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INSIDE THE CRUCIBLE

Learning and Leading with Resilience

IN HIS SHORT STORY “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” Edgar Allan Poe offers a marvelous literary evocation of life inside a crucible.¹ The story’s narrator, one of three brothers who achieved success as fishermen by sailing through waters made treacherous by a periodic whirlpool or maelstrom, tells of a fateful day when he lost track of the time and tides and his ship was sucked into the circling waters. In the clamor and rush of water pulling the boat to the ocean floor, he confesses that he fell into the grip of an overpowering panic. In the moment of greatest confusion, however, with the sky narrowing above him, he was suddenly enveloped in an unearthly calm, a revelation that everything was beyond his control. No matter what he did, it seemed he was going to die. And in those minutes of calm, he let loose his death grip on one reality and recognized another.

The noise and the fog that had impaired his senses receded. He stepped outside the part of him that had panicked and saw with astonishing clarity that some debris caught up in the whirlpool wasn’t descending as fast as his ship. In fact, some empty barrels seemed to hang suspended above him as he and the ship sank deeper and deeper. He realized that if the barrels hung there long enough, they might escape being pulled to the bottom altogether. His chance for salvation was to lash himself to a barrel and step off the ship. He did, and he survived.

Like Poe’s protagonist, most people I interview recalled life inside a crucible as a time of turbulence and profound tension—sometimes depressing, sometimes giddy, sometimes chaotic, sometimes all three. Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America, described how, as a college senior struggling to define a thesis topic, she descended into a “funk that I had never been in before and will hopefully never be in again.” She emerged out of it with the idea of a national teacher corps. Tara Church, who founded a nationwide conservation organization, told of her inner struggle as an eight-year-old when she realized that drought robbed trees of their sustenance—but that activities aimed to save water (like using disposable paper plates) consumed trees. The seeming contradiction between conservation and destruction puzzled and then terrified her as a child. Would humans have to live underground if there were no trees and water? she wondered. Out of that nightmare came an organization she formed as a child (with help from her mother) made up of children who planted trees.

Leaders I spoke with also experienced their time inside the crucible as a seemingly intractable double bind. They often looked back in wonder that they survived the turmoil at all. Some spoke ruefully (and occasionally with embarrassment) about how long it took them to see and understand what they’d actually been through. But the lessons they recounted were as immediate as if they had occurred just days before.

Even when they dismissed their survival as so much luck or good fortune, each person said their crucibles invoked as well as strengthened something crucial: their adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity is all about learning—about oneself, about the world, and about what it takes to adjust to, and make, change. Adaptive capacity is what makes it possible to live with the doubt that accompanies a double bind, to open up to possibilities rather than shutting down and retreating.

Defensive reactions like tensing up, on the other hand, as Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee remind us in Resonant Leadership, can increase vulnerability. Such reactions make it difficult to flex—to sidestep an attacker or to see an opportunity for escape, for example—and, worse yet, they dissipate energy rather than unleash it.² “Fight or flight” may be an instinct rooted in a part of the brain evolved over tens of thousands of years of survival in the wild, but the ability to learn—and to learn quickly—is an essential part of successful adaptation to the challenges of living in human society, especially in the twenty-first century.

Resilience, a central facet of adaptive capacity, makes it possible for leaders to find calm in the face of tension and to begin the search for answers. According to psychologist Frederic Flach, resilience is about resolving the tension between opposing forces: “Each period of change is necessarily stressful, for it involves conflict between a powerful force that operates to keep things exactly as they’ve been, and another powerful force that commands us to move forward and embrace new conditions.”³ (See the box, “Resilience: Inner Strengths and Interpersonal Strengths.”)

My interviews about crucibles and their lessons—especially the lessons people learned about learning—suggest that resilience is perhaps better understood as a process rather than an inherited trait. In other words, while resilience may be innate to some individuals, it can also be practiced much like a deliberate sequence of moves or enacted like a diagnostic routine. As I’ll show in more detail later in this book, that kind of practice is vital to an individual’s Personal Learning Strategy.

