by Charles Plant | Jul 26, 2012 | Leaders, Leadership Development
In the world of leaders who stay calm in the face of stressful situations, Corneille Ewango stands out for his courage and dedication. While he grew up in a family of poachers and hunters he got the chance to go to school and there he found a new mission, to study and preserve the flora and fauna of his region, the Congo Basin forest.
The Congo Basin’s great forests are, like many other fragile ecosystems, under pressure from external forces. Settlers are always on the hunt for fresh farmland and miners look for valuable ore deposits. Worst of all are the soldiers who have been fighting over the forests both as territory to be won and as a resource for bush meat and cooking charcoal. Ewango risked his life to defend his country’s extraordinary wilderness. As director of the Okapi Reserve’s botany program during its civil war he led efforts to protect the forest and its people from mass murder, rampant rape, and widespread destruction.
According to the National Geographic “He rallied 30 junior staff members and 1,500 forest residents to stand up to marauding militias and preserve crucial reserve data throughout years of war and chaos. He divided irreplaceable plant specimens, secretly distributing them to friends for safekeeping. Research materials and data files were strategically buried in the forest. For three months he hid in the dense vegetation himself, foraging for food alongside the very wildlife he sought to protect. “I knew if I left, everything could be lost. And I wanted to be there to rebuild immediately after the situation normalized.”
His leadership is an example to all of us who face adversity and strive to remain calm in stressful situations.
by Charles Plant | Jul 24, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Development, Research
There is more to this staying calm stuff than you might realize. Research is showing that it may be possible to train yourself (or at least train mice) to remain calm in stressful situations. Yesterday’s blog elicited some feedback which took me to a piece of research published by Psych Central.
“In the new Neuron study, Pollak and Kandel sought to tease out the behavioral and molecular characteristics of learned safety in mice.
“In their experiments, mice were trained to associate safety or fear with specific auditory stimuli (tones). For fear conditioning, the auditory stimulus was paired with a mild shock to the mouse’s foot. For safety conditioning, the auditory stimulus was not followed by a shock.
“The experiments showed that the safety-conditioned mice learned to associate the tone with the absence of danger and displayed less anxiety in the presence of this safety signal.
“Moving to a stress test, Kandel’s team placed the safety-conditioned mice into a pool of water for a swim test. The forced-swim test is commonly used by researchers to measure how antidepressant drugs affect the behavior of mice.
“In this seemingly desperate situation – where the mice have no option to escape from the water — they start to show signs of behavioral despair that are ameliorated by antidepressant medications. We found that the mice trained for safety could overcome their sense of hopelessness in the swim test,” Kandel explained.”
I have been trying to think how this might fit in at work and think that perhaps the use of some object that calms you down might have the same effect. Think of a place that you find very calming, home, the outdoors, wherever it is. Now find some very small object that you associate with that environment. The next time you feel you might be entering a stressful situation at work, hold the object and think of the location from which it comes. I’m going to try this as a technique to see if it actually calms me down.
by Charles Plant | Jul 23, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence, Exercises, Leadership Development
“Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everyone’s power and that is not easy.”
Aristotle
Staying calm in times of high stress is one of those leadership skills that amazes me. Watching someone react to a high pressure situation in a calm and balanced way is truly inspiring. Maybe I’m impressed because I am naturally excited, prone to get agitated and raise my voice in stressful situations. I know it doesn’t work and it’s a bad habit but I still manage to do it.
The problem with getting excited and not staying calm is that it exacerbates an already highly charged and stressful situation. If you’ve ever been in an emergency room as a patient, you’ll notice that unlike on TV, most staff don’t exhibit any stress. They are calm and measured but fast in everything they do. If they can stay calm when life and death is on the line, why shouldn’t business people be able to stay calm when revenue targets are missed, when customer returns increase or when costs rise unexpectedly. After all, it’s not as if anyone is going to die.
Try this at work:
You’ve probably been told to step back from stressful situations, breather deeply and modulate your voice. Easy to say, not that easy to do. Instead, the next time you find yourself in one of those situations, just imagine the worst thing that can happen.
It’s sort of like imagining the audience naked when you have to give a speech or your boss putting on his dress every morning to take away the jitters. In this case, imagine the worst thing that can happen. Could someone die? Will there be a loss of limbs or other essential body parts? If the answer is yes then by all means become excited but otherwise just think about the long run.
Try to imagine a room full of dead people and body parts that will fill up the room when the situation is over. If you actually take two seconds to try to create that image, it will be enough to make you realize that no matter how stressful the situation is, no one is likely to die or become maimed and that you’re better off remaining calm.
by Charles Plant | Jul 20, 2012 | Leadership Development
In all the debate about the value of a BA, there is one factor that keeps being missed. BAs make better people managers that those from engineering, accounting, finance, computer science and other left-brained occupations. A BA is a better path to leadership than a BSc.
A BA is still worth more than a high school diploma
If you listen to the pundits, they’ll say that what you learn in getting a BA doesn’t relate to the needs of the job market and that you will end up working at Walmart (not to diss Walmart as I’m sure it is a fine place to work.) The stats don’t tell that story however. According to Jeffrey Simpson in an article in today’s Globe and Mail, 94 percent of graduates of fine and applied arts had jobs two years after graduation. The rates for engineers were 95 percent and for health grads, 94%. Yes there is a difference but it isn’t great. As to money, having a BA was worth $17,000 a year more than just having a high school diploma.
Humanities grads understand people better than technology grads
So the stats say there is still a benefit to having a BA but what is being missed is the value to the grads career down the road and my claim that BA grads make better managers than left brained grads. If you’ve got a BA, you’ve taken literature, sociology, philosophy, psychology, sociology and all sorts of Humanities related cources. See that word? Humanities. Unless you didn’t notice, it contains the word Human. The Humanities are all about studying the human condition, what it means to be a human. The trials, tribulations, emotions etc of the human experience.
Leadership skills are enhanced when you really understand what makes people tick and that comes from studying the humanities
Why does this relate to managing? Well to be a good manager, you need to get work done through other people. Doing that means you have to have a good understanding of how people thinks, what moves them. You need to know how to motivate them, change their behaviour, communicate with them. These are not easy things to learn and they are rarely taught to left brained professionals. Thus the chances are that a humanities grad will make a better manager than a left brained professional who has never had to figure out how to communicate, motivate, inspire and lead.
Think about your past managers. Who was a better leader, the Humanities grad or the left brained grad?
by Charles Plant | Jul 18, 2012 | Management, Research
Did you know that we’re working more but getting less done? The average work week has increased from 35 hours in 1970 to 46 hours in 2012 and three out of four Americans feel stressed at work and one out of four say that work is the most stressful part of their lives. We’re working longer hours but are we more productive?
What is the effect of these changes? Check out this post with a great infographic that Keri Damen sent me.
I’m not sure where this idea that you’re more productive working longer hours comes from. I suspect it comes from the world of lawyers, accountants, and engineers who bill their time by the hour. In their case, working longer hours results in getting paid more. For the rest of us, that isn’t the case.
If you’re a manager, your job is to get things done through other people.
If you’re doing a good job delegating responsibility and authority, there is no reason to work long hours. In fact if you are working too long you probably aren’t doing your job properly.
Working long hours means that either you are doing things yourself which is a no-no as a manager or you haven’t delegated enough authority to the people working for you. In either case, you’re not being an effective leader.
Don’t forget. Your job as a leader is to set the vision, communicate and motivate. Your job doesn’t actually entail doing any work yourself. So why are you working such long hours?
