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I enjoy pictures of the earth from the International Space Station (ISS).  The earth and atmosphere are gorgeous, and the videos of the Aurora Borealis are spectacular.

From enough distance, everything looks impressive.  Blue oceans.  Desert expanses.  Cities lit up at night.  Snowy mountain ranges.  You can’t see garbage, slums, pollution, crime, starvation or injustice.  No unpleasant smells, flooding, lightning, tornadoes, or earthquakes will affect you.  The air supply and quality is carefully calibrated and filtered.

This can be true of senior leaders in large companies, too.  We insulate them from certain unpleasantries and truths.  They’re far enough from most of the action that they don’t see the yucky stuff.  There is a reason that those CEOs on that “Undercover Boss” reality show are surprised how their company operations “really work.”  Glossy PowerPoint presentations and selective information are the C-suite equivalent of pretty pictures from space; you can’t see the garbage from there.

One of my colleagues referred to company execs as “thin air people.”  He said, “They’re living at high elevations and the hypoxia [lack of oxygen] affects their judgment.”

You don’t have to be a top company exec to be fooled by leadership hypoxia.  It can affect anyone in a leadership role.  You and I are the easiest persons to fool, especially by giving into our preferences to hearing good news and unconsciously creating a culture where it’s not “safe” to share the gritty reality.

Now that you’ve recognized you’re vulnerable, here are three ways you can avoid leadership hypoxia:

1. Insist on being told the full story with raw data.

Bill Gates recognized at one point while CEO of Microsoft that he was hearing about problems and bad news too late.  People were understandably giving him more positive news and shielding him from some of the trouble issues.  So he began insisting that every update opened with the problems and the bad news.  He made it safe to relay this kind of information rather than hiding it.

Talk with the people who regularly give you updates.  Specifically ask about what’s not going well or needs significant improvement.  If the data seems overly-rosy, ask if there is more or another perspective. Reward and praise the people who give you the full story.

2. Get out to the front lines and see for yourself.

Get physically away from the comfortable role of sitting in familiar, comfortable headquarter offices.  There’s no good substitute for on-site visits and re-visits over time.   Watch for the tendency to say, “Well, I went there 5 years ago, so I don’t need to go again.”  Things change, people change, customers and products change.  Plus – your experiences have influenced your ability to understand the on-the-ground situation.

3. Develop ways of listening to people who are close to the business execution.

Senior leaders have a difficult set of roles and simply can’t be on the front lines often enough.  But they can create communication channels for unfiltered news.  Find creative ways to set up “suggestion boxes,” analog or digital.  Engineer sharing events where you can visit with cross-functional groups of people –emphasizing your role as listener, not talker or explainer.  The format is less important than the spirit of the conversation and the openness of the dialog.

Facts-on-the-ground are sometimes smelly and awkward.  Position yourself to hear and act on reality.  That’s real leadership.

The concept of “decision fatigue” is that you only have so much decision capacity in your “tank,” and as you make decisions you run low and then empty. 

Complete bunk.  Horse-hooey. This is fodder to feed your inner whiner and excuse proliferator.

You are making decisions all day, every day.   What you focus your eyes on.  What you do with your hands.  What to do next.  Shifting in your seat.  Flipping pages and channels and jumping between sites.  You saw the headline or picture for this article and decided to look at it more.  From the time you open your eyes in the morning until you drift off into sleepy land you are making decisions.  No one comes to the end of the day and fails to make another few decisions.

I’ll grant you that some decisions are much more difficult.  Some decisions have a higher mental cost or consequence factor. 

Also, it’s true that our energy levels fluctuate through the day.  You have more energy for thinking and careful analysis at some times, and less at others. 

When you find that you’re struggling to make a particular decision, it’s something other than your “decision capacity tank.”  It’s more likely

• You’re fearful of making this decision because of the consequences.
• You aren’t confident of your analysis, or would prefer to have more information.
• You prefer that someone else had responsibility to make the decision.
• You lack the self-confidence to make the decision that you know needs to be made.

If you’re simply physically tired and not at your best, then be honest with others and yourself, and push that decision to a time when you’re energy level is more appropriate. 

But don’t say, “My decision capacity tank is empty.”  That tells people that you’re “full” of something else.

