By definition, a crisis demands that you do a lot. If you lead an emergency response organization, your followers include both professionals and volunteers. The professionals are accustomed to crisis response structures, such as the Incident Command System (ICS), that can exclude those volunteers. Through your meta-leadership, you complement and amplify the benefits of ICS by motivating heightened connectivity of effort between those with formal responsibilities as well as those with informal roles. We saw this in abundance in the Boston Marathon bombing response (Chapter 1) and the Super Storm Sandy response (Chapter 2).
Focus activity to form a determined, productive group of people working together to alleviate the crisis. People are eager to follow and pivot with you: many are in the basement, awaiting your direction and instructions. Reassure, comfort, and invigorate them. This is the power of your meta-leadership. It is why people have trust and confidence in you and what you ask of them.
Whether you lead just a few people, an organization, or, as in the Boston Marathon bombings, a whole city, it is up to you to embolden people with the strength of their togetherness and the good they can accomplish together. “You’re it”—both you personally and the collection of other leaders who follow you and whom you follow.
Earlier in the book, you met Coast Guard admiral Peter Neffenger, the deputy incident commander during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Five years after the spill, President Barack Obama asked him to assume leadership of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). In June 2015, just before Neffenger was sworn in, news leaked that in a test by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General, 95 percent of the mock explosives and weapons carried by inspectors were successfully smuggled past security screeners. The report suggested a clear threat to public safety.
Upon taking office, Admiral Neffenger learned that the screening deficiency was one of many shortcomings plaguing the agency. There were also problems with morale, training, oversight, management, internal connectivity, and external relations. And the traveling public disdained TSA. As Admiral Neffenger later reflected to us, “TSA is a daily reminder of terrorism and a system that failed. And it is intrusive. When you have a system that you are already inclined to dislike, you’ll put up with it if you trust that it really is protecting you, but the minute you find out they can’t do it, it collapses confidence in the system.”
Admiral Neffenger was determined to investigate the causes of the breakdown and to fix them. First, he learned that TSA was understaffed. At the top thirty airports, TSA was able to meet only 60 percent of peak demand, causing long wait lines. To overcome that problem, the agency, before Neffenger arrived, had implemented a program called managed inclusion, which allowed a high number of passengers to be randomly selected to bypass standard screening. Instead, they were directed to the more streamlined TSA Pre-Check lanes. Screeners also received financial incentives to reduce wait lines. Although the program remedied the backup problem, it didn’t fix the failing screening scores.
Ten weeks after taking office, Neffenger made his first pivot, leveraging the crisis prompted by the report to institute transformational change: he ended the managed inclusion program. Then, to reorient the agency to its core purpose, he required all airport TSA airport leaders, managers, and frontline security officers to participate in a new training: “Mission Essentials—Back to Basics.” Neffenger’s objective was to reinforce the agency’s confidence, in particular the frontline transportation security officers. “I wanted to connect them to the mission so that they realized, they’re the most important people in this organization because they’re at the mission end. And the mission only gets done if the people are trained, connected, and involved and they feel empowered to do their job,” said Neffenger. The new problem was that more careful screening, combined with screener understaffing, caused airport wait lines to balloon.
In the midst of these complications, on March 22, 2016, Neffenger arrived in Brussels for a meeting with European Union aviation leaders. His commercial flight reached the airport twenty minutes late. Just feet from the jetway, the pilot slammed on the plane’s brakes. From the cockpit, the pilot was witnessing a catastrophic event that rocked the airport. Two bombs had detonated in the pre-screening area of the airport. Seventeen people died, and more than eighty were injured.
Panic unfolded inside the terminal; meanwhile, Neffenger’s plane was held for hours on the tarmac. “I spent a lot of time looking out the window, watching. Airport and airline employees, emergency personnel, and passengers, all haphazardly running. It was clear that what was happening in the airport was catastrophic,” said Neffenger.
The Brussels incident prompted Neffenger’s next pivot. He returned to Washington the next day, even more determined to fortify the TSA aviation security mission. “The major takeaway for me was that we had to keep this from happening anywhere else. And in order to do so, we had to stop thinking of security as a series of checkpoints and barriers,” said Neffenger. “We’d always tried to manage lines from the checkpoint, but the checkpoint is very different from the approaches to the checkpoint. And the approaches to the checkpoint are very much tied to the exposure of this public area, where the bombs had gone off. We later learned that the bombers hadn’t planned to go through security. Their goal was to take advantage of the public area.”
The dilemma was that those ballooning crowds were waiting in ever-longer screening lines. They were soft targets in exposed public areas, a clear security threat. Seattle, Minneapolis, Dallas, Atlanta—thousands of passengers were missing flights, and the airlines and airport operators were fuming.
