I received some wonderful emails in response to last week’s post, You Are The Culture. One in particular was a long and thoughtful note which included these words. “Perhaps the second best quality (after creating the right culture I assume) for a leader is NEVER react under pressure. Situations are dynamic, people are dynamic, and it’s a struggle to communicate properly under pressure. Between Stimulus and Response is space.” I would share the author’s name but was asked to keep it to myself.
What a wonderful thought to add to my comments on how you are the culture. You meaning your actions, not your words. In situations of great pressure some space is needed before action to allow for judgment.
For judgement is what seems to be lacking in so many situations. There is too much pressure to perform, too high an expectation of instant response, to low a value on thoughtful decision making. In pressure situations the space to think before words and actions burst forth disappears.
Leaders get carried away with the need to just do something without considering that something’s long term, or short term, impact on what they’re trying to create. In the haste of the moment weeks, months, years of effort can be squandered as everyone sees the unthinking you emerge.
Of course there are situations where instant action is required. We saw this in the recent bombing at the Boston Marathon. But in the business world we rarely have such life and death situations. There is rarely a situation where some space between stimulus and response would not lead to a better outcome than immediate action where thought and judgment are missing.
All too many have forgotten the value of pausing before doing, the value of time as an aid to judgment. It takes a moment to destroy that which then takes forever to rebuild.
Take your time, think a bit. The empty spaces are where all the rhythm and creativity lie.
Steve, the interesting thing is that if your values are real and run deep, the answers to difficult issues often will be obvious to you and it won’t take a lot of time to get there. Three great examples come to mind.
When J&J went through the Tylenol poisoning event, a relatively small number of people were affected and it was almost certain that only a few bottles of Tylenol had been tampered with. Nonetheless, the CEO, recognizing that the company would be violating its core principles by taking ANY risk regarding its customers’ health, immediately ordered all extra-strength Tylenol off the shelves, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. I had a chance to talk with an HBS professor who had interviewed the CEO about this decision, and he said the CEO told him that in his mind, it wasn’t even a choice – just something he obviously had to do.
The second occurred about 10 years ago, when someone figured out hack into the system that the major business schools use to process applications, which allowed snoop-minded candidates to snoop to get an early look at their decisions. All but one of the affected schools pondered this at length, dithered and wound up doing not much. HBS Dean Kim Clark, a man of pretty deep moral commitments (that Mormon thing, I guess), immediately announced that any applicant who was found to have hacked in would be denied admission that year, and that while they were welcome to reapply, a careful look would be taken to see what lessons they’d learn. Clark took a beating in the press but never wavered. I had the opportunity to hear him speak about it, and like the J&J guy, he also said it was obvious. It was breaking and entering, even if it was digital B&E, and the school would be violating a sacred principle to countenance it in any way. He never considered doing anything less.
The last occurred when Sully Sullenberger made that incredible “water landing” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) on the Hudson. In later interviews, he said that he had decided years ago that if he were ever in a situation where the aircraft was stricken, he would consider the airplane already destroyed, and therefore would do nothing to try to save it (akin to the Israeli policy of considering hostages dead), even though saving it would save the airline millions of dollars. As a result, he spent literally zero time trying to figure out if he could make it to Teeterboro. The time he saved probably saved a lot of lives.
Judgment in all three cases, but judgment that occurred in an instant.