November
November| 2021 news & updates
Leadership Under Pressure
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This North Carolina native from a family of 10 children raised by a single mother is an exemplary role model for personal and professional success. Venessa began her AT&T career as an operator 40+ years ago in Raleigh. She advanced to the very top becoming AT&T’s N.C. president.
Along the way, she led the push for early fiber deployment and was honored by being inducted into TechWire’s Hall of Fame. In 2017, Venessa stepped into her current position in GA which includes legislative, business, and civic responsibilities. In 2020, she was honored as the Women in Technology (WIT) Woman of the Year in Technology and as the Civic Diversity Champion in the Atlanta Business Chronicle Diversity & Inclusion Awards.
Join us Friday, Nov. 19 for what is sure to be a memorable discussion with this leader.
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“From Entry Level to Corporate President: Pathways to the Top”
featuring Venessa Harrison
President of AT&T – Georgia
Women in Leadership Signature Series
Friday, November 19, 8 - 10 am, Virtual
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Calendar: Upcoming TLG Events
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Leadership Under Pressure |
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Everyone is under some kind of pressure...everyone. And when stressed and pressed, how does our behavior change?
More importantly, how do we as LEADERS change our behavior when we are faced with extreme pressure? We love this quote....there is no time when a leader's actions are more important and more magnified than during a crisis.
Enjoy this newsletter and many different perspectives on leading under pressure. From a fireman, from coaches, from business leaders...hoping you find some useful tips for growing in your own leadership journey.
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Leaders are Ticking Time Bombs |
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Excerpt:
"TLG is a leadership development company, so why would I/we be focusing the content of this month’s newsletter on pressure? I contend that there is an inextricable link between pressure and leadership. When the fuse isn’t lit, and the time bomb isn’t ready to blow, rational decisions are more likely to occur...I have often seen people’s attitude change when there is something brewing, and they are holding it in and holding it in and then all of a sudden BOOM. Sometimes there is a silencer on the explosion. They may quit. They may get sick, mentally and/or physically. Or they might shut down. READ MORE
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Dealing with Pressure...For What It's Worth
Watch the full episode of For What It’s Worth on YouTube. below.
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Tino's Featured Product for October: |
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2022 Women in Leadership
Signature Series Subscription
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You asked for it and we are delivering!
Announcing FOUR (one per quarter) in-person Signature Series events for 2022.
We will meet at the Commerce Club at 141 Peachtree Street and just can't wait!
Annual Subscriptions for the Series available now at just $400 for the entire year for one person or $2,500 for a table of 8 (and yes, you can use the 8 seats with the same people or rotate attendees)
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Leadership Character in a Crisis:
Five Lessons for Keeping your Balance
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Co-founder & Co-chair
Excerpt:
"Not long after the pandemic began we were asked to write an article about leadership in crisis for the American Rental Association. The first “lesson” of the resulting article, Leadership Character in a Crisis - Five Lessons for Keeping Your Balance. began with the advice, start by calming yourself. Little did we know how much our ability as leaders would be tested since that time, especially our ability to handle the pressure of constant adaptation and relentless challenge. The excerpt is below." READ MORE
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Under Pressure: Lessons From Afghanistan |
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TLG Senior Consultant
Excerpt:
"For most of us, life and death decisions are not part of our everyday leadership experience. Regardless of our industry or our responsibilities, the results of our decisions will rarely cause irreversible negative impacts to people. For me, this wasn’t always the case. Several years ago, while serving as the Chief of Current Operations for a brigade deployed in Afghanistan supporting Operation Enduring Freedom, I occasionally had a need to make rapid judgement calls that could have potentially deadly consequences...One such event comes to mind. " READ MORE
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Leading From the Hot Seat |
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by Lieutenant Daniel Lohman
Guest Contributor
GEORGIA SMOKE DIVER #869
COBB COUNTY FIRE & EMERGENCY SERVICES
Excerpt:
"On a seemingly calm night around 12:30 in the morning, my unit is woken up and dispatched to a house fire. We quickly throw on our gear, jump into our seats, and buckle up. The dispatcher tells us there are multiple incoming calls describing flames showing. The hairs on our necks stand up and our heartrates increase because this usually means it’s a working fire and we have serious work ahead of us. Based on the territory, I can tell we are going to be the first unit to arrive on scene. " READ MORE
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Leadership Under Pressure….Listening Through the Holidays |
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TLG Senior Consultant
Excerpt:
"There is one family tradition that I might skip this year: debates about politics and society with my brothers and sisters. Despite our intense mutual respect, things just might be too “hot” this go-around for such discussions. Covid. Mask mandates. Vaccine Mandates. Policing. Black Lives Matter protests. Allegations of rigged elections. January 6th. Critical Race Theory. The Rittenhouse trial. The list is long and unrelenting. The emotions and divisions run deep, even within families...Avoidance seems like a pretty solid strategy this year. But if things go astray and a debate sparks up, I plan to give the ultimate gift possible to my loved ones: Listening. " READ MORE
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Champions at Last: Three Leadership Lessons from the 2021 Atlanta Braves |
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Marketing Coordinator
Excerpt:
"There was no team in Major League Baseball that was as resilient as the 2021 World Series Champion Atlanta Braves, who brought home the Commissioner’s Trophy for the first time in 26 years. Rolling (and at times speeding) through the streets of Downtown Atlanta and Cobb County, The Braves celebrated the unlikely triumph of winning it all, having been below 500. for most of the season. They did what nobody in Atlanta thought they could, given the recent struggles of Atlanta sports over the past few decades. How did they get there? Through great leadership and a little bit of magic." READ MORE
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For our Veterans
for Those Who Served
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TLG Affinity Partner
Excerpt:
"Our country recently celebrated Veteran’s Day. As the wife of a Vietnam Veteran, it is an honor and a privilege to celebrate this special day each year with my husband and other veterans. And, while I appreciate the recognition our Veterans receive on Veterans Day, I know firsthand that thanking them for their service one day a year isn’t near enough. " READ MORE
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What We are Reading at TLG |
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TLG Co-founder and Co-Chair
by Robert M. Sapolsky
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Published in Harvard Business Review Dec. 19, 2019
By Kelsey Miller
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TLG Co-founder and Co-Chair
Article Recommendation
Published in Harvard Business Review Dec. 19, 2019
By Kelsey Miller
In almost every therapy or coaching experience that I have done, helping a person to recognize that to gain control, you have to give up control, has been an underlying goal - because doing so just doesn’t feel intuitive to any of us.
In fact, whenever I have gotten excellent results in therapy or coaching, it’s because of helping the person reframe their mental model regarding control – and relate to themselves and others in a dramatically new and different way, i.e., in a way that others can easily see (and experience) the positive changes.
So, to be a most highly effective leader, spouse, or parent does require giving up that addictive need for control – or, another way to put it: in order to have a strong sense of mastery and inner peace, that addictive need for control has to be continuously grappled with.
And, because it is a paradox, it is one of the most (if not the most) difficult psychological issues that we all encounter in our life (and, for most of us, throughout our entire life).
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Article Recommendation
Published by Zenger-Folkman
August 24, 2020
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Vice President Strategic Services TLG
by Dr. Judson Brewer
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Judson Brewer (MD, PhD) argues that anxiety is a learned mechanism that drives addiction and bad habits we use to cope. The author offers a three-part process to break the anxiety habit loop: mind mapping to discover triggers, mindfulness to understand our reward value systems, and curiosity to change behaviors. A free app is available at drjud.com.
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Each year since 2007, the American Psychological Association surveys people across the U.S. about stress. The 2020 Stress in America report sounded the alarm that the pandemic was creating a national mental health crisis, especially among young people. Gen Z teens and adults had the highest stress level of any generation, twice that of boomers. The recently published 2021 Stress in America report focused on decision-making and behavior changes during the pandemic. Millennials were found to be having the hardest time making decisions due to the pandemic. Younger people were experiencing more behavior changes (e.g. diet, exercise, socializing) than older generations. Parents were also suffering some of the highest levels of stress. |
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Leading Under Pressure: Thoughts from the Experts.... |
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Carolyn (Lyn) Turknett
TLG Co-founder and Co-Chair
How do you coach clients to handle pressure?
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By helping them understand both how common and how destructive negative reactions to pressure are. Research has shown that 45% of leaders get more upset and emotional than calm and in control. And they are even more likely to get more controlling and closed-minded, making it less likely that they will be open to thinking that could solve the problem. The research also shows that the morale of their teams declines and teams are more likely to miss deadlines and perform poorly.
- We help them build the emotional mastery and resilience needed to handle pressure more effectively. They have to first reframe the situation - to talk to themselves about the situation differently. Is it really terrible, horrible, and awful? Or would it be better to frame it to yourself as a problem to be solved and a test of leadership character? Asking yourself the question, “What’s the worst thing that could happen, and how would I deal with it” is often helpful for feeling more confident and less distressed.
- We help them build confidence through development of their leadership competence and through realizing that confidence is also psychological. It is, as Bob often says, “there for the taking.”