Leadership drives intelligent, wise change.  Change is about people and behaviors. Therefore, leaders must be skilled in influence and persuasion.  Influence and persuasion are often centered on status quo vs. possible future state discussions.

Weak and manipulative leaders try persuasion through straw man arguments.  A straw man approach calls attention to something you covertly substituted into your opponent’s argument, which he didn’t say.  You knock down that straw man, giving the impression you defeated the argument, when in fact you didn’t address the original argument at all.  This is frequently observed when the value of the appearance of vanquishing an opponent is far greater than critical thinking about complex issues. 

Strong, confident leaders know this truth: “We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong.” (Lord Acton) The most persuasive leaders will articulate the “other side” arguments even better than they do – and then explain point by point why an alternative approach is better.  This is called the steel man approach.

The steel man approach is especially helpful for major changes with significant consequences. You want to bring people along with you when your organization faces a “no going back” irreversible decision.  Therefore, you must be articulate about all options.  One of the best outcomes of the steel man approach is that people will respect you even if they don’t always agree with your decisions.

Some historical examples:

• Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation by articulating the Pope’s arguments for indulgences and other practices, then demonstrating why they were illogical and inconsistent with the Bible. 

• Charles Darwin’s book “On the Origin of Species” broke through historic dogmas because he used the steel man approach.  He laid out the case for alternative explanations of different species far better than others had done, and then systematically showed why those explanations were inferior to evolution. 

• Karl Marx brilliantly documented the inherent consequences of capitalism in “Das Kapital” by partially using a steel man approach – though 100+ million dead demonstrate his recommended alternative proved disastrous.

• Law schools in England and the US (until the mid-20th century) used the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans as the archetypical ancient legal brief.  Paul effectively used the steel man approach to make the case for Christianity rather than the pantheon of Roman gods and traditional understanding of how “the divine” interacted with men.

Develop your leadership capability by making the case for both “sides” or “next actions.” Discipline yourself to articulate ideas and strategies (especially if you think they’re dumb).  You can practice this even in situations where you aren’t making the decision. 

This practice work will be truly helpful when you are put to the leadership test.  Straw man arguments go down badly in history. 

Leaders at every level are vulnerable to chronic stress.  We’re sincere in our desire to burn energy to accomplish our goals and help people.  However, over time, depleted “batteries” mean our decisions are less effective, our creativity drops, our emotional resilience fades, and our endurance becomes pitiful.

Leaders need to recharge.  Your organization and the people you serve need you at your best.  Here are three suggested ways to recharge:

1. Extend your sleep by 30 minutes a night

Many leaders get into seasons of chronic sleep deprivation – not all-nighters, but just a little short each day.  You’ll know this is true for you if you need to sleep more on the weekends to “catch up.”  A typical sleep phase is 20 minutes.  Set your alarm to give yourself an additional 30 minutes of sleep time, which is enough to carry you through another sleep phase.  It only takes a little more discipline to find 30 minutes in your day, and the payoff is enormous. 

2. Breathe deeply for two minutes

When problems are coming in high and hot, or you’ve been switching between many small tasks and conversations, take two minutes and focus on breathing deeply.  Breath in slowly, breathe out slowly.  You don’t need any special program or ritual to do this.  Just focus on your breathing.  Tell your busy, anxious mind that you’ll start on a new problem in only two minutes. Your heart rate will slow down.  You’ll find it easier to concentrate.  Getting more oxygen in your brain will help you make better decisions.  [Bonus: do this two-minute breathing ritual before you go into a difficult meeting or important presentation.]

3 Walk in natural surroundings

There is something – difficult to describe but commonly experienced – uniquely refreshing about walking in a natural setting.  Strolling in a garden and focusing on the sounds, smells, and sights.  Listening to the wind in the leaves of trees.  Relishing the gurgle of a small creek, or the sound of waves lapping on the shoreline.  These do more to recharge you than hours working on gym equipment indoors.  Get outside, no matter the weather, for a few minutes each day. 

There are other ways to recharge, too.  Become a student of yourself, so you develop greater sensitivity to when your energy levels are low.  Try these approaches, and develop others which help you in particular.  (I know one talented leader who gets recharged by sitting in a quiet area and knitting.)

Finally, remember that the reason to recharge is to unselfishly invest that energy in serving others.