Resilience manifested itself in different moments in leaders’ crucible stories. The following examples illustrate three key moments in the process of resilience: recognizing the tension (sometimes even the pain) that accompanies a crucible, reframing the tension as something knowable and manageable, and resolving the tension constructively.⁴

RECOGNIZING THE TENSION

Muriel Siebert, founder of Siebert Financial and the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, came to New York in the 1950s after her father died broke from three years of illness. She marveled at the money she was making: $12,500 a year. But after several years of work and despite distinguishing herself as the lead airlines analyst in the NYSE Analysts Society, she was refused the title of “trader” and was denied the commissions routinely due to someone who dealt in blocks of stock the way she did.

She remembers, “I was a partner of a small firm, Finkel & Co., because I could not get hired by a large firm and get credit on the business. They did not have women. We just were not there. They had women as secretaries; sometimes they had an analyst or two; but we were secretaries. This was a period of time that was not nice on Wall Street.” When she realized that the men in her firm were being paid twice her wages, she sent her résumé to every firm downtown—but didn’t get a single bite. It wasn’t until the Analysts Society sent around her résumé with only her initials on it (rather than her full name) that she got an interview at a major brokerage house—and she got the job.

Still, she continued to earn only a fraction of the proper commission on her sales. She recalled in vivid detail the conflict she felt between her pride at making a sale and the deep-seated inequity she experienced. “When I learned how to trade and put the blocks together, that changed everything,” she said. “One day, the Madison Fund gave me a 10,000 share order. And I went to my boss, and I said, ‘Isn’t this great?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘That’s shit!’ We didn’t have negotiated rates, so I think the commission was maybe $4,000, but I made only $1,600 that day. On one hand, I thought I was doing well. That was a good month’s pay. On the other hand, I was being cheated. I had to decide what I was going to do about it.”

Siebert thought long and hard about her double bind: the inequity of her situation was maddening, but the risk of starting her own firm and thus deftly sidestepping the game rigged against her was enormous. Not only could she fail, but she could thoroughly alienate herself from future employers who would always question her allegiance. In the end, she chose to transform the tension that might have consumed her into a resolution to create her own firm—and ultimately also to train women and minorities to be world-class performers.

Her success in setting up her own firm (a fascinating story in itself) emboldened her to take her ideas public (e.g., as superintendent of banks for the state of New York) and to create a high school curriculum to teach teenagers about money, focused on budgeting and prudent use of credit.⁵ “Do you know there is nowhere, on any credit card bill, that says if you make only the minimum payment you will be paying for last night’s dinner for fifteen to twenty years? That’s the way it’s designed,” Siebert said. Her goal is to make sure that young people understand all the ins and outs of money and financial well-being, and she hopes to make the course mandatory for high school graduation. Siebert also launched one of the first Web sites dedicated to women and finance.

For leaders like Siebert and others I interviewed, recognizing the tension inside a crucible situation was often not easy. It requires one to distinguish between the force that is driving for change and the force that is trying desperately to sustain the status quo. It requires an awareness of one’s vulnerability (difficult things are happening to me), and yet it demands a relentless sense of agency (I can do something in, or despite, these circumstances). The next step, then, involves taking that recognition and reframing or reshaping it into a new perception of reality.

REFRAMING THE TENSION

Growing up in the African American community on Baltimore’s West Side, Brian Morris recalled being “not the poorest of the poor, but clearly not the richest of the rich.” Truth is, his family just scraped by. Close friends and relatives were claimed as victims of drugs and gang violence. But because of some strong adult models, including a grandmother with high aspirations for young Brian, Morris was able to reshape that early adversity into opportunity: today he heads his own community-based building and investment company, and he serves on the Baltimore city school board.

Asked to recall a time when he learned something important about being a leader, Morris talked about an incident at age eleven that “shaped who I am and why I behave the way I do.” His story centered on what for many children is the ultimate nightmare: he found his father lying face down on the apartment floor, unconscious from an apparent drug overdose. Morris called his mother, who summoned an ambulance, but as he recalled, “It seemed like hours, me standing there just staring at him. I don’t know if I ever blinked the whole time.”

