Leading under Pressure: Keeping your Calm

Going back to your time during the Siege of Sarajevo, how did you learn to deal with changing situations and the fast-paced nature of the environment?

Sometimes, in war, there’s a lot of intense pressure. When the bullets were flying, the first thing going through my head wasn’t, “What are we gonna do?” It’s just, “Don’t panic.” You’re the leader on the ground; if you panic, everyone else will panic. If you panic, you can hardly breathe, let alone think. Not panicking under pressure is a critical part of a leader. It helps you in later life too because you go into companies where there aren’t life-and-death situations. The worst thing that can happen is you get fired, and it brings everything into context, which is quite nice.

Other things around learning about the fast-paced nature of war and operations, it comes down to a whole load of things. Hopefully, you’ve seen similar situations elsewhere. One of the things the army is very good at is making training as intense as possible so when you hit high-pressure situations, you can be calmer but also, you’ve seen something similar and learned how to think through it — creating mental models and standard operating procedures for things as well. When you go to sleep at night, you have sentries. They have a set of pretty standard duties, and they’ve all been tested so if they get attacked, they know what to do next. As much as possible, try and anticipate the problems that could happen and train people for it.

The other is being able to think quickly on your feet, which is a combination of always being prepared. Whenever I went anywhere in the army and still now, in life, I always made sure my stuff was ready to grab and go. Even though I spent a lot of my time in tanks, I had a backpack with all my stuff ready to go, so if the tank broke down or the wheel blew off, I could grab my backpack and keep moving. Sometimes, things happen that mean you have to change the plan suddenly. Just being mentally prepared. Having that backpack there, I never felt comfortable that, “I’m in my tank, I’ll operate everything from here.” I can operate from anywhere, just like in modern business.

You shouldn’t get too comfortable in your office. The role of a leader requires thinking and leading from wherever you need to be, which could be a different part of the world; a shop floor somewhere; brainstorming with engineers; or leaning over someone’s shoulder, looking at their screen, doing some problem-solving. Not that much leadership happens from an office. You can do one-to-ones and send emails, but that’s a very small fraction of leadership.