Your project went off the rails, and your boss – who doesn’t care about the complexities of the project and only wants to not be embarrassed in front of her boss – is chewing your butt because it looks like lousy planning and execution.  She wants to see the detailed project plan in two days. You know the team had a detailed project plan but it fell apart two weeks after the start.

For the umpteenth time you wonder about how useful planning really is.

Experienced project managers agree with these statements:

• Planning is helpful and important.
• Planning without execution is wasteful of time, energy, and attention.
• Execution without planning can go awry.
• “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” (Helmuth von Moltke)  Also known as “Stuff happens.”

The key question becomes: “What’s the right amount of planning?”

[Note: I am assuming that you have a clear idea of the objective.  You know what success looks like.  You understand the priority outcome. If you don’t know this, no amount of planning helps.] 

If you’re willing to learn from data and experience during the execution phase, you need direction and some way to evaluate “success,” but you need only plan for allocating people and the first set of tasks.   This is what’s behind the maneuver warfare strategy of “Commander’s Intent.”  The objective is clear, but the details evolve. 

Effective project leaders “play chess” and think out possible second and third moves.  The dialogue in your head sounds like this: “We do X and the two most likely responses are Y and Z.  If Y, then we have these options, but if Z we have a different set of options.  And the most unexpected responses are….”

The key is to develop some flexible planning scenarios with contingency plans, coupled with a healthy dose of paying attention.  Leaders must recognize the world is complex and you have imperfect information.  Invest time and energy into “sensing” what is going on with your project or initiative. 

One of the most significant things to anticipate are delays and extensions of work.  A large percentage of project failures happen because some activity on the critical path became significantly delayed.  How will you respond when (not if, when) this happens?  What new options come into play?

If you’re unwilling to learn from data and experience during the execution phase, you’ll need substantial planning coupled with extraordinary luck that your plan will work out exactly as planned.  The consistent failure of 5 year, 3 year, and even 6 month plans should make us sober. 

The Agile Manifesto recommends favoring:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Avoid these two rookie mistakes:

1. Building the perfect plan, and assuming everything works out exactly like you expect.  
   
2. Saying “We don’t plan.”  Don’t pay that stupidity tax.  Knowing your objective, develop a starting plan, and work through scenarios of how the next steps could unfold.

Bonus leadership tip: Notice how people react to more planning and less planning scenarios for clues about their risk orientation.  Some people are simpler happier staying in the planning phase than taking the risks of action.  Other people are too impatient to do more than cursory planning. Most of us recognize that in a VUCA world we need to be in observe/learn/adapt cycles much more than we need to be in detailed planning for massive projects. But you’ll find that not everyone agrees with that statement.   

A reader asked how to overcome writer’s block. I told her there is no such thing as writer’s block. When we feel like we can’t write anything, the truth is that we don’t think we can write anything good. You don’t have a “writing poorly block,” do you? 

Just write. Get it moving. Expect that as you write you’ll start producing something more worthwhile.

Don’t score yourself on the % of your writing which you like. Score yourself for writing as a process, expecting that a fraction of what you produce is schlock.

(This understanding is not original to me.  C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, and Seth Godin have all described this.)

This is true for every creative venture, not only writing.

For several years I managed the global DuPont IT infrastructure team – data centers, servers, networks, security, phone systems, databases, PCs, printers, help desks.  As you can imagine, every day was a firefighting day.  Somewhere, some system or some process wasn’t working correctly, for someone, for at least some time. We had a great team. We did a good job dealing with many issues and struggled badly with others. 

Our performance rating system required a fixed distribution of “Exceeds Expectations,” “Meets Expectations,” and “Does Not Meet Expectations” ratings.  No more than 2 of my 17 direct reports could receive an Exceeds rating, and at least 1 had to receive a Does Not Meet rating.    

One of my steady-eddy managers approached me shortly after he told me he was planning to retire in a year.  In the course of a very open conversation he mentioned this observation:  

“You have a tendency to reward heroics to fix what’s broken over the well-planned, well-designed system work that doesn’t require heroics.” 

There will be crises and emergencies and unplanned work when you’re leading an organization, or managing a working team.  People who step up and go the extra mile to help should be recognized and appropriately rewarded.  [Be sure to arrange for a review of what happened and what’s needed to ensure that won’t happen again, or at least reduce the consequences if it does occur.] 

