just with her role: “I’m so sorry, Ma’am. Let me see if there’s something else we can do for you.”  She steps outside the boundary condition of her role, not by changing the protocol of her role, but through her tone of voice, empathy, and efforts to help me. She becomes bigger than her role, without negating its constraints.

For a leader who has to deliver bad news, this is a critical point. Having to fire someone, or make changes, or propose a new direction is easier to do when you aren’t limited emotionally by the tasks you have to perform. I discussed in my post, Fog of War, how I didn’t communicate as often and as much as I wanted to. In retrospect, I can see that it was due to the boundary conditions of my role. I didn’t know how I could combine two seemingly contradictory positions in one role: putting forth a direction AND being open to input. My boundary conditions around the role were too limited, in that I didn’t feel free to do both.

3. Your limits aren’t personal – give them back

Limitations aren’t personal. They belong to the job. If the organization hires you, your limits are part of the package. Or, at least the limits you can’t surmount without doing damage to yourself. If you are a teacher trying to manage 35 students, and can’t manage it, your limitations reflect the larger problem in the school system. You and your class are a symptom of a bigger problem. If you are a new parent, and you desperately need a break, even if your baby has to cry for 30 minutes, and the latest child rearing literature says you’ll injure your child’s attachment process if you let her cry for more than 3 minutes, pushing past your limit won’t help your baby. Your impatience, frustration and anger will be expressed in your tone, movements and touch; your baby will get the message anyway.

Pushing past limits is unsustainable. It’s using up nonrenewable resources- your own – and puts you in a dangerous place. You work beyond your capacity; your body starts to break down; you require more and more substances to stay awake, which over time diminish your thinking and energy. You make poor decisions, snap at people, forget important things, and lose your patience. Recent studies on presenteeism (Harvard Business Review, October 2004) analyze sleep deprivation among workers show that it makes good sense and good financial sense as well, to respect your physical limits.

The overall outcome of every situation has to include you. It’s the triple bottom line: profit, planet, and people. And ‘people’ means you. If you succeed at a task, at the cost of your health, it’s not a success. I was working on a project last year with a big deadline. I could feel the time pressure begin to affect me. My blood pressure went up. I couldn’t relax, got grumpy and irritable. One day, I realized, “If it doesn’t happen by the deadline, then it’s not meant to be for the whole organization.” Obviously, this could be used as a massive excuse. But I knew it was true because I know I am a very good worker. I have my shortcomings, but working under deadline is not one of them. So I knew if I couldn’t do it in time, it just had to take longer. It turned out to be an organizational wide limit; we had to push the deadline back because even if I got it done, the organization wouldn’t have the capacity to run it.

If you push past limits, you might not only endanger yourself, but others as well. Many police forces have stopped permitting high speed car chases. The overall cost is too great. Too many innocent deaths and injuries occurred. In the last ten years, three major race riots started in the wake of a high speed car chase, including the Rodney King riots. The officers are so high up on the stress cycle, their own tendency towards violence is too great.

This point could also be called Don’t Be a Hero. Laurence Gonzales wrote a book called Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. He interviews people who survived shipwrecks, catastrophes, and being lost in the wilderness, and asked, why do some survive, while others don’t? Is there a trait that increases the chance of survival? One of his findings is that the “macho,” the classic hero archetype doesn’t do well in survival situations. They overestimate themselves. They push past limits. Actually, they don’t just push past them; they don’t even see them. They don’t see reality, just their idealized identity. If you are a hero, and overestimate your abilities you put yourself and others in danger.

4. Perfect practice makes perfect

At the police academy, I heard a chilling story about how important it is to make sure what you practice is exactly what you want to master. In learning how to disarm a suspect, officers practiced in pairs, using role play. One officer would play the suspect pulling a gun, and the other officer played himself. This second officer had to disarm the ‘suspect’ by grabbing the gun from the his hand, and then aiming it back at him. They were instructed to do it several times before swapping roles. The officer would execute the move, grab the gun out of the ‘suspect’s’ hand, and then aim it back at the ‘suspect.’ Then the officer would give the gun back to the officer playing the suspect to do the role play again.

A terrible discovery changed that exercise. On several occasions, officers were shot and killed because they actually returned the weapon to the suspect after disarming him. Obviously, this was not a deliberate or conscious action. Under stress, when your attention narrows, your body takes over and you do what you have trained to do. How well a leader handles highly pressured situations should not be a surprise. Whatever you practice, you will do under pressure. Whatever you don’t practice, you won’t be able to do under pressure.

