Urgent issues and changing priorities – these are daily occurrences for leaders. And there’s only so much time to deal with them.
Psychiatrist, philosopher and author, Viktor Frankl, offers this valuable insight for leaders:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Because time is unrecoverable, leaders often react instinctively in such moments, like an involuntary reflex, yielding to the impulse of responding with urgency. But this impulse can be resisted by realizing that there is time to gain clarity about the circumstances, to assess, to gather perspectives, and to develop their response.
In their book “Real Time Leadership,” authors David Noble and Carol Kauffman propose 5 steps to create this space between stimulus and response, helping leaders focus on the situation, determine a response priority, and manage emotions:
- Be calm, to better manage your response to the threat;
- Be clear, about your current challenges and highest priorities – external (goals/others’ expectations), internal (your values/mindset), and interpersonal (relationships/social intelligence) – to see things for what they are;
- Be curious, taking time to gather information that will enable the generation of alternative responses and thoughtful decisions;
- Be compassionate, empathizing with others to encourage their suggestions, maximize the number of optional responses, and discover what they need to move forward;
- Be courageous, challenging existing assumptions, precedents, and perceptions of reality, speaking truth to power when necessary.
How might this process improve your response to the next urgent challenge?
