Keep Calm and Carry On - Calm Beats Chaos Every Time
Staying calm in a crisis is a necessary component of leadership.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
Free members can read some amount of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, part of the article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member!
As a quick completely off-topic share, my family went to Maui last year, and I spent some time snorkeling with my wife and daughter. I have also wanted to learn video editing, because I like learning things. I cut my underwater videos into a single video (using DaVinci Resolve), and I thought I’d share with all of you.
I hope you enjoy! Ok, on with the show.
Years ago, I read a piece of relationship advice that still comes back to me.
It said that you control 100% of 50% of a relationship. In other words, you have 100% control over your side of a relationship. You can’t stop them from doing something. You can’t make them have a good day if they’re grumpy. You can’t make them say things you want them to say. In the end, you have zero control over them.
Now I think a lot of people agree with that, and it makes sense, right?
But if you really believe that logic, then you must understand that the inverse is true as well. That they can’t control you. Yet so many people fall into that trap.
“They made me angry!” “They made me have a bad day!” “They stopped me from exercising!” “They stop me from eating healthy!”
Both of these beliefs can’t be true at the same time. And with a few exceptions, I think it’s safe to say that you have 100% control over your behaviors and reactions, and everyone else will do their thing. You need to stress over what you can control.
This is certainly not just a home thing. This applies to work as well.
A website goes down. People don’t do their work. Someone responds to us rudely. Perhaps our great work is ignored. And we might get angry that our co-workers are making our work experience bad.
We can’t control what other people do. What we can control is our mind and our behavior. We can’t control life, but we control how to react to it.
Why do I feel this is important to bring up in a leadership newsletter?
Because everyone performs poorly when they’re stressed. Stress causes a fight-or-flight response. Yes, if your office catches fire, I suggest flight.
However, stress at the office is usually not life threatening. Instead, we might have a late project, or a forgotten requirement, or an outage, or a bug found late in the project. These events are unexpected, and do need to be dealt with.
A panic response is not only a bad idea, but it actually makes the problem significantly worse.
Certain skills and behaviors become less important as your career grows. Things like “coding fast” or “knowing spreadsheet macros.” Other things become more important. The ability to stay calm in a work crisis becomes indispensable as you grow in experience and influence.
What’s the downside of emotional escalation?
This newsletter is mostly for workers at tech companies. Our mistakes are very rarely life or death. If you’re a doctor reading this, thank you for your work. Perhaps this doesn’t apply to you. Yelling in the tech office is the adult version of screaming because we stubbed our toe. It’s an overreaction to a minor situation. The corporation might have lost some money, but in most cases our jobs will be fine.
However, it’s not just about acting childish.
What is a human reaction to panic? We try to solve things quickly. We take action, and then think later. Of course this is a surefire way to turn a medium-sized problem into a huge problem. Knowledge worker problems are solved with careful and thoughtful planning. You can only achieve this when you’re calm.
We also benefit from making mistakes, if we take the time to absorb the lesson. Most of our learning in life comes from making mistakes, not things we already do well. This means we learn by changing our processes when the other one didn’t work out. We learn new skills when our existing skills aren’t sufficient. Our personal growth, corporate process growth, and growth of those around us all revolves around our ability to make mistakes, and learn from them. A calm response to failure means that mistakes are ok, and that leads to growth.
Finally, a big part of our happiness at work revolves around how we feel at work. Big problems can be solved when we’re engaged and enthusiastic about fixing things. Even small problems seem insurmountable when our work environment is toxic.
Let me tell you about a time when my team freaked out.
