Sunday 12 June 2011 10:24 pm | Updated: Friday 31 May 2019 11:52 am

The stress test: why great leaders find opportunities even in a crisis

TO LEAD in today’s environment, you must go beyond tolerating stress and fear to actually using them as a motivator and tool to enhance your focus and your people’s focus.

Even though it can render intelligent people incapable of complex thought, adrenaline is one of the most useful tools in the human arsenal, and in an environment of ongoing pressure, great leaders must learn how to make this stress hormone an asset. If properly channelled, its presence helps human beings attain levels of performance that they never otherwise would have imagined possible, and after the episode look back in awe at what they were able to do. With the adrenaline gone from their system, people may wonder how their achievement had ever been possible.

Aspiring leaders need to make adrenaline their friend. Making yourself familiar with its presence is key. For example, Larry Hunter and Sherry Thatcher conducted a study of a commission-based financial services sales force. Observing the relationship between the anxiety levels and sales performance of several hundred sales professionals, they found that the revenue numbers of new employees, even strong ones, dropped drastically (average total commissions fell 30 per cent) during times of intense pressure. But the performance of the more senior employees, those who had been in the job a few years, noticeably increased (average total commissions rose 50 per cent) when they felt the most stress.

In the untrained mind, adrenaline acts as a noisemaker and distracter, causing us to diffuse our attention and increasing the difficulty of focusing on the job at hand. But when we become familiar with the effects of adrenaline, we find ourselves performing with intensified focus. As Marijn Dekkers, chief executive of Thermo Fisher, said: “The pressure of an audience is inspiring. It makes you play harder.”

THRIVING IN A CRISIS
Let’s look at an example of this kind of practice in real life. Joe Swedish, chief executive of Trinity Health Systems, is drawn to helping turn around organisations in crisis. When he became chief executive at a regional health system, he faced an urgent situation. Upon his arrival, the hospital was sanctioned by the inspector general of the United States, and soon after, Medicare slapped the hospital with its twenty-three-day notice about the hospital’s inadequate care of obstetrics patients. The hospital had twenty-three days to prove that it was correcting the problems, or Medicare would execute the suspension.

“When you are under a twenty-three-day suspension notice, you’re staring at the near-death of your organisation,” Swedish said. “Can you imagine if [the hospital’s certification by] Medicare is shut down? You have no business, because commercial [insurers] like Blue Cross and others condition your participation on their contracts to the Medicare certification. It’s like ripping the oxygen right out of the scuba diver. You’re done.”

Swedish’s reaction to this pressure? “What a great opportunity,” he told me. How many of us could say that, honestly? For most of us, such a crisis would be fodder for the deepest complaints, the most garish of headaches. For Swedish, as a great leader, the burning platform he’d landed on meant a chance to improve everything about how the hospital worked, while providing his people a chance to come together as a group. This change in mind-set is critical to great leaders today.

So how do we get there? Swedish attributes his calm and focused attitude under pressure to his mentors – it wasn’t something he was born with; it was something that he learned. “I was the beneficiary of some mentorship experiences that allowed me to feel secure about my ability to respond to forbidding challenges and react to emergencies in an emotional and [procedural] way that is constructive,” he said. “That kind of confidence allows you to admit your own vulnerability in these situations. To admit that you don’t have all the answers, that you need help. That enables you to learn and be open to advice and counsel, and this is how you use emergencies to build extremely cohesive teams at an accelerated rate.”

Thus Swedish used humility and an awareness of the actual circumstances around him, admitting vulnerability as a way to grow. He was able to stay calm in the face of pressure, specifically because he had already practised admitting vulnerability in the past. This kind of practice makes it possible for leaders to perform under pressure.

A THIRST FOR CONTINUOUS LEARNING
Kevin Sharer, the chief executive of Amgen, compared managing the pressure and complexity of his job to a real-life version of the children’s toy Lite-Brite, a game that requires the player to bring together coherent shapes from a random collection of coloured bulbs. “The CEO version of Lite-Brite is the ability to instinctively understand what’s the right subject,” he told me. “What’s the right level of detail to talk about that subject? Am I basically a listener? Am I an actor? Am I a director? Am I Socratic? How do I participate in that particular issue?” Asking these kinds of questions is visibly an enjoyable experience for Sharer.

Although he used a game as his analogy, that doesn’t mean that he found his job pleasurable immediately. “It’s something you have to learn and grow into,” he said. Sharer described the chief executive job as necessitating asking these questions along three separate axes. There’s an activity axis (x) that includes inside things like budget reviews and strategy as well as outside things like dealing with shareholders and regulators. He thinks of the y-axis of the matrix as the level of detail the chief executive must apply to an issue: “What were sales on the product this week in a particular geography?” for example, or “What are we going to do for life cycle management for that product?” And the z-axis is the style of the chief executive – will the executive be hands-on, or will he or she direct the game board from above?

So there are tens of thousands of choices to be made every day. “And you have to instinctively know how to operate around this game board,” Sharer said. “The good CEOs have to operate around this cube instinctively, like a flow sport. You know where the ball is. You know who to pass it to. You just know what the flow of the game is. And you’ve got to have a broad range of capability. This takes time and experience. No one is born knowing how to do this. And you never really finish learning. It’s too complex for that. But that’s what makes the job so stimulating.” Sharer’s love of organising problems to create the best solution is clear in the enthusiasm with which he tackles this analogy. The greatest chief executives all demonstrate this thirst for continuous learning not only about themselves and their roles, but about the complex, real-life puzzles that define today’s business environment.

CV | JUSTIN MENKES
Education: Graduated Haverford College; MA in psychology, University of Pennsylvania; PhD in organisational behaviour, Claremont Graduate University (studied under Peter Drucker)

Career: Menkes identified and created a methodology to measure “Executive Intelligence”. He was inducted into the Sigma Xi Psychological Honors Society for his research contributions. A consultant for Spencer Stuart, Menkes prepares individuals for the chief executive position and has been advising boards on the subject since 2002, working with clients including Blackstone, Chevron, Mass Mutual and State Street.

Writing: Executive Intelligence (2005); Better Under Pressure (May 2011).