Five Leaders Forged in Crisis, and What We Can Learn From
Them
PART I
· AUTHOR
INTERVIEW
Leadership Under Fire
Interview by Dina Gerdeman
In the early 2000s, Nancy Koehn was socked with one personal
blow after the next within a three-year period: Her father dropped dead
suddenly. Her husband walked out and a terrible divorced ensued. And she was
diagnosed with breast cancer.
As these “big hunky blocks” of her life were falling around her,
the business historian says she reached for the collective writings of Abraham
Lincoln.
“I was feeling vulnerable, and it was a personal search for some
sort of clarity and redemption,” explains Koehn, the James E. Robison Professor
of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. “I was struck by all
that Lincoln was carrying, and I thought, ‘Nancy, you think you have problems.
Look at Lincoln!’”
Koehn set out to write a book about the former president,
inspired by his remarkable leadership as he persevered in his fight against
slavery. He did so despite the weight of many Civil War losses on his shoulders
and personal tragedies, including the death of his son. But, after four years
of "sniffing and snooping,” it occurred to her the world didn't need
another Lincoln book.
Koehn realized she had more to say about how great leaders were
made, and Lincoln was just one shining example. She decided to pull into the
fold other leaders who had gripped the attention of her students in her courses
at HBS: polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, abolitionist Frederick Douglass,
Nazi-resisting clergyman Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, and environmental crusader Rachel Carson. The result, about a dozen
years in the making, is Koehn’s book Forged in Crisis:
The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times, which is being published this
week.
Each of
the extraordinary people Koehn chronicles found themselves
at the center of a great crisis. Shackleton was stranded on the ice with his
men in the Antarctic. Lincoln was on the verge of seeing the Union fall apart.
Douglass, an escaped slave, was dodging capture by his former owner. Bonhoeffer
was secretly working to bring down Hitler while attempting to evade his own
arrest by the Nazis. Carson was racing to finish a book about the dangers of
pesticides before cancer silenced her.
Each person faced long odds of success, each was filled with
fear, dread, and uncertainty, and yet each found the inner strength—rooted
deeply in the need to fight for the greater good—to carry on.
The book urges readers to peer into the past and find
inspiration from five people who managed to accept their failures, steady
themselves, and overcome great obstacles to make their mark. It’s a call to
action for future leaders: “Read these stories and get to work,” Koehn says in
her introduction. “The world has never needed you and other real leaders more
than it does now.”
Yet, the book is also more than that. Like a warm cup of tea on
a cold, rainy day, it’s an antidote to those times when we all feel overwhelmed
by our own struggles—work-related or personal. Koehn herself certainly knows
that feeling.
“Lincoln taught me a great deal about the possibilities of
growth in the midst of crisis," says Koehn, whose research focuses on how
leaders craft lives of purpose, worth, and impact. “When I’m scared or confused
or besieged with problems, I think, ‘What would Bonhoeffer do?’ I’ve had other
people say to me, ‘Here’s what I was dealing with, and this is why Rachel
Carson really spoke to me.’ The ability for a story from history to help
someone when they are emotionally vulnerable and confused is deeply gratifying.
Each of these people triumphed—after they failed—and they made a great difference
in the world. We can learn a lot from their stories.”
In this interview with HBS Working Knowledge, Koehn delves
into the many leadership lessons readers can take away from the five subjects
she profiled.
Dina Gerdeman: As a slave, Frederick Douglass feared his master,
but then something shifted in him the day he decided to physically fight back.
You say that confronting your fears head on allows you to find your core
strength. I imagine this is as true for the people you write about as for the
entrepreneur looking to start a business?
Nancy Koehn: When we’re dealing with our worst fears, it’s hard.
I call it the 2 a.m. cold sweats, where you think: How am I going to get
through this? Every leader knows these moments, and the people in this book
experienced those.
What’s interesting about this critical moment for Douglass: You
see a man who’s been made a slave, and he’s scared of [the overseer], but he's
not going to succumb this time. He steps into it. Bonhoeffer talks about
killing himself, then learns how to step back from the edge of caving in. He is
quaking in his boots when he is interrogated [by Nazis]. And the next time,
he's a little less scared. Lincoln talks a lot about doubt and despair, but he
learns how to manage it.
These people squared their shoulders and took a series of small
steps into the fear. Each step you take makes you a little stronger and a
little braver, and that means that the next baby step is easier than the one
before. The people in my book keep on keeping on and walking into the
fear—until the winds have died down and they know the storm has passed for
them.
At times, leading an organization is about an ongoing encounter
with one’s own fears and the fears of one’s people. A lot of leaders who take
on the amount of responsibility and accountability that goes with being the CEO
of a major company will encounter fear and have to figure out how to deal with
it.
Some of our alumni [who are business leaders] have
said, I knew it was going to be really hard, but I took that first step and the
next step, and after a difficult journey, the impossible was made possible.
They understand that ordinary people can make themselves capable of doing
extraordinary things.
It’s not easy. Turbulence is all around us, and that creates
more fear. I think of Merck CEO) Ken Frazier, who resigned from the president’s
manufacturing council because he didn’t believe the president was speaking with
integrity [during his initial failure to condemn white supremacists]. I can
imagine Ken Frazier had some anxiety about that. But he did it anyway.
Gerdeman: You say in the book that great leaders live by “right
action.” Can you explain what you mean?
Koehn: If you read all five stories, you realize that part of
what fuels each of the protagonists, when they're most vulnerable or confused
or in a fog of doubt, is the mission. The goodness of what they're trying to do
gives them each the energy to take the next step. It’s not like they wake up
and are born with the genes of Jesus or that they have been endowed with a
prophet's sense of purpose.
Shackleton is chasing fame when he goes to the Antarctic. Carson
wants to be a best-selling author. It’s a narcissistic quest that gives way to
the realization of a larger moment and a sense that they can make a worthy
difference to other people. They stumble onto the goodness of their
contribution and the possibility of service to others, and the narcissistic
quest disappears in that discovery.
Carson realizes: "DDT is a big deal. I've got to wake
people to the dangers here." Shackleton says, "I've got to save my
men." Lincoln says, "We can't have this loss of life in the war
without cutting out the cancer of slavery."
I say to my students: “Don’t give up looking. You have a bigger
purpose, and the search for that purpose can take you somewhere astounding.”
Our Millennial students and our alumni want to answer that call. So many values
we hold dear as a nation are up for grabs right now in a newly prominent and
frightening way, and this is a call for action.
Gerdeman: Shackleton is an example of someone who worked quite a
bit on team-building. He made a point of connecting personally with his men,
and he also knew the way he carried himself could make the difference in
whether his team survived. Can you talk about why team-building is important?
Koehn: Without Shackleton’s ability to foster cohesion among his
team, those folks wouldn’t have survived. It started with how he selected
people for his team. He hired for attitude and trained for skill.
And then he knew how to manage his worst enemies, the naysayers.
He couldn’t fire the people who doubted him and spread pessimism and negativity
because they were all on the ice together, but he kept the naysayers close, so
he himself could contain them. At the same time, he was managing the energy of
his team in other ways. Once the ship had been down for months and supplies
were running low, for example, Shackleton ordered up double rations to raise
the men’s spirits by feeding them. Each evening after supper, he walked around
to the men’s tents at night to play cards or tell stories.
All of Shackleton’s actions were intended to make his men feel
they were a part of this band of brothers that together could not fail. And,
when he himself walked out of his tent in the morning, he made certain to
appear confident and to show up with positive energy, even when he harbored his
fears and doubts himself.
CONTINUES IN PART II
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