The tension confronting Morris—between life and death, between life as he’d known it with a family and the specter of losing his father, between his grandmother’s aspirations for him and his everyday experience of the West Side’s mean streets—came at him like a freight train. “When you’re young, you don’t have a sense of your own existence,” he said. “You don’t have a sense that one day this thing ends. And not until that point did I have an understanding that this thing called my life, or this thing called the life of other people, could actually end.” He began then and there to feel his own mortality, that he only had a certain amount of time allotted to him—a lesson that typically happens to people much later in life.

With that crucible experience came the realization that he wanted to make something of his limited time on earth, helping Morris to reframe his circumstances as he moved through adolescence into manhood. Describing himself as a “glass half-full kind of guy,” he influenced his friends too. When his pals complained about the lack of basketball hoops in the neighborhood, he got their help to nail up milk crates. When they needed jerseys, he scavenged T-shirts and lettered them by hand.

Morris modeled himself on several heroes, Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy among them. But Malcolm X came the closest to being a kindred spirit. “Malcolm X came from nothing,” Morris said. “He was a criminal, a burglar, a pimp, a drug dealer and then made this miraculous metamorphosis into this guy who led a nation in understanding themselves, understanding how to clean yourself up from whatever vices that you have and be a stand up guy who can be respected.” Clearly, Morris took that understanding to heart, given his own transformation from that boy staring at his father lying on the floor to the leading Baltimore citizen and community member he later became.

Sometimes the process of reframing becomes a communal activity. Many of the leaders whose crucibles involved reversal—bankruptcy, loss of an election, or a major project failure—worked their way out of an untenable situation by enlisting the aid of others facing similar straits. A marvelous example can be found in the Island Moving Company, a contemporary ballet company based in Newport, Rhode Island, and founded by Miki Ohlsen. Classically trained in the Netherlands, Ohlsen experienced a deep and abiding love for ballet since her earliest days as a dancer. As she progressed in her training, however, earning more prominent roles and artistic acclaim, she also experienced what she termed the “brutal hierarchy” of the traditional ballet company, with the harsh and “ego-crushing” domination of the ballet master and the mindless subservience expected of even the most accomplished dancers.

Determined to pursue her passion for dance in an environment more consistent with personal expression, Ohlsen assembled a small but like-minded group of dancers into a company dedicated, in the words of its mission statement, “to the belief that collaboration and a supportive environment enhance the creative process, producing great works of art representing profound expressions of the human spirit and experience.”⁶ The Island Moving Company, now more than twenty-five years old, has done what few regional dance organizations have done: established a permanent home, maintained a continuous schedule of performances over two decades, successfully recruited and retained a stable cast of dancers, and offered a living salary to all members of the company.

Reshaping and reframing tension is not illusion—or selfdelusion. It is a purposive reframing: finding an angle or a lens through which the current reality can be reshaped into a healthier and more productive outcome. In Ohlsen’s case, a principal tenet of the Island Moving Company is personal responsibility, which includes the responsibility to articulate one’s own values and aspirations and to find ways to productively resolve the conflicts that will inevitably result. When, for example, individual dancers feel that they have been relegated too often to supporting roles, and they desire to be out in front, it is their obligation to say so, even if that means an uncomfortable confrontation with the artistic director or other dancers.

RESOLVING THE TENSION CONSTRUCTIVELY

Resolving the tension of any crucible experience means finding a way to mend the tear that has occurred between life as one has known it and life as it now presents itself. George Vaillant, in his long-term studies of a cohort of men, concluded that the core attribute of mental health is the ability to adapt and adjust.⁷ He identified some eighteen forms of adaptation—what he referred to as defense mechanisms—and argued that five were characteristic of healthy, mature means by which people cope with the challenges that life presents: altruism, humor, suppression, anticipation and sublimation. I found ample evidence for each in the stories I heard about learning from crucible experiences.