Good leadership means looking deeply at the quiet, steady work which prevents problems, including good design.  Find ways to celebrate proactive work which prevents emergencies.  Give it equal weight as firefighting when it is time to recognize people.  Build a culture which honors risk assessment and appropriate mitigation.   

Related tip: It’s easy to brag to your management about the firefighting event and recognize the people who took care of the problem.  Be the kind of manager who highlights the preventative work to your management.   

Remember, you will always get more of what you reward.  

Anger has been a lifelong companion, and constantly seeks to rule me. This is a prayer I have used in recent years:

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Precious God, thank you for making me in Your image — slow to anger, seeking justice, and full of self-control.

I trust You because You have sovereign power over all the universe.

Thanks for giving me the emotion of anger so that I can be alert to what is not right, and respond rightly.

Thanks for saving me from slavery to anger, which always seeks to rule me. You and you alone are my ruler.

I rejoice that You have already brought me far and kept me safe. I’m not yet what I will be by Your grace and power, so please continue to shape me into Christ-likeness. Thanks for keeping Your promise to complete the work You began in me.

Thanks for the opportunities You give me today to practice discernment and self-control.  Help me to see the gaps between what is and what should be the way that YOU see them.

Thanks for giving me a spirit of self-control and freedom from sin, so that my responses will be pleasing to You. Help me to repent quickly when I fail. I remain confident in Your sustaining power working in me and through me.

May I be a large, clean conduit of Your love and grace today to a world that struggles with anger.

In the beautiful name of Jesus, who was angry but did not sin,

Amen.

I wrote this six years ago, and it’s still true.

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Frustrated?  Angry?  Read this.

Not long ago I left the office, fuming with frustration, and headed home.   I could feel the blood pounding in my ears.  I got a glass of ice water and sat down with my journal, took a deep breath, took another one, and then wrote this out.  I’m sharing because I hope this helps some others, too.

I want to acknowledge how ungrateful I am. I leave my office most days tired, frustrated, unsatisfied. I selfishly want so much more, most of the time, that I fail to remember how good I have it.

I am extraordinarily blessed with wife, children, and extended family. I have handfuls of deep friendships.

Spiritually I am filthy rich in Christ Jesus, a citizen of heaven by grace, and able to rely upon the strength of the gospel day by day. I have nothing to fear because “the God of angel armies is by my side.”

 I live a comfortable, affluent life. Kings of old could not imagine the conveniences we take for granted. I use more technology daily than sci-fi writers in 1950 wrote about. I’m in a generation that is living longer and healthier at older ages than any previous generation. I live in one of the freest safest countries on earth.

Our travel options are so grand I could get to almost anywhere on the planet within 3 days of starting out. People the world over speak (or want to speak) my native language.

Intellectually I get to live in an idea-rich world, practically unlimited access to data, and I’ve benefited from 21 years of formal schooling and post-doctoral studies. I have the tools to capture and share my writing with others.  I have meaningful work with smart, savvy, hard-working colleagues. We’re contributing to our company’s efforts to tackle a handful of the most important problems in the world, including feeding a growing world population.  

I have abundant opportunities to serve others.

I have no reasons for complaints, none. I should have only room and energy for gratitude. Perhaps the most significant battle I get to fight (not need to, but get to) is the fight for joy and gratitude.

Many conversations these days are loaded with concerns about the future and the state of societies. How we view the future strongly affects our ability to perform well today. Believing “the view out the windshield is bigger than the rear-view mirror” is right and proper.  

Make this your mental model:

• I’m going to live a long time, therefore I care for my body, and discipline it to be effective.
• Every day is precious for contribution, celebration, relationships, recovery, and worship.
• It is right to fear God, and needless to fear men.
• I must use my agency and gifts well.
• I can trust that God will put what and whom I need within reach.

Avoid mindset traps like these:

• I will die soon.
• My best days are behind me.
• I deserve to coast or quit.
• There is nothing more for me to do.
• I can do this alone.

It’s true that we could die today. In the sovereignty of God, you’re effectively immortal until He calls you home. (Sidebar: You should still wear your seatbelt and avoid stupid decisions!) Our ignorance of the details of our future is a great gift to us because we could not handle the knowledge and live well.