Rocketeer Leadership Behavior 5 - Stable Confidence / Calm Presence
When the pressure rises, how do you stand up?
Our fifth Leadership Behavior is Stable Confidence/Calm Presence. And in a true consistent & predictable manner I present the slide from our super-secret internal deck:
I love this Leadership Behavior and the work that I did with Graham Betchart I have written about previously and helped us develop an athletic mindset at ServiceRocket and really understand the important role that anxiety plays in our lives and the impact it has on our performance.
The Stable Confidence / Calm Presence Rocketeer Leadership Behavior has the following sub-points:
Composed Under Pressure.Understands the role anxiety plays in performance and actively works to identify and eliminate negative anxiety.Is a calming influence in ambiguous, difficult & heated situations.
The underlying model for this Leadership Behavior is the Yerkes-Dodson Law that shows the relationship between stress and performance. Often at times we think we want the least amount of stress in our lives but in fact what we want is the optimal amount of stress in our life. Enough urgency and motivation to get up off the couch and get it done, vs so little stress that we’ll sit on the couch with a bag of potato chips and watch Netflix.
Source: Wikipedia
So why is it important to understand this curve?
The key is the right hand side of this curve and being able to know when you’re in the high anxiety/arousal section. That is, when things are too much.
And when they are, what do you do. How are you composed? How do you maintain composure? How do you practice this?
If you were an athlete, it’s preparing for race day, for that last second shot, for the 2-minute drill. For us in the business world, these moments happen every day - especially when you’re leading in times of change.
Anti-Behavior: Lacks Emotional Control / Easily Triggered
The Anti-Behavior for this Leadership Behavior is: Lacks Emotional Control/Easily Triggered.
It’s hard at times to keep your cool, something happens that ticks you off and you’re immediately filled with the need to react verbally or with a bang on the table or whatever else.
At times like this, there’s a few things that can help: The first is that being curious and asking a question of myself helps use a different part of my mind. The second is taking the time to empty my lungs and then take a deep breath. Sounds simple, it is. But simple isn’t easy at times!
Our Inspiration
We leveraged the core of this Leadership Behavior from Scaling Leadership by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams along with it’s anti-behavior. And then we adapted it for our culture and The series of books and research by these authors and the underlying Leadership Circle framework is used heavily at our company and linking these together made so much sense. In that body of work it distinguishes between leaders being in the state of high creativity or high reactivity. The anti-behavior logically has a canceling effect on the creative side.
The sub-points were inspired by our Rocketeer managers along with the Leadership Circle. I’ll write more in a future post how we use this leadership framework in our company across the globe in a scalable way.
Some great resources for this Leadership Behavior include*:
Man's Search For Meaning - Viktor Frankl
Mastering Leadership - Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams
Scaling Leadership - Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams
Principles - Ray Dalio
Why do we have Leadership Behaviors? Isn’t this what Core Values are supposed to do? See my previous post below on ‘When are Core Values not enough?”, but in short Leadership Behaviors give you explicit coachable items to work with your team to help them get better. Telling someone they have fallen on a behavior is much easier to correct and improve, whereas telling someone that they have failed against values is akin to telling them that they’ve been banished from the tribe.
In my opinion, companies need to define these behaviors if they are truly invested in growing their employees to reach their potential. We outline this in our Rocketeer Promise.
When are Core Values not enough?
·
FEB 9
*I have some amazon affiliate codes on book links, I may make billions from these and quit my job.
**Over time these posts will be updated with more links, tweaks and changes as we learn more. Nothing is ever final at ServiceRocket, and we don’t like “unveiling” things.
Taking a breath is good advice. When on "that side of the curve," it's critical to be self-aware, too. Especially around others. Check in with yourself and double check your behaviors: are you talking too much, too fast, too panicky? Careful...don't push your high anxiety onto others.
I like the idea that leadership behaviors are specific enough to be coachable. Perhaps, more importantly for me, that they are specific enough that I (or anyone) can learn them, assessment oneself on each, and "do something" to improve on specific areas of weakness.
Not that I have any weaknesses.