For example, Bob Donohue, who leads the Fire and Rescue Department for the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport), which includes Boston’s Logan International Airport, spoke of the challenges of leading in a complex, interdependent environment. The emergencies that are so much a part of his department’s mission do not respect organizational boundaries. But there are emergencies and then there are frame-busting events that toss convention out the window. On September 11, 2001, when two commercial airliners out of Logan were hijacked and sent hurtling into the World Trade Center in New York City, Donohue was one of a very few people who understood just how complicated the task would be of coordinating several dozen local, municipal, airport, state, and federal agencies and nearly as many businesses in their response to this unprecedented crisis.

“As the news began to filter in I was stunned, absolutely stunned,” he recalled. “How could anyone do this? Why would they do it? And then: what are we going to do?” Fortunately, his department had a set of agreements and rules about how to behave in an emergency—even if none were truly matched to the scale of that one. “But even more important, we had a network of people I knew well. It was a bad situation, but I knew I could trust these people to do the right things when they were called on to do them.”

Donohue called on his network that day in ways he never imagined he’d have to, and like the unanticipated leaders who emerged in the days following the devastation—particularly midlevel managers in the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey—they kept order at the airport; coordinated operations to accommodate dozens of grounded aircraft, flight crews, and thousands of passengers; mobilized staff to meet and console the families of the hijacking victims; and began a methodical search for clues to the events of the day.

What did a crucible experience like 9/11 teach Donohue about himself as a leader and his own learning style? He replied that though he did gain some confidence in himself as a leader, the real resolution from this crucible event for him came when he realized he’d become more willing to ask for help from others.

Donohue makes a powerful point: awareness of tension or the demand for adaptation is an empty vessel if you are not disposed to learn from it. Seeing others act or, in this instance, seeking out others to lend assistance is something that individuals can learn to do. In other words, resilience is not an accident of birth. It can be learned.

A resolution to the tension is not always the product of conscious deliberation. Once in a while it seems to happen spontaneously, as Jack Coleman, former president of Haverford College in Pennsylvania, suggests in a crucible story he chose to share. Coleman described how one day, during the Vietnam War, he heard that a group of students was planning to pull down the American flag and burn it. He also knew that members of the school’s football team were determined that the protesters would not succeed. As both factions gathered around the flagpole, Coleman suddenly had an idea to preempt the showdown. With a voice quavering with the depth of emotion the experience still held for him, he explained, “From somewhere a voice came to me, gave me a message. And I went to the peace faction and said, ‘Instead of burning the flag, why not get a bucket of soap and water? Wash the flag and put it back up.’ That’s what happened. The troops dispersed. I don’t know where that message came from or why.”

Whether spontaneous or the product of a prepared mind, resolutions of the sort Coleman and Donohue described are the work of leaders. But success at resolving tension does not always take place on the stage of world events, of course. As they say, sometimes healing the universe is an inside job. Certainly that would be the case with the leaders I encountered who overcame learning disabilities through creative adaptations.

For example, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson suffers from dyslexia, is bad at math, and, by his own admission, has a terrible memory. He never made it through high school. But, he says, “At some point, I think I decided that being dyslexic was better than being stupid.”⁸ Knowing how he learns—and learns best—he set about creating things he could be proud of, leveraging lessons learned in one product or service to grow another and another (forty-nine at last count).

The list of business leaders with learning disabilities is formidable—and I mention it here because it seems imminently appropriate in a discussion about learning. They include business leaders John Chambers (CEO of Cisco Systems), Charles Schwab, John Reed (formerly of Citibank), Craig McCaw (who pioneered the cellular industry), Paul Orfalea (founder of Kinko’s), Diane Swonk (chief economist of Bank One), and attorney David Boies. Orfalea failed second grade and spent part of third in a class of mentally retarded children. He could not read. As his peers read aloud in class, Orfalea described it as if “angels whispered words in their ears.” Each in his or her own way resolved the conflict between a learning disability that threatened to sideline them at an early age and an overpowering urge to succeed.⁹

Resolution can be accomplished by shifting the focus from a disability to an ability to confront and overcome challenges. Finding a way to cope with dyslexia or navigate a path to normalcy after September 11 does not necessarily mean the underlying tension has been eradicated. It has, however, been rendered manageable. And importantly, finding resolution is almost never done in complete isolation.

