Calm leadership under pressure – whether in business, aviation, or racing – proves experience and composure drive effective decision-making.
My wife has always been stressed out by flying. On flights together, she sits next to me and squeezes my arm so tightly at times I think she is going to bruise me! Thank God for Less Drowsy Dramamine or we would be forced to drive everywhere we wanted to go on vacation or work trips (not that we don’t drive anywhere we can within reason – it’s more fun and we control when we come and go plus have a vehicle when we get there!).
Yesterday, she found a little video that she wanted me to watch. It was all about an expert’s evaluation of a Southwest Airlines pilot’s performance in a specific situation. He had an airplane full of people and took off from the Burbank, California, airport. Somewhere around 400-500 feet above the ground, they had a catastrophic engine failure and were down to one of two engines on the airplane.
The airplane they were flying could still climb in that condition but at a much slower rate. The pilot immediately reported it to the control tower at Burbank to a quite noticeably agitated air traffic controller who was talking so quickly he was hard to understand. The controller asked if the pilot wanted to return to the airport. But instead, the pilot remained calm and began going through one of many checklists with his copilot as they were trained to do in such situations.
Cutting through to the end of the long account that went into every detail of what happened – after about 20 minutes in the air going through all of their checklists, the pilot decided he would land his plane at LAX versus Burbank because it has longer runways and fewer tall buildings around it. With emergency vehicles at the airport alerted and on standby ready to go, all went according to plan and the pilot landed the airplane with no problem. The moral of the story was to stay calm and remember your training.
The timing of her sharing this video was interesting because later in the afternoon we went to meet her Texas cousins – a brother and sister who were in town with their spouses on vacation in our area to ride their adventure touring bikes on some of the fantastic roads we have and visit some of the award-winning museums here in the area – as well as see my wife and her sister and the rest of us. Her female cousin’s husband, “Bob,” was a military pilot and flew for Southwest Airlines for 25 years. He is now the COO of another small airline company.
Somehow we started talking about flying and then this video, and that morphed into a discussion about leadership. Bob said people – when grouped closely together in a stressful situation – can quickly develop a “herd mentality,” just like the horses they had when their kids were younger. The next thing that happens is someone from the herd will quickly emerge as the “alpha” in the group to get everyone riled up. He said it’s the captain’s job to defuse and establish calm and order, and that is what you are trained to do.
We then discussed how that applies to business. The leader’s job is to establish calm and order and implement the plan to deal with whatever is happening in or to the business. People who are not calm don’t make good decisions. They don’t inspire calm in other people. They cannot then lead everyone out of the mess.
This morning I woke up thinking about this. The ability to stay calm under pressure is one thing that does get easier as you get older. Experience tells you that if you do the right things you will probably survive. When you haven’t had that experience of being battle-tested repeatedly it’s a lot harder to have that perspective.
Back in 1997, Zweig White (the company that is today called “Zweig Group”) put on the first of a number of conferences that we did for CEOs and top managers of AEC firms called, “Racing to the Future.” Each of these events involved two or three days at a race track of some sort combined with a round table discussion of the firm leaders in attendance. This first one was at Skip Barber Formula Car school at Moroso Raceway Park in Palm Beach, Florida.
One of our instructors was an old Porsche factory team driver, the late Vic Elford. We didn’t have the internet back then so unfortunately I didn’t fully appreciate who Vic – a little guy in tennis shorts who chain smoked Marlboros – really was. He won the Rally Monte Carlo and 24 Hours of Daytona for Porsche in 1968. He won 12 Hours of Sebring in 1969. But he really became famous in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1972. Seeing a burning Ferrari Daytona in front of him, Elford stopped mid-race to save the driver. When opening the door, Elford found an empty cockpit, as the driver had already escaped. Cameras caught the act and Elford was named Chevalier of the National Order of Merit by French President Georges Pompidou.
In any case, I distinctly remember the advice Elford gave me after several laps around the track in the Formula Dodge car I was driving. He told me, “Mark, the car is moving very rapidly but you need to be moving very slowly inside of it. That’s how you will do the right thing.”
Maybe there is something to the notion that experience helps you acquire a certain wisdom and ability to remain calm under pressure? I’m sure I didn’t fully appreciate that when I was younger!
Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.