Practice performing under stress. Role play your worst fears and prepare for them. Prepare for the day you are fired. Practice firing people. Practice being attacked in public, maligned in the press, resisted by your team, and criticized by superiors. Don’t wait for it to happen, and hope you can remember your training when it does. Practice the scenarios you fear the most. Get a coach or advisor and describe to him or her the things that derail you, make you choke, and terrify you. What events would you want to avoid? Simulate them and practice them daily.

5. Align your means with your ends

This one is an oldie, but it’s true: if your journey doesn’t resemble your destination, you never arrive there fully. It’s like the old cliche of the workaholic who slaved away so he could make it to retirement, only to discover that he had ruined his health in the process. His retirement is now convalescence and his dreams for retirement are gone.

The whole journey has to be enjoyable, not just the end. Winning and achieving your goals is a great feeling. But unless the journey contains something innately enjoyable and attractive, it’s not worth it. Even though the business world is all about goals and outcomes, when it comes to stress and performance, being too goal directed is counterproductive. The pressure to get somewhere, to achieve a goal is like looking through a narrow telescope – your vision narrows, and you lose perspective. The martial artist knows that if she starts to obsess on winning, she’s lost her center. Same thing in sports. When the focus narrows to winning, the athlete is in big trouble. Those trite comments athletes say in interviews, “I just want to do my best, and go out there and have fun,” may be rehearsed, but they reflect a truth of sports psychology: focus on what you have to do to win, but not on winning itself.

The means and the ends really are related because how we get somewhere determines the quality of being there. So the way we approach our goals should be a microcosm of the goal itself. For instance, if our goal is to get into college, then we have to study as if we are already in college. Because once we are in college, how will we be able to study and manage our time if we didn’t learn it in the process of getting there? If our goal is to serve in public office then the way we run for office should mimic the way we want to serve in office. If our methods of campaigning aren’t congruent with the way we will be in office, we undermine our credibility. If I want my children to be independent, and make great choices as adults, then telling them what to do all the time won’t produce good decision making as adults.

6. Practice Dying

Everyone needs a way to detach. Detaching means reconnecting with the bigger picture – remembering the forest when all you can see are the trees. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly talks about flow, the state of mind in which you are totally immersed in what you are doing. You lose track of time, feel completely at one with what you are doing. It is the ultimate form of enjoyment. Flow is when you are performing at your peak. But you can’t get to flow by gritting your teeth, furrowing your brow and thinking hard about the problems in front of you. Flow requires an inner balance, some kind of detachment, so the stress of the moment doesn’t knock you off balance, but instead, raises your level of alertness and focus.

Detaching means dropping out, temporarily, from what my teacher calls, consensus reality. Arny Mindell says that dealing with life only at the level of consensus reality is depleting and depressing. Focusing only on the details, on the task, or the immediate, everyday world with its conflicts, people, meetings, to-do lists is depressing. It makes us serious and gloomy, and blocks out the kind of awareness our minds need for creativity, innovation, and longevity in our job. Remembering the spiritual, emotional, irrational parts of existence is a direct recharge of our psychological batteries. And there are numerous ways to get there. Faith is for many people a way to do this. Some people need breathing exercises, or time alone. Some people work on their dreams, or have a coach or counselor to cool down. Plato said, practice dying. Consult with the you on your death bed, how to handle each crisis. The you who is already finished with what your are doing now is a much wiser and well balanced you.

7. Have a confidant with little stake in the outcome and absolutely no interest in your job.

One of the things that helped me last year was having a trustworthy confidant. Sometimes itâ??s a coach or counselor, or a mentor. Sometimes, it’s a number 2 person in the organization. Or sometimes it’s a friend. If you’re a leader, you need someone in whom you can confide, who can help you when you are stuck. Now, this sounds simple, but someone who can help you is as rare as hen’s teeth. Most people – even when they think they are helping you – are not helping you. Telling you what THEY would do is not help. A lot of people – and I’m guilty of this too – use a request for help as a way to slip in their agenda, promote their idea, or remind you that they would be better at your job than you are. And the truth is, it’s dead easy to tell leaders what to do, because when you’re not in the pressured leadership position, itâ??s a cinch. Just turn on any of the news programs, and there’s no shortage of people telling you what they think leaders should do.

Giving help means finding out, first and foremost, why the person needs help. Why don’t they already know the next step? If you don’t know where to go next, it’s not because you lack the knowledge. It’s because you’re somehow stuck. A great helper will help you find out why, how and where you’re stuck, which will inevitably turn up a solution.