The wait line problem reached crisis proportions two months later in Chicago, where passengers stood for up to four hours in security wait lines at O’Hare International Airport. Everyone—the mayor, aviation leaders, the public—was angry. On May 20, 2016, Neffenger flew out to Chicago. It was a moment to be present. “I knew that I had to get up there and that this was going to be a pivot point,” said Neffenger. Some on his senior staff warned him not to go: he would get ensnared in the negative news cycle. Neffenger wanted to see the situation for himself and meet with the leadership in Chicago to determine whether TSA was providing the resources and training the front line needed. “I thought, well, there’s no way to find out unless I go,” said Neffenger.
The long wait lines in Chicago had sparked a media frenzy, and Neffenger became entangled in a swirl of suspicion and controversy. The Washington Post reported, “TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger May Be in Trouble.” Airline executives were pressuring the White House and Congress. The public was furious.
Admiral Neffenger seized the opportunity to convert suspicion into swarm. What if the airlines, airports, and TSA worked together to both ensure security and advance screening process efficiencies? He was a presence at troubled airports. He reached out to industry leaders. And he took responsibility for turning the situation around. He crafted a massive collective pivot as he motivated everyone involved to turn “my” problem into “our” problem. And it worked.
The airlines pivoted with him. They offered to purchase and install new, more efficient screening technology. To speed lines, airports provided personnel to assist with nonsecurity tasks. Congress authorized new funding to expand on-duty hours for screeners. And airlines, airports, and TSA joined a new daily status call to share data on expected passenger loads. This way, screeners could be directed to service security lines at the height of an expected rush.
There had been stern warnings about the crushing security wait lines expected on Memorial Day weekend. Those lines never materialized. Neffenger had applied his meta-leadership sensibilities and forged the connectivity of effort needed to solve complex, interwoven problems with airport security.
Four months later, that collaboration coalesced into the first-ever TSA Public Area Security Summit. Though TSA had long been despised by the aviation industry, the agency was regarded now as a respected convener. Security leaders from the maj
or airlines, cargo carriers, industry associations, law enforcement, and airports came together on a shared mission. Neffenger and his team of TSA leaders had coalesced a swarm.
One of Neffenger’s senior leaders, Jerry Agnew, had just been through our meta-leadership course at Harvard before he shipped out to assist in the Chicago situation. He wrote us afterwards:
“Last week I was sent to Chicago to restore TSA to normal operations after the incredible operational challenges we faced the week previous. I can tell you first hand that I was fully aware when I reached the basement and at a couple of junctures began digging. One thing I found most helpful about understanding when you’re in the basement was to remember that I was in a survival instinct mode, and the problems before me were bigger than myself.
“I employed every facet of what we learned at Harvard. I attempted to lead in every direction, searching for the connectivity that would make us all successful. I took a walk in the woods (several times a day) with air carriers, city officials, employees, you name it, anyone willing to walk and talk to find solutions to the multi-dimensional problem I was facing, and it worked, I believe, because I stayed with the concept you taught us of ‘How can I make you a success?’
“Instead of trying to achieve my goals in negotiation, I sought an interest-based solution. In some cases it meant I may have gotten only 30% and sometimes less of what I wanted, and they may have gotten 70% or more, but it was effective. I continuously used the 3 zone Meta-Leadership principle to achieve results, especially when it came to strategy and execution, because it included my walk in the woods and the ideas they believed would make them successful. I sought the highest level of collaboration I could gain.
“You know it’s kind of funny how this works, as I would move through the POP-DOC Loop and did my best to stay in the 3 zones, the leadership distractions began to disappear. It’s almost as if you have the upper hand because those around you have no idea what you’re doing. The pushback on changes, you wouldn’t believe the number of times I heard ‘we can’t do that’ come up in conversation. It all began to disappear. My executive circuits were fully charged and I was able to lead all of Chicago out of the basement. It wasn’t until I had everyone going in the right direction, that I began to see a hybrid if you will of Swarm Leadership. I mean Hybrid because they are not fully there, but I did see them begin to understand their role and begin acting in it collaboratively.”
As Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” By definition, a crisis is a pivot point. It often pivots toward the worse, of course, though it can also pivot toward improvement. As a crisis meta-leader, crisis is your opportunity to shape something that otherwise would not have emerged. This was the lesson of the TSA experience.
You can never know when a crisis might hit. When it does, move methodically through pivot after pivot, executing what you have learned and practiced. Adapt what you do as the situation unfolds. As your proficiency grows, you develop even more routines and tools for your workroom. With time, your capacity to adapt grows, building confidence. The more you experience, the more the unprecedented becomes the routine. You collect familiar patterns and behaviors to call upon as you handle circumstances that you never before thought possible.
An example: Paramedics riding in an ambulance are trained to treat severely injured people at gruesome scenes. For victims, this could be a life-changing crisis. For onlookers, it is a traumatic event. For the paramedics, this is another day on the job, something sad which they have seen before and will again. They know how to handle it. They follow their routines.
