You Can Be a Leader: Leadership Principles to Achieve Excellence

Chapter Twelve

Challenging Personalities and Situations

Bosses, Peers, and Employees

In my career field, military aviators are cursed with at least three character flaws: An extremely oversized ego, a propensity to take risks, and a sense of invincibility. This volatile mix has been a major factor in numerous aircraft accidents. The military has an obligation to prevent accidents and protect national assets. In an effort to avoid losing aircrew members and aircraft, the branches of the military have put risk mitigation and standardized training programs in place. These control measures are targeted to help control the typical aviator character flaws. The various programs have been very effective. Over the years, these programs improved significantly, decreasing the loss of life and aircraft. As military aviators like to say, the ground has a probability kill factor of 1.0. Anything the military can do to prevent accidents pays huge dividends in protecting our national assets.

So how do you recognize and deal with some of the less desirable leadership characteristics you observe in your boss, peers, and employees? First off, don't talk too much, just take the time to listen and observe. Do this for enough time, and watch the good and bad leadership characteristics bubble to the surface. Recognizing the not-so-sought-after characteristics is a lot easier than dealing with them on a weekly basis. You most likely cannot fix all of these flaws, so your main challenge is to mitigate the destruction they can leave in their paths.

Let's start by analyzing The Crisis Manager. This is a good characteristic, isn't it? Of course it is...in most situations. The ability to calmly and effectively handle a crisis is an excellent leadership trait to possess.

How can a crisis start? You miss a deliverable, or maybe a major milestone or a sales target, or worse yet, you are way over budget and behind schedule on a project. These situations can easily morph into a crisis situation.

Often, one of the early root causes of a crisis occurs when proposals are bid with very optimistic budgets and timelines. The guidance from management sounds like this: Get the contract at any cost and deal with any issues later. We have good people who can make it happen. This puts undue pressure on the proposal writers. As they gather information for the proposal, the writers should seek input from subject-matter experts or other departments. Sometimes the gathered input is outright ignored, because the bid would become too costly for the customer. Most times, this type of overconfident bidding translates into a future crisis. When this happens, don't worry; it's not the end of the world. Dealing with a crisis is part of doing daily business and is not a reason to hit the panic button. Good leadership, customer communication, and developing an alternate plan can resolve most crises in a short amount of time.

Crisis management is very different than leading through crisis management. A couple of problems come to mind when I think of the employee who leads through crisis management. First off, an employee may create a crisis, so they can solve the crisis and come out the other end looking like a hero. Normally this is some sort of small problem the employee quickly resolves to make themselves look good. The crisis creator has a tendency to make it look like they are the only one with the required skills to fix the crisis at hand. Hero Effect: Solve crisis=hero.

Spotting the employee who is trying to gain visibility by creating a crisis is fairly easy. I remember once telling an officer who approached me with a minor crisis, "You should have been able to fix this on your own. Come see me tomorrow when you have a solution." The officer looked slightly shocked, but he returned the next day with an acceptable solution. After this, I was able to better judge this officer's problem solving abilities. I also let him know he had the freedom to fix minor problems on his own. I made sure to let him know I did want to stay informed of any issues and he could visit my office at any time.