When dealing with a crisis, worry can be a major mental block in getting the problem solved. Here are some fundamental facts you should know about worry. One, if you want to avoid worry, do what Sir William Osler did. Live in day-tight compartments. Don’t stew about the future, just live each day until bedtime. Two, the next time trouble with a capital T backs you up in a corner, try the magic formula of Willis H. Carrier:
A. Ask yourself, “What is the worst that can possibly happen if I can’t solve this problem?”
B. Prepare yourself mentally to accept the worst, if necessary.
C. Calmly try to improve upon the worst, which you’ve already mentally agreed to accept.
Three, remind yourself of the exorbitant price you can pay for worry in terms of your health. Those who do not know how to fight worry die young.
—Dale Carnegie
In the years since John Kennedy occupied the White House, there have been many revelations about him and his administration. Some have been unflattering, yet the vast majority of Americans still admire John Kennedy highly. Any shortcomings or indiscretions seem insignificant in comparison to his successes. In particular, one very dramatic occasion stands out. In the fall of 1962, the United States came closer than ever before to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. During the Cuban missile crisis Kennedy showed real leadership, courage, and creative thinking under the most stressful circumstances imaginable. Today, when people think of John Kennedy, his conduct during those thirteen days in October is one of the first things they remember. This was a defining moment for Kennedy and for his administration. Along with his tragic death, this is what we most remember John Kennedy for.
With this in mind, we can discover an important truth about leadership and the evaluation of leaders. Very simply put, leaders are defined and judged by how they respond in a crisis. The worse the crisis is, the more important the leader’s behavior becomes. Winston Churchill was considered a brilliant failure until the outbreak of World War II. Lee Iacocca was not much more than a fired auto executive until Chrysler needed someone to hold the company together. We can still view a crisis as a genuine threat that has to be addressed, but we also should realize that it’s an opportunity to practice leadership mastery. It is a chance to really test yourself in the big leagues, and the purpose of this session is to help you bat a thousand.
In any crisis, whether personal or professional, there are principles that a leader should put into action. While doing so cannot guarantee that things will turn out exactly as you would like, it can guarantee that you will display real leadership mastery. Very often, your initiative to solve this crisis can certainly help you avoid similar problems in the future.
In the late ’80s, there was an emergency aboard a wide-body jetliner making a cross-country flight. The plane was somewhere over Iowa when suddenly and without warning many vital control systems failed. It was a catastrophe, pure and simple. The damage to the plane’s internal system could hardly have been more severe. Flying the plane in that condition was like trying to steer a car by opening and closing the doors. An emergency landing was requested at a remote airfield in Iowa, and the plane began its perilous descent.
Owing to the pilot’s almost incredible skill and performance, the plane made a crash landing with a minimal number of injuries. Although some people did lose their lives, it was a miracle that anyone survived at all. The minutes that passed between the start of the emergency and the landing could hardly have been more terrifying. Later, however, when conversations between the pilot and the control tower were broadcast on national news, it sounded like a very calm chat between two casual acquaintances. There were no raised voices, and no indication of apparent stress, anger, or fear.
This way of responding in a crisis, of course, is drilled into airline personnel throughout their training and their careers. It’s a mark of professionalism, but it’s also the most effective form of behavior from a practical standpoint. So, keep this first principle of crisis leadership firmly in mind. Getting excited almost never helps, and keeping calm almost always does.
As a leader, you must train yourself to resist instinctive emotional responses. Force yourself to think positively, even if you don’t believe your own reassurances. Very few situations are as bad as they seem in the moment. Even if a situation is as bad as it seems, your best course is to behave otherwise. Act as if everything is under control and chances are, it soon will be. Quietly ask yourself, “What can I do to make this situation better? How quickly should I act? Who can be of help? After I make the first move, what are the second, third, and fourth things I should do? How can I measure the effectiveness of the steps I take?”
A young woman we’ll call Patty used questions like that to lead herself through the most intense crisis of her life. The day after a routine physical checkup, Patty’s phone rang. Her physician wanted her back in his office as soon as possible to run some more tests. It seemed the tests already taken during routine exams suggested that Patty might have uterine cancer.
Patty was devastated by the news. A thousand dire thoughts ran through her head. And when the follow-up tests confirmed the cancer diagnosis, there was a moment when Patty totally collapsed inside. But she had always been a strong person, a person who understood the need for self-leadership in times of crisis. Soon Patty began to pull herself together.
She began asking questions of her doctor. She started doing research on her own. And gradually, the real facts of her situation began to emerge. At that stage, her illness had a 95 percent cure rate. She focused on the strong probability that, come what may, the odds of survival were strongly in her favor. Even after eighteen months of drug therapy failed to eliminate the disease, Patty concentrated on the positive aspects of her situation.
