Leaders navigate a flood of information, learning constantly and synthesizing all of it to guide and encourage people each day. Add the anxiety and emotion generated by recent, rapidly-evolving national and global events and we have an extra measure of (personal and professional) leadership challenges.
So how do we stand up to this test? Not by trying to work longer or to cram more information into our heads.
Actually, we need a little of the opposite.
Right now – we could do with the best leadership possible – for our organizations, companies, units, congregations, teams, work groups, families … and country. I mean people who can evaluate inputs thoughtfully and make responsible determinations – not to simply yield to ‘conventional thinking’ or what ‘everyone else is doing’. This is harder to do than ever when we are constantly marinated in other peoples’ ideas with a 24/7 news cycle/feeds, instant notifications, commentary shows and social media.
Today’s evolving situations may require a leader to focus on an urgent issue without losing sight of the big picture. It may even demand the moral courage to challenge conventional thinking and take calculated risks. This balance of perspective, imagination and inner strength is simply not available to a busy, multi-tasking and distracted leader.
If you are a leader who aspires to perform at a high level in a high stress environment, you must find time for solitude:
- Alone
- No head phones, no interruptions.
- To think things through – really concentrate.
- Long
enough to marshal the incoming data points, emotions and thoughts.
- To filter some
- To form ideas and turn them over in your mind, testing them, generating more.
- Then imagining the coming hours and days.
This could be 15 minutes a day, it could be an hour. But if you are leading in a crisis, you’ll need to develop this discipline – to step away from the fray and be alone with your thoughts.
Try it one time and you will find yourself with a measure of perspective and composure that you simply cannot access on days when you dive right in.
If you don’t think you have time for solitude and thinking, look at it this way. If you are maxed out on multitasking and tactical distractions, you simply will not have the mental capacity to evaluate new challenges with detachment. You may even become a net negative – actually harming the people that you mean to nurture. Or, best case, you will simply “just do enough” and guide them in following the herd, doing what everyone else is doing, because you will not have prepared yourself adequately to respond creatively to disruptions.
You (We) Must Be Better.
Years ago, I stumbled upon something that worked for me. I was unexpectedly assigned to run a troubled but talented technology organization. Replacing a leader and founder who was dismissed in a controversial acquisition, I was seen as an interloper of sorts. There were serious business challenges from the first day. To make the situation more interesting, the new role was an unpleasant two-hour drive from my house each day.
During the first week, I had a particularly bad commute one morning and just sat in my car in silence for 15 minutes to cool down before entering the building. At one point, I pulled out a notepad and jotted a few things down. I unexpectedly found that this helped me – a lot.
Eventually, sitting in silence each day with a notepad became a crisis management ritual for me.
Every situation is different, but my time-in-silence exercise looks a little like this:
- Remind myself of big picture leadership context – my larger objectives / longer term
- Think about things that I may have been missing that I need to focus on
- Ask the big question: Who do I need to be today? What is my best behavior?
- Imagine situations that can go wrong today….and how will I respond?
- Place myself in good humor. And get moving.
Later in my career, having read books like “Excellent Sheep” by William Deresiewicz (also look for the transcript of his outstanding West Point Lecture) and biographies of people like Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Abraham Lincoln and others, I came to see that some sort of solitude ‘ritual’ is a mainstay for many leaders in times of crisis.
Please give it a try. The people you lead deserve your very best performance….and they need it now.
Start with 15 minutes tomorrow. I really believe it will help. Good luck and let me know how it goes.