testing, crafting policies regarding staff leave to ensure a continually refreshed team on site to deal with the expected surge in patient volumes, and so on. By prioritizing those issues over the surgeons’ anxiety, she could have implicitly conveyed a decision to them. But she feared that gaming the agenda in that way would undermine trust.
Instead she decided on direct engagement. But because she wanted to preserve her coercive power and had limited reciprocal power, she asked the surgeons for guidance on how to handle their situation. In effect she relinquished her coercive power to them, making them her agents. Her gam- ble paid off: Realizing from the perspective of power that their worries were but one ripple in a quickly swelling sea, the surgeons backed down. Roethlisberger’s advice comes alive in Pandit’s decision: She reached into a future version of OUH—one with a more trusting culture—to generate a solution to the present crisis.
→ Beware learned helplessness. We often create false narratives about adversity. Getting laid off from work is a traumatic experience that negatively affects self-worth. So someone who subsequently experiences another difficult work environment may attribute it to personal failings and struggle to address the challenges. Surmounting this learned helplessness involves acknowledging the false logic of our scripts, which usually requires external support through what experts call active-constructive relationships. Cressida Dick, for example, considers a community of trusted friends indispensable.
→ Cultivate detachment. According to the ancient Stoic
philosopher Epictetus, “The chief task in life is simply this:
to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.” I was drawn to this philosophy by some of the protagonists in my case studies, having noticed that managers who are successful in the age of outrage often manifest stoicism. The method is frequently misunderstood as advocating emotionlessness in the face of both pleasure and pain. For Stoics, however, the objective is not to deny emotions but, rather, to avoid pathological ones.
KARL POPPER, oneof the 20th century’s most influential philosophers, argued that science progresses by falsify- ing our theories about the world—a process of continual criticism. Ironically, he was also known for his “inability to accept criticism of any kind,” in the words of Adam Gopnik.
Observing this disconnect, Gopnik concluded, “It is not merely that we do not live up to our ideals but that we can- not, since our ideals are exactly the part of us that we do not instantly identify as just part of life.”
I aspire every day to the framework offered here but do not always live up to it. I hope this admission comforts and encourages fellow managers who may be muddling through a polarized and uncertain world. HBR ReprintR2301G
KARTHIK RAMANNA is a professor of business and public policy at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government.
He is a coauthor (with Robert S. Kaplan) of the 2022 McKinsey Award–winning article “Accounting for Climate Change” (HBR, November–December 2021).
implicit understanding that the former will not frivolously pull the cord and the latter will not punish the former if the cord is pulled (or not pulled) in error. Other car companies have tried for years to copy the Toyota system, but they have failed out of an inability to create the necessary relational contract.
An organization’s resilience is also affected by how well its leaders manage the tension between dealing with today’s problems and planning for better management of tomorrow’s. From the long list of to-dos that Pandit had to consider alongside the possible surgeons’ revolt, she chose cultural change as her foremost priority. But why focus on an intangible when so many tangibles needed attention?
The leadership expert Stephen Covey provides an answer:
Managers often conflate the urgent with the important.
There are always “urgent” issues on a manager’s plate, especially in a crisis, and responding to them can very quickly become all-consuming. But the more leaders focus on firefighting, the less they focus on fire prevention—and the more fires they will need to put out in the future.
If Pandit had not prioritized cultural change in March 2020, she would never have had the capacity to address the stream of urgent decisions that came her way during a pan- demic of indeterminate length. So she decided to continue building a culture of patient safety, confidence in manage- ment, and intelligent risk management—not to the exclusion of handling emergencies but with a view to ensuring that more of them could be handled by trusted and competent delegates.
Personal resilience. This is perhaps the most elusive element in the framework. Managers are reluctant to talk about it because they fear that to do so will signal a lack of it. Here I have boiled down insights from various literatures into three takeaways.
→ Do not conflate optimism with resilience. A positive
mindset is an element in individual resilience, but when managing in the age of outrage, it must be balanced with continual reappraisal of the situation at hand to allow for a recalibration of strategy and tactics. The author and consul- tant Jim Collins captured the difference when he suggested that leaders must have both an unfailing belief in ultimate victory and the daily discipline to acknowledge and address harsh realities.
An organization’s resilience is affected by how well its leaders manage the tension
between dealing with today’s problems and planning for better management of tomorrow’s.
Harvard Business Review
January–February 2023
107
Always give yourself four ways to win.
L E A D E RS H I P ST Y L ES AU T H O RS
P H OTO G R A P H E R MAT THIAS HEIDERICH
David Noble
Founder, View Advisors
Carol Kauffman
Founder, Institute of Coaching
Harvard Business Review
January–February 2023
109
I D E A I N B R I E F
THE PROBLEM
Facing a crisis or an opportunity, leaders often fall back on the leader- ship style that has worked for them in the past. But to be effective, they need to rise above their default reactions and generate more options for how to respond in real time.
A NEW MODEL In this article two leadership coaches offer an approach, called the “four stances,” to help leaders generate options for interpersonal communication.
THE PROCESS
Leaders should identify which stance is their default, make a plan for using alternative ones in various situations, and be ready to pivot if an approach is not working.
they will respond to a crisis or a massive new opportunity, and they often will tell you they already know what to do.
This is surprising because most crises and opportunities have unexpected elements. A high-powered executive whom we coach once told us, “In any crisis, I come out of the gate fast and take action. I go over, under, or through any wall in my way. With my people, I lead from the front.” To be sure, that approach has the benefit of deci- siveness, but it offers a narrow path, especially in high-stakes situations. What happens when such leaders run into obstacles they can’t muscle their way through?
Another leader we coached had a different approach. He was an incredible delegator with legendary calm. This worked well until a crisis surfaced and his team started feeling lost and overwhelmed. He stayed steady, confident in his default style, telling people,
“Don’t worry, I have confidence that you’ll figure it out.” They didn’t figure it out, team members began fighting with one another, and within months the company lost its market- leading position.
L E A D E RS H I P ST Y L ES
Ask leaders
how
In our work coaching and advising senior leaders, we have found that when faced with unfamiliar or risky situ- ations, leaders often rely on their familiar playbook. They act instinctively, falling back on behavior and postures that worked for them before. But should their operating environ- ment experience a discontinuity, reflexes—which may still be right at times—can no longer be counted on. To be effec- tive, leaders need to rise above their default reactions and generate more options for how to act in the very moments when they are needed most.
Few leadership roles come with a treasure map showing a direct line to where X marks the spot. That’s why the ability to generate multiple pathways to a desired destination is crucial to success. Whether it’s chasing a strategy that could drive 10x growth in a business, facing a potentially catastrophic threat, or guiding a team through uncharted territory, great leaders generate options so that when an opportunity arises or a crisis hits, they can pivot in real time and make the optimal move.
Our experience shows that leaders’ success depends on their ability to MOVE—that is, to be mindfully alert to priorities, to generate options so that they always have several ways to win, to validate their own vantage point, and to engage with stakeholders to ensure that they are along for the ride. (We lay out this framework in our book, Real- Time Leadership. To gauge your ability to MOVE, take our self-assessment at RealTimeLeadershipInstitute.com.) In this article, we examine the crucial second step of our model.
Specifically, we look at four common leadership approaches and the scenarios in which each can be most helpful, and we introduce a process for navigating the options in real time.