She had to undergo surgery, but at least surgery was possible and would probably be effective. “I told myself to have faith, and not to let fear destroy me,” Patty said. “I put myself in the mind-set that I could handle anything that life brought.” Fortunately for Patty, her surgery was successful. Four years later, there was no evidence of disease. And as Patty puts it, “Every day, I face life anew.”
There are many ways of training yourself to react calmly. There are many techniques for diffusing the ticking bomb that a real crisis seems to represent. Dale Carnegie used to speak of putting a stop loss order on your stress. A stop loss order is what happens on Wall Street when a trader automatically sells a stock if it falls below a certain price. As a leadership master, you can learn to do the same thing with stress, pressure, and anxiety.
In a crisis, for example, ask yourself this question, “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” Thankfully, most of our problems are not really of the life-and-death variety. So you may blow an account, you may miss a payment, or you may even lose your job. Will that be unpleasant? Absolutely. Is it worth the price of stress? Absolutely not.
Identifying the worst possible outcome and facing it squarely does not mean you have to accept it. It does not mean lying back and welcoming failure, especially when others depend on you to lead them toward success. It just means telling yourself, “Yes, I suppose I could accept that outcome if I really had to, but I still have no intention of letting it happen.”
By definition, a serious challenge seems overwhelming when it’s confronted full force and head-on. If we stand at the foot of a mountain and look up at the top, it can seem a long way off. It can seem impossible that we’ll ever get there. Perhaps, then, instead of looking at the top of the mountain, we should try looking down at the ground. We should watch ourselves take one step first, and then another. This is really the only way of avoiding the sudden paralysis that can set in when a crisis suddenly looms. As a leader, you’ve got to reduce the dimensions of a crisis to a manageable size. You’ve got to break it down into bite-size pieces for your own benefit, and for the people who depend on you.
This is such a fundamental concept that it deserves to be emphasized. How do computers perform their calculations with such incredible speed? They reduce even the most complicated problems to a series of zeros and ones, a sequence of tiny calculations that can add up to something very big. In much the same way, when planes fly across the country, the flight plan is a list of small jumps: from Chicago to Des Moines, from Des Moines to Fort Dodge, and so on, all the way to San Francisco.
The Scottish poet and novelist Robert Lewis Stevenson expressed this idea very poetically. He wrote, “Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely until the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.”
It is possible, of course, that even after you have broken a crisis down into its component parts, you may still feel stymied. This does happen and at this point, you may have to recognize something that many people don’t like to admit. Not every problem has a complete and total solution. Much as we might wish otherwise, square pegs do not fit in round holes.
Despite the best efforts of some of the brightest minds in history, there is no way to turn lead into gold. There is no way to square the circle. There is no way to invent a perpetual motion machine.
The point is this: If you cannot see a way to solve a problem, can you at least see a way to solve part of it? Even in the direst crisis, there is almost always something proactive that you can do. Focus your attention on finding that something, and then do it, by all means. You can never tell where it might lead.
The late Peter Drucker, famed author and philosopher of management wisdom, made a very interesting statement in this regard. “Good managers and good leaders,” Drucker said, “are not problem-oriented people. They are by nature oriented toward opportunities rather than problems. Even when things seem really bleak, they focus on what can be done rather than what can’t.”
For these kinds of leaders, a crisis is like a crossword puzzle. There may be many words that they do not know, but even if they know only one, they realize that this is a step in the right direction. So take that small step, by all means.
Research on decision making shows that most people consider far too few options, especially when the stakes are very high. There are always positive things you can do, but seeing them is likely to take some focused attention.
Here’s a rule of thumb to help with this: In a crisis, discipline yourself to make a list of no less than fifty proactive things you can do. Make no mistake, there are more than fifty if you really get yourself to think about it. Ask yourself, “What are the small changes I can make that will benefit the situation? Who are the people I can call? How can I minimize the damage? What can I do that will reveal the silver lining even within the blackest cloud?
1. In responding to crisis, it is wise to resist emotionality. Consider a crisis situation that you find yourself in (or one that you worry may come about). Rate your anxiety level about the situation on a scale from one to ten.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Not worried | Very worried | ||||||||
2. Now ask yourself the following questions in response to the situation you considered in question #1: “What can I do to make this situation better? How quickly should I act? Who can be of help? After I make the first move, what are the second, third, and fourth things I should do? How can I measure the effectiveness of the steps I take?” Once you have applied the five questions above to the situation, write out an action plan.
3. Whenever you have a crisis on your hands, you have an opportunity to be proactive and prove yourself. In a crisis, you should ideally discipline yourself to make a list of no less than fifty proactive things you can do. Make that list with the above-mentioned crisis now.
4. Now that you have proactively worked on your crisis (in questions 1, 2, and 3), make note of how you feel in response to this process. Rate yourself again on the scale from one to ten below. Has your anxiety lowered since you did the exercises above?
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Not worried | Very worried | ||||||||