Awhile back I was conducting a leadership class in which I showed a video of a school principal who was a pioneer in the area of early education intervention for at-risk children. The video depicted a day in the life of the principal (whom I’ll call Kate) as she interacted with different groups – students, parents, administrators, corporate executives – and attempted to influence their participation in and funding of early education programs.
At the conclusion of the video, I asked my standard debriefing question: “What factors do you think governed Kate’s influencing approach to each of these different groups?”
By asking the question, I intended (and expected) the class participants to point out Kate’s use of certain approaches (rewards, sanctions, personal charisma) to influence students’ behavior, and her use of other approaches (her expertise in the field, her track record of success) to sway her corporate audiences.
I primarily wanted the class to acknowledge a key aspect of leadership: The ability to adapt one’s style to motivate different people based on a reading of the audience and the situation.
So I was intrigued when one of the participants gave me a somewhat unexpected response: “I don’t think she consciously considered any factors. I think she just acted intuitively.”
The response provided me a golden opportunity to refer to a situation described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. In Blink, Gladwell cites the work of a researcher named Gary Klein (whose company happens to be located two miles from my house – a connection I can’t resist offering up here, for what it’s worth). Klein’s company conducts detailed research into the ways that people make decisions – especially split-second ones in emergency situations.
Gladwell describes one of Klein’s research subjects, a fire department commander who once responded to a house fire that seemed to resist all of his squad’s efforts to extinguish it. As he and his squad stood in the living room trying to figure out their next move, the commander suddenly got a sense that something was just “not right” about the situation. He immediately ordered everyone out of the house – just before the living room floor collapsed into the basement.
Klein interviewed the commander about the factors that led to his decision to vacate and discovered:
“He didn’t know why he had ordered everyone out. He believed it was ESP. He was serious. He thought he had ESP, and he felt that because of that ESP, he’d been protected throughout his career.”
Most people would have chalked this up to “intuitive” decision-making born of years of experience. But not Klein, whose entire research is based on delving into how the mind arrives at such decisions, especially in the heat of the moment. As he pressed the commander to describe exactly what cues caught his attention as he moved through the house, Klein pieced together the thought processes that led to his urgent command to vacate. As Gladwell relates it:
“The fire didn’t respond to being sprayed in the kitchen because it wasn’t centered in the kitchen. It was quiet because it was muffled by the floor. The living room was hot because the fire was underneath the living room, and heat rises. At the time, though, the lieutenant made none of those connections consciously. All of his thinking was going on behind the locked door of his unconscious.” [emphasis added]
Similarly, in the situation of Kate, the school principal: She may not have been consciously aware of the signs she was picking up from her audience that governed her influencing behavior. However, under the surface, her mental computer was rapidly processing the cues and guiding her in-the-moment choices of behavior. (In this sense, she was very much operating in the same manner as a performance improviser – but more on that in a later article.)
Certainly, neither Kate nor the fire commander came into this world with their intuitive capabilities fully formed. Like anyone else, they first had to consciously learn the rudiments of effective action and proceed from a state of “conscious competence” to one of “unconscious competence.”
The good news, then, in these two examples – the fire commander and Kate – is that intuitive action can be taught, as long as we can isolate the inputs and processes that lead one to act effectively. Gary Klein is living proof that we can in fact identify the underlying dynamics of improvisational action in emergency situations. Similarly, through the creation of competency models and other behavioral descriptions, we can identify (and teach) what the best leaders do when they’re acting “in the heat of the moment.”
Of course, teaching intuitive action requires much more than just isolating key factors and presenting them on a Powerpoint slide. In my next article, I’ll describe strategies that can be employed to ingrain effective leadership behaviors (as my improv colleague Gary Schwartz says) “in the bones.”
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