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Three Sayings to Remember
One of the best lessons I’ve learned — especially from my time in uniform service — was the importance of staying calm under pressure. A lot of my US Navy SEAL friends have two great sayings I like. One is “Calm breeds calm.” Whether you’re a very junior leader in your organization or you’re the most senior leader in your organization, the people around you tend to follow your guide. So if you remain calm during adversity, they will too. If you start to freak out and you start to get really outwardly nervous or concerned, then they will as well. The other US Navy SEAL saying that I really like that goes along with that is “Calm is smooth, smooth is steady, and steady is fast.” Sometimes your first inclination is to do a lot of things as fast as possible to try to overcome that challenge and move on. Usually it’s best just to take a quick pause, assess the situation, and then make a good plan of attack to overcome it. Einstein said, if asked to save the world in 60 minutes, how would he do that? He said, “Well, I’m going to study the problem for 55 minutes and then take the last five minutes to actually act.”
And so I think a lot of times that is how successful leaders — people who are successful in their careers — behave. They want to make sure that they have all the right information, that they’re getting that truth data as much as possible. And then moving forward with it is a corollary that goes along with it as well. And that is, “Emotion is the enemy of good judgment.” A lot of times it’s very easy in the heat of the moment to get kind of pulled in emotionally. And while, of course, having emotions is good, I think if you’re facing a critical decision, a lot of times it’s better just to kind of step back from the situation, think about it from maybe a third person observer’s view and say, “Okay, well, if I’m faced with all the realities of this decision, what’s really the best way forward? Not for me in this moment, but what’s the best decision I can make as a leader for the organization, for my team, for the people I work around?” And that usually is going to put you in good stead.
Repetition, Repetition
The military is very good at training. We do things relentlessly and we do them over and over and over again because our saying is “Repetition teaches the donkey.” If you do it a million times, well, I guarantee you that million and one time that it’s required, you can just do it from rote memory. And I’ve seen that because I’ve straddled both worlds. I had about two decades of experience with the United States military, but then I stepped out into the private sector and I’ve worked with a wide variety of institutions and of various types of leaders. What we did as fighter pilots is we used a training simulator. It’s basically kind of a mock up of a cockpit and you have computer screens in front of you, but you can place individuals in these high stress situations. Maybe in a simulated experience, your right engine explodes. And so you have to handle those emergency action items right off the bat from your memory. And the first time you do it, it’s a challenge. But then the second, the third, the hundredth time you do it, you realize you can do it pretty quickly without even thinking about it.
It allows you to elevate your consciousness. It then frees you up to expand that aperture and to be thinking about the environment around you. So I’m freeing up those mental resources to say, “Okay, well this is happening and I’m handling it, but what else is going on around me? What’s that bigger picture and how does this fit into it?” So I can actually be more effective.
Reading Your Team’s Emotions
Something that goes hand in glove with remaining calm under pressure is the ability to accurately assess what’s happening around you specifically with your team or the other members that you might be in a room or on a remote call with. So as a leader, a lot of times, what you want to do for your team is you want to create kind of this element of psychological safety. And to do so, you have to create this environment where everyone feels comfortable. This is where this concept of emotional quotient comes into play — your EQ. You need to be able to develop the skillset of reading others around you. So there’s two things you can do. The first is, you can observe body language, facial expressions. There’s a lot of tangible cues. You can use it to determine whether what you’re saying is being received effectively, or maybe someone’s dismissive and their body language will really help you to determine how you’re being received. And if someone seems like they’re not being receptive, you can change your approach so that you can reach them better.
And the second is cultivate this type of environment of open and honest feedback. One thing that that I did as a senior leader was, I would give a large presentation, maybe to 200, 300 people. I would explain what we were doing in the world, why we were doing it, where we were going next. And I would kind of relay the information out. And then I would purposely, after the meeting was over, I would go and find, you know, two or three individuals. And they would rank in seniority, they would rank in gender, and I would purposely find three different types of people to say, “Hey, you know, what’d you think of the meeting? Can you tell me three things you took away from this?” And what you found is that not only did you challenge them to come up with three things, but you would learn a lot from it. So, are you being an effective communicator? Can they effectively tell you, yes, these are the three things I took from it. You can nod your head and say, that’s spot on.
And then of course, if at the end of the day, you still felt like you weren’t that effective, once again, you can pull someone aside and say, “Hey, I didn’t think that landed the way I wanted to. How would you have conveyed that information that would’ve been more effective for you?” That not only helps them to better understand that you care as a leader, but you also build rapport with them by asking their opinion and their questions. And of course you can learn and grow from every single opportunity. So by engaging in a very active and real sense, you’ll not only improve as a communicator, but you’ll also help reinforce with your team that you want to create a trusted environment where everyone should be safe to operate.