Don Boyce is an alumnus of our Harvard executive crisis leadership program and a senior emergency response official. He is also a former New York City paramedic. In his early days in that position, when he arrived at an incident, he would first survey the situation to assess what he and others had to do. Pivot. No matter how shocking, he would then open his trauma, medical, or airway bag and quickly assess the inventory, making sure that he had what he needed. Another pivot moment. It was his routine for getting himself from the basement to productively saving lives. Those pivots offered momentary pauses to collect himself and formulate his plan of action. They reinforced his confidence that he could handle whatever the situation presented. Although his tools have changed, he retains the leadership practice of synchronizing his mental preparedness with the material job that faces him.
One final point for your crisis meta-leadership: Leaders often are reluctant to tend to themselves. As you take care of others, don’t forget to take care of yourself. When the moment is right, take a break—particularly in an extended crisis. Performance degrades over time, and working beyond your limits is a disservice both to yourself and to others.
On your break, your brain is working—busily processing all you are experiencing in the crisis. Shocked by what you have seen and undergone, you might need some time to collapse into the basement. Alone and away from your duties, let that happen. Cry if you need to. You are alone. At this moment, you are not leading. These moments fortify you when it is time to step back into your role.
You enhance team performance when you remember that your self-care is also a model for those who follow you. They too may be exhausted and emotional yet afraid to say so in front of you or their peers. Three weeks into the H1N1 response, the acting CDC director, Dr. Rich Besser, announced that he was taking a day off and encouraged others to do the same. Stepping away to rejuvenate was also a vote of confidence in those others he left in charge while he was gone.
In a crisis, be a role model for attentive, focused, and driven meta-leadership. Your job is to lead your followers beyond the crisis. Taking care of yourself is an essential part of taking care of others.
Questions for Journaling
Reflect upon crises you’ve experienced. What did you do well? What could you have done better? How can you improve your capacities and insights during times of crisis?
Your pivoting is a very personal process. What works for someone else might not work for you. What trigger scripts do you call upon, and how can you adapt and expand them to meet crises, both those you’ve experienced before and future crises that will be new to you?
It is rare to think of crisis as opportunity. In your experience, what opportunities have been spurred by a crisis? What happened? How did leaders leverage the moment? What was the result?
THIRTEEN
SHAPING THE CHANGE
Meta-Leading Across the Arc of Time
This book’s title includes the phrase “How to Lead When It Matters Most.” “When” alludes to the dynamic factor of time in whether “people follow you.” Central to the meta-view of time is orchestrating it—seeing time, working with time, and leading in time. We present here both a way for you to think about time and a tool to make it part of your meta-leadership.
A crisis is often seen as one moment in time. It is more than that. A crisis builds, erupts, evolves, and is resolved over a period of time. Transformational change also unfolds incrementally. Time seems to move at light speed sometimes. By contrast, it can crawl or even seem to move backwards, as pushback reverses progress. Your meta-leadership responsibility is to remain balanced and resilient through the duration of the crisis or change. Doing so requires understanding and working with the complexities of time.
The outcomes of leadership practices are often measured in tangible operational metrics: money earned or saved; people affected, lost, or rescued; property damaged, restored, or removed. There are also intangibles at stake, among the most important of which is time. You can’t see time. You can’t change time. You can’t go forward and you can’t go backward in time. How you perceive and affect time often moves, motivates, or distracts those who follow.
The Arc of Time: Was–Is–Will Be
What you can do with time is use it, save it, waste it, and adjust it. You can get ahead of time or get behind it. Time and timing are powerful metrics and tools for the meta-leader.
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sp; When something happens can be as important as what happens. After a motor vehicle accident with horrific injuries, an ambulance arrives. If it arrives quickly, people live. If it’s late, people die. Same action. Different outcome. Time is critical. A cyber-attack hits your organization and IT is called in. With a quick fix, data is saved and operations resume. If the response is slow, data is lost and operations collapse. Your company is about to introduce a new product line and the reviews are great. The new line fails, however, because your competition beats you to market.
As you understand, anticipate, and focus on time, you harness it to the advantage of what you hope and need to accomplish. Influencing the pace of events along with expectations and attitudes about them, meta-leaders perceive and shape a progression along a flexible “Arc of Time.” When you are responsible for leading solution-building for a large, complex problem, involving many people, its urgency is experienced differently by the relevant stakeholders. There are diverging notions about when the steps in tackling the problem should occur.
Who does what and when? If some lag in their actions, others are frustrated. As a meta-leader, your job is synchronizing many different people, expectations, and activities to achieve a timeline suitable to the situation at hand. Time complexity emerges from differing positions, priorities, and sequencing, presenting you with a puzzle to solve. You work with the “gives” and “gets” of time: hurry it, slow it, and always gauge it.
The Arc of Time can be adjusted, adapted, and reoriented. A skilled meta-leader uses time to increase the pace toward a solution or slow it to ease the pressure to find one. Decisions, operations, and communications are configured along a timeline. The POP-DOC Loop is a guide for measuring, pacing, sequencing, and ordering the course of events over time. Pattern recognition translates into predictions of what will, or what could, happen next.
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