No One Learns Alone

The journey that transforms an individual into a leader is often a lonely one. We only truly know one side of any conversation: our own. We know every torturous turn and pang of our own ordeals and rites of passage, but we never know more than a cartoon version of anyone else’s. Unable to hear another’s interior monologue, you may not realize that he or she is struggling at all.

Yet, the leaders I interviewed were rarely alone in their crucibles. Mentors, coaches, teachers, spouses, peers, bosses, and friends played critical advisory or “sense-making” roles during crucible experiences. They helped most by putting events in context, in helping others create a more robust awareness of the things that were going on around them. As Vaillant concluded in his study of lifelong adaptation, “Both as children and as adults, we learn to anticipate pain effectively only if someone first sits beside us while we learn to bear current anxiety.”¹⁰

For example, and as I will show in detail in the next chapter, outstanding performers often seek out the best available teachers—even when, to the rest of us, it appears that they are at the peak of their game or their profession. A great coach or mentor can contribute a wealth of experience and an objective eye. The same finding applies to effective leaders, especially because of the central role that experience plays in their matriculation and their maturation.

Consider the case of the 1970s congressman and priest, Father Robert Drinan. He was the first member of the House to file a resolution of impeachment on President Nixon (on July 31, 1973). Although by that point he was a seasoned religious and political leader, he told me that during this particular crucible experience, he leaned heavily on a network of Jesuit peers and moral leaders to convince him that he was doing the right thing by publicly accusing the president of the United States of illegal acts. The community of Jesuits with whom he lived in Washington, D.C., many of whom were on the faculty at Georgetown University, provided a critical sounding board.

For leaders in the midst of a crucible, one of the most important things that their coaches and mentors did was to help them to “step out of role” temporarily, to accomplish what management educator Janice Klein argues is a vital skill for leaders and change agents: the ability to be both an insider and an outsider.¹¹ The insider is entirely in the game, in the action as it unfolds, but the outsider looks around, questions what is being taken for granted, and assesses his or her own performance from a more dispassionate perspective. In crucible situations, coaching tends to be more effective than mentoring: unlike mentors, coaches do not offer answers, they offer perspective.

Coaches and mentors rarely just appeared—as if by magic or destiny—though that would have lent a more dramatic flair to some of the crucible stories. More often, coaches and mentors were recruited as part of a strategy for managing and/or resolving the tension induced by a crucible situation. Family members, most commonly parents and grandparents, tended to be more easily at hand, and in many instances they were more attractive because they’d already proved themselves to be understanding and accepting of the individual and his or her prior quandaries.

Some leaders enlarged the role of coach by impaneling for themselves the equivalent of a personal board of directors whom they call on periodically for advice, feedback, and perspective. Amazon.com’s Jeff Wilke has done just that. As a result of a crucible early in his career (described in chapter 2), Wilke said he recognized the value of having a group of people—friends, former bosses, and teachers—to whom he could refer for advice and counsel and who, in turn, cared enough about him and his success to tell him the unvarnished truth.

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What distinguishes learning from a crucible and simply surviving it (or, worse yet, not surviving it) is partly a product of personality and partly a product of learned behavior. Some people are constitutionally optimistic. The roots of their resilience go deep—so deep, in fact, that beyond a certain point, a search for origins becomes a purely metaphysical exercise.

The crucible stories in these last two chapters, however, offer strong evidence that both helplessness and resilience can be learned.¹² Repeatedly, people attributed to their crucible experiences an enriched understanding of how they lead, and then used that understanding, in the words of one, “to put themselves in the path of more crucibles”—so that they could continue to learn, adapt, and improve.

That’s why, for example, I found these leaders to be resolute in their curiosity, what I refer to as their proclivity to be egoless learners. To a person, they denied suffering from boredom, whether on the job or in the rest of life. There is always something new to explore: a new technique, a colleague’s or an employee’s new idea, a new way to look at an old problem. Each challenge refines, sharpens, and/or improves understanding of the world and of the self and, in many instances, enhances appreciation of the fact that there is still so much more to learn. Practice makes perfect—and as I’ll show in the next chapter, it can even overcome any perceived limits in the talent department.