The gold in every organization is such a person. Everyone focuses on the leadership position, but the team, the advisors, the Number Two people who can problem solve with you, listen to your worries, and help you find solutions are vastly underestimated. While the leader gets credit for being visionary, the number two person should get more credit for being practical and grounded. And one of their practical talents is being very, very straight-  sometimes deadly straight – with you. But because they harbor no secret longing for your position, their advice, even when brutally honest, is easier to take. It’s not infused with resentment or rivalry.

8. Make your mistakes public before others do.

It’s well known that creativity and innovation require an atmosphere that rewards people for making mistakes. There’s no creativity if you can’t risk making mistakes. But can leaders also make mistakes? Can they also have the freedom to learn and grow publicly?

Leaders’ failings become public, eventually. But it’s often a process of shame, exposure and blame. And when leaders do admit failure or mistakes, it’s often with an apology or an admission of regret, which, while appropriate, contributes to the view that leaders should not fail; they should be infallible. I think this reflects on our still somewhat feudal attitude to power: we don’t tolerate failure in those with higher rank. But an atmosphere that is hostile to mistakes and learning leads people to hide their mistakes. That’s dangerous. I know from having consulted on ethical problems of counselors, that when ethics policies are too severe they have the reverse effect of creating less ethical practice. Counselors are less likely to seek out supervision and help for fear of being punished.

This topic is indeed worth a post unto itself, because there is some glee and revenge at play when we see people in high rank take a fall. And undoubtedly looking at our history of tyranny and oppression this reaction must have a justification. But unless we accord those in high rank the same freedom to make mistakes that we give ourselves, and unless those in high rank show how to learn publicly, then we continue along that feudal path of deifying leaders. Holding them to higher standards makes them the force for change. It would be refreshing, and one of the hopes of this blog, to have a forum where mistakes, failures, screw ups and such could be openly shared and learned from. And not only from the place of humility and remorse, but with a spirit of celebration that something was tried and learning happened.

9 & 10: Find & measure your self-worth somewhere else, not in your job!

I’m not sure these are two points or one. But they are hard to pull apart, so I put them together as #9 and #10 â?? finding and measuring your sense of self-worth.

Number 9 can be summed up as follows: the more we put our ego on the line, the more stressed out we get. It’s human nature to attach our self-worth to our performance. But self worth is much more than performance. Naturally some of our self-worth is satisfied through work. It’s a terrific privilege to feel that through work we can contribute to society, help others, use our creativity, and influence the world around us. And if it’s a high profile job with a lot of glamour and acclaim, itâ??s even harder to let go of the sense of self worth that comes from our role.

But when our self-worth is attached primarily to things outside our control – a job, our performance on any given day, others’ evaluation of our performance – it is a fragile self worth indeed. A more enduring and stable sense of self worth comes from those things which cannot be taken from us. Discovering what contributes to our true self-worth should be one of our most serious endeavors in life. The compass for our behavior and actions in this lifetime can be found using a retrospective analysis: on our deathbeds, what will feel most proud of? What values did we live by and model for others? What are we happiest that we accomplished?

That’s not just how to find it, but how to measure it as well. How well are we doing, relative to our internally meaningful standards? John Wooden, oft quoted basketball coach, said, “Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.” We each have abilities, quirks, talents and weaknesses. Altogether, these comprise a personality blueprint unlike anyone else. What I need to accomplish in this life time can’t be measured against anything but this blueprint, and what I am measuring is how much of my inner blueprint I have managed to live out loud.

This is why performance management is such a messy business. There’s very little we can improve about ourselves that doesn’t find an echo within. We just can’t get motivated to attain great heights based on what another determines is valuable. My work as a facilitator, trainer and leader puts me in the line of constant feedback. People offer their opinions frequently. “Gee, that was good,” they say, or, “I really disagreed with what you said,” and often not that politely. It’s always useful to hear what people think, but being too open to someone’s praise – or criticism – I’ve discovered, isn’t helpful. I start to orient myself to values and benchmarks which may not be my own. I used to love praise and positive feedback. I’d say, “Thank you,” or “I’m glad you liked it,” when someone gave me positive feedback. Now I say, “What did you like about it?” because unless I know the benchmark they use to rate my performance it has no meaning for me. What someone else thinks is good about me is usually a reflection of their values, not mine.

Sometimes this mis-measurement of ourselves explodes in the form of a mid-life crisis, the breakdown of an inner measurement system. We created a set goals and tasks based on what’s expected of us. If we are trying to succeed on a path without a full inner consensus, we’ll eventually lose the power to sustain this direction. Achieving goals requires a deep and enduring love for what we are doing.

Well, it’s a start. It’s not a full curriculum, but is a beginning for thinking about leading under fire, game day conditions, and managing the fog of war. What about numbers 11, 12, 13? Add your tips and help create a new kind of leader.