Anxious CEOs need to learn new skills in a crisis

They are supposed to guide us through the crisis. But what happens if the leaders start to shake?

History’s best leaders, such as Abraham Lincoln, understood how to provide stability, a steady hand and hope, even when they were uncertain about the road ahead.

Leaders around the world, in business and government, are facing an enormous challenge: guiding people through a deadly pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands and up-ended the lives of billions more. Amid so much uncertainty about COVID-19, how can they inspire their anxious colleagues and constituents? And how can they manage their own anxieties in the process?

History can serve as a guide. Nancy Koehn, the James E. Robison professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and the author of Forged in Crisis, explains that history’s best leaders — think Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Shackleton and Franklin Delano Roosevelt — understood how to provide stability, a steady hand and hope, even when they themselves were uncertain about the road ahead. They were honest with their followers and found private outlets for their own anxieties. And they celebrated small victories, even when the losses seemed large. This interview has been edited for clarity.

These feel like unprecedented times. But we’ve seen other periods of high anxiety. How have the leaders you’ve studied helped their followers through the uncertainty and stress of the crises they faced?

With a combination of brutal honesty and credible hope.

First, give people the facts to keep them informed, to help them make sense of the crisis and to build their trust. Then you tell them what you are doing about the key challenges, what resources you — and they — have at hand to confront the moment, and what their job is in helping to navigate the crisis.

Some of these resources are tangible, such as money, manpower or military might; some are intangible, such as courage, resilience, unity, compassion and imagination. Presenting both is very useful for dialling down fear. You don’t ignore or eliminate the anxiety. You do get people to understand that they are part of a solution.

For Abraham Lincoln during the civil war, this was about inspiring northern supporters to hold firm to the twin goals of the conflict: save the Union and end slavery.

For Winston Churchill during World War 11, it was about resilience and dedication to the fight against Nazi Germany — even in 1940 and 1941, when Britain stood virtually alone, the last bulwark against Adolf Hitler. In a famous address to the House of Commons in June 1940, Churchill declared, “We shall go on to the end … we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” When you do these things, people think, “OK, I’m scared, and my leader knows it, but we’re going to get through it anyway and we each have a role to play.”

What sort of presence should a chief executive or a political leader have during times such as these?

A huge amount of anxiety in times of crisis has to do with who is in charge and how they behave. People need to think — not only rationally but also intuitively and instinctively — that the leader and his or her people understand what’s going on, know what they’re doing, have a plan, and that they care.

James Burke, who was head of Johnson & Johnson when the company had to recall 31 million bottles of Tylenol in 1982, after people died from cyanide-laced pills, pulled the company out of crisis by showing that kind of competence and concern. He led an immediate corporate response and people thought, “There may be a lot of poisoned Tylenol out there, but he’s taking swift action. He truly cares.”

As a leader, should you ever share your own worries or anxieties?

In the types of crises we’re talking about — ones with very high stakes — people need to believe their leaders can get the job done. This means that thoughtfully revealing your humanity is fine, but permitting yourself an emotional catharsis in public is not. Airing your own anxieties in front of your followers is distracting, destabilising and destructive. People can’t be excited about following you if they believe you are defined by doubt and fear.

So you need to show up and perform well without allowing the public or the organisation to sense your fears. Nelson Mandela famously said that, as an enemy of the state and a prisoner in apartheid-era South Africa, he “learned that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it”. And that triumph is rooted in self-discipline. Lincoln could have stood before congress at the height of the civil war and said, “I have no idea how to get out of this.” But instead he summoned the discipline to tell them they were facing “a fiery trial” so they must “think anew and act anew”.

Real leaders know people are taking their cues from them, so they arrive like they’re marching into battle. This does not mean that leaders ignore or deny their own fears. It means they have to find a way to release these anxieties — in private, with trusted colleagues or in some other safe context — without showing up in service to or acting on them.

But what if you aren’t sure that everything and everyone will come out of the situation OK?

In a widespread crisis, the odds are that you cannot be certain all will end well. And by definition there is a great deal of uncertainty and confusion. So a leader must find faith in the knowledge that his or her job is to navigate point to point, that there is inevitably another star on the horizon to steer by, and that it is OK — indeed, it is to be expected — that one cannot see much beyond the next point. You might not know how to get through the entire storm, but you know that if you go this way the waves will be lower and the winds less intense.

That is exactly what we saw New York Governor Andrew Cuomo do when his state became the epicentre of the US COVID-19 pandemic. He’d say things like, “Here’s what’s going to happen over the next two weeks” or “Here’s the spectrum of possibilities” and “Here’s how we’re preparing.” In a crisis, you navigate step by step, based on all the information you have, while always keeping the mission in plain sight.

For Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, whose expedition got stuck in the ice off that continent from 1914 to 1916, his mission was to get his crew home alive. For Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Depression in the early 1930s, it was to save not only the American economy but also its democracy, since he could see other economically hard-hit countries, such as Spain, Italy and Germany, sliding into fascism. The missions of these leaders were always crystal clear. But none of them knew exactly how they would get there. They just took one step, then the next, and then the one after that.

So you’re supposed to experiment behind the scenes?

Talking about a particularly difficult period during 1862, Lincoln explained that “we had about played our last card and must change tactics or lose the game”. Certainly, he tried all kinds of possibilities to save the Union during the first two years of the civil war — from appointing different Union generals to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

Roosevelt experimented with an alphabet soup of policies to shore up the larger economy and improve American lives in the Depression.

During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, president John F. Kennedy had a similar strategy: he assembled a group of experts and offered them the latitude to try to solve the problem without an escalation into nuclear war. Of course, in times of great challenge, you often find that more of your moves don’t work than do.

Several times Shackleton tried having his men pull the boats across the ice in search of open water, only to have all of those efforts fail.

If followers see you trying out different plans, and sometimes failing, won’t that exacerbate anxiety?

You need to nurture a new way of thinking about the crisis among your people. Pull them away from believing there is a clear GPS-like path to its end. Explain that there will be fits and starts, and that you’re moving from point to point or stage to stage. But, at the same time, keep giving them jobs to do — a prescription for work that helps move the mission forward. Routine is also hugely important for diluting fear. All kinds of studies — on subjects ranging from children’s development to prisoners of war — show this. Finally, think about FDR’s fireside chats or Cuomo’s daily press conferences. Regular communication can be a fixture of stability during a frightening period.

There’s immediate anxiety and prolonged anxiety. Does the approach change as challenging times go on and on?

Once you know it’s not going to be over quickly, you need to let people know that. With the COVID-19 crisis, it’s important to explain that you’re in a multi-chapter book. It’s not as long as Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Dickens’s Bleak House but it’s a novel, not a short magazine story, so to speak. Then assure people that they’ll be better off in chapter three than in chapter one, because their resilience muscles can only get stronger. Also make sure to highlight progress and triumphs.

Great leaders always find victories, no matter how small, to celebrate. Even when Shackleton had no good news to report, he would find other ways to boost men’s spirits — with food or just good conversation.

Should you manage the anxieties of various stakeholders differently?

All good leaders are thoughtful about how they share information and how they deliver it to different sets of people. For example, Shackleton and his second-in-command, Frank Wild, talked frequently about worst-case scenarios, so they could address these possibilities, voice their own fears about them and bolster one another. They did this in private because they both knew it would have crushed morale to share those thoughts widely.

Lincoln generally kept his own counsel. But at times, he relied on two trusted secretaries, a few old friends and, less often, one or two of his cabinet members as sounding boards. Kennedy, by contrast, had an entire executive committee working on the Cuban missile crisis, though only his brother Bobby knew the president’s worst fears.

Here’s one big caveat to having an inner circle, though: you can’t withhold information that matters from these people if you believe it will erode their trust in you. That trust is an essential element in getting through the crisis together. So it’s a fine balance.

Are there any corporate leaders you’d point to who have handled crises particularly effectively?

Burke at Johnson & Johnson is one. Other examples include the leaders of the HJ Heinz Company during the Depression. With about a quarter of the US workforce unemployed, the Pittsburgh-based food manufacturer pursued a range of tacks to keep their people employed at a living wage, including investing in staple products for hard-hit consumers like ready-to-serve soup and baby formula. That was a powerful thing to do. It wasn’t dictated by America’s harsh rules of capitalism. But it obviously eased employees’ anxieties and it proved to be quite important for the future of the company.

Employment actually increased at Heinz throughout the Depression and, as the decade drew to a close, workers won higher wages, overtime pay, seniority rights and paid vacation as part of a broader wave of unionisation in the country. As the economy recovered in the 1940s, Heinz had incredibly loyal employees and was regarded as an excellent employer.

The point is that after the crisis had passed, people remembered what the company had done and what its priorities had been.

How did the leaders you’ve studied manage their own anxieties?

Kennedy swam when he could and talked to his brother. Lincoln paced the halls of the White House late at night and sang songs and told raunchy jokes. Shackleton walked the ice and read poetry. Effective leaders find whatever it is that will help them release their fears, and do it regularly to stay grounded.

Who is reducing the anxiety of the COVID-19 crisis?

I mentioned Cuomo before, and I will again. He communicates the facts, assigns New Yorkers jobs and espouses the vital importance of people staying home to save lives. He constantly reinforces the dual mission of keeping people safe and not overwhelming the health care system, while offering people credible hope.

The message is: We are New Yorkers, strong, smart, unified and loving. We’ve been tested before and emerged triumphant. We will do the same again. US governors, like Jay Inslee of Washington, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have also been very strong leaders. So has German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern.

Alison Beard is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review

- Copyright 2020 Harvard Business Review/Distributed by the New York Times Syndicate