Patricia Wheeler

There’s no doubt, we live in interesting times. As we continue to experience economic ups and downs, “business not as usual” (also known as the New Normal) brings with it an ever-increasing pace of change and complexity. And as we know, even good news brings its own challenges.

Take the case of Jane, an executive who recently moved to a new role as her company renewed its global expansion and moved from a “stabilization” agenda into a phase of rapid growth. She’s excited about her new position and her boss is already heavily booking her travel schedule. There’s one catch, however….she still has to finish grooming her replacement in the role she’s leaving. She lamented that she’s working fifteen-hour days on average, with no clear relief in sight.

She’s happy to have this job, but worried about how long she can sustain this “nose down, full speed ahead” trajectory without (at best) losing her edge or (at worst) flaming out.

As her coach, I encouraged Jane to make sure that during this stimulating and high pressure time, she remembers and manages her “default” settings. This is an important part of emotional intelligence: knowing what behaviors you are likely to revert to when under stress or operating on automatic pilot. These are the very times when we are likely to stumble on our way to driving results. Do we, for example, narrowly focus on operations at the expense of the bigger picture? Become more siloed in our approach? Wait to be told what to do?

In Jane’s case, she recounted that she is highly prone to forget her “people agenda” when she operates under high pressure situations. She had received feedback in prior roles that her “default style” is to drive her team so aggressively that she neglects to encourage and validate their contributions, leading to time wasted as the team questions its contributions and commiserates with one another at the water cooler. This cycle of waste eventually results in Jane thinking she’s the only one who really cares and leaves frustrated and disengaged team members in her wake.

Can we change our default settings? The answer is probably not. We mammals are all born different. For example, Animal Planet’s Growing Up Tiger program reveals that when tigers are shaved, the stripes go all the way into the skin. And each set of stripes is unique…no two have the same pattern. As evidenced in skin-deep tiger stripes, we must know that our fundamental personality or wiring -- the “who we are” goes deep – down to our very skins. Thus it is important to know our default settings, anticipate pressure and craft a plan to manage them, before they catch us unaware.

Here are the questions I asked Jane to help her stay on top of and manage her default settings:

- What are the “big picture” areas that will continue to require your focus, even during times of great pressure? For Jane, this involves making sure that she takes time to develop, in addition to drive, her people.

- How can you put boundaries on your time, even for those urgent and important initiatives that you must add to your plate? Jane already found her energy and resilience eroding, and she found that even small steps, such as taking lunch breaks away from her desk, helped her garner some relief.

- What is the minimum you must do to take care of yourself and keep your energy up during “nose down, full speed ahead” times? Remember, if you aren’t recharging your own batteries, eventually you, like any of us, will run down.

Copyright 2010, Leading News.

Patricia Wheeler is an executive and team coach who helps smart people become more effective leaders. As Managing Partner in the Levin Group LLC, she has spent 15 years consulting to organizations and coaching senior leaders and their teams. Her work helping executives succeed in new roles is featured in The AMA Handbook of Leadership. You may contact Patricia by E-mail at Patricia@TheLevinGroup.com<mailto:Patricia@TheLevinGroup.com> or by telephone at 001.404.377.9408.