What are the most destructive traits you’ve seen from leaders under pressure, and how could they have been avoided?
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Anger, especially unleashing anger at subordinates, is the most destructive. It destroys morale, destroys trust, and makes a psychologically safe environment impossible. And we know now how essential a safe environment is to performance and to innovation. See Charles Duhigg’s famous NY Times article about Google’s research, or read Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code. To avoid anger, it’s essential to learn to step back and calm yourself, putting a space between stimulus and reaction to actually choose your response. Meditation helps develop that ability, as does cognitive reframing. We call the ability to choose and manage emotions "emotional mastery."
- Less destructive to others but just as destructive to the bottom line is the tendency for leaders to become more controlling under pressure. Bob saw a great example of that when a leader he was coaching got a customer call upset about a product failure. The leader called his team together, and he said that his first instinct was to tell his team what he thought should be done and tell them to go execute. He then remembered discussions from coaching, and decided to ask each person on the team, one by one, what they would do. He said that the resulting ideas were much better than the one he had come up with, a crisis was averted, and the relationship with the customer improved.
- One particularly destructive response to pressure from above is blaming the boss or blaming the company. It’s always easy to build a relationship with someone else by gossiping about a third party, and when a leader tries to build a coalition of his team or department against the rest of the organization - an “ain’t it awful what the company expects of us” - the consequences are never good. Experienced, resilient leaders know how to push back effectively against unrealistic expectations or unwise policies, but complaining about those expectations to those below breeds a culture of mistrust and low performance.
TLG Co-founder & Co-chair
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How do you coach clients to handle pressure?
The game of handling pressure is won or lost long before a pressure situation is upon us. For example, research on crisis management shows that the costs of surviving and recovering from a crisis depend on what was done during the pre-crisis stage. Many things are critical for leaders to address pre-crisis. A good start is to assess strengths and weaknesses of your individuals, teams, and organization. We have tools for this, but "do-it-yourselfers" can initiate conversations on this topic at individual and team levels. Organizations can be assessed through analyzing readiness, SWOT, and thinking through scenarios.
The leader team itself must prepare by becoming aware of their strengths and weaknesses. There is a risk that old, bad habits emerge under pressure.
When in crisis or under pressure, if you are in charge, take charge! But don't be a hero, be a heroic team. And a team of complementary strengths has taken the first step of preparing for a crisis.
Senior Consultant
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How do you coach clients to handle pressure?
One of the most important things I tell my clients when under pressure is to not lose sight of their authentic self. Pressure situations can often force leaders out of their sense of control and comfort, which might lead them to lose their sense of who they are, what their values are, and what’s most important to them. Keeping a solid sense of self and perspective can be very powerful to thriving in pressure situations.
What are the most destructive traits you’ve seen from leaders under pressure, and how could they have been avoided?
All too often, I see leaders under pressure react by falling into attack mode. They take out their stress on anyone around them through abrasive language or posturing in an attempt to retain some control over their situation. Most of the time, leaders either don’t realize their destructive behavior or they rationalize it as a valid response to their situation. This can usually be avoided by recognizing the triggers that’s threatening their loss of control, taking a pause, taking a deep breath, and regaining control of their reactions. Not easy to do, but critical for effective leadership under pressure!
Senior Consultant
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How do you coach clients to handle pressure?
When talking about handling pressure, both personal and professional, I sometimes find that my clients ask the wrong question. Rather, they don't ask all the right questions.
Yes, we absolutely need tools and tips to reduce pressure, but we also need tools and tips to reduce pressure from happening in the first place.
You may say to me that this is unrealistic, but I argue that that is not absolutely true.
When making a plan for the day/week/month, ask yourself the following questions:
1) What projects/meetings/initiatives do I have?
2) What can come in the way of accomplishing any of the above?
3) What buffer time can I add in?
4) What will I do if other priorities or urgent matters come up?
5) How will I take a break when I need to?
Taking a few minutes to plan, future proof, and taking an intentional break can help consistently reduce pressure, both at home and work.
Senior Consultant - Healthcare
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How do you coach clients to handle pressure?
I offer these tips:
- Separate out what is in your control and not in your control – maximize your response to what’s in your control and mitigate the stress of the not in control items with contingency strategies.
- Don’t go it alone. Drawing a blank? Having a blank page freeze? Grab a partner and talk it out. Take notes. No more blank page.
- Take a mindful moment. Even 30 seconds of deep breathing can add to clarity and composure.
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Have a mantra that works for you – If you find yourself over indexing on pressure and worry, try this on for size: It all works out with ease and grace.
Senior Consultant
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How do you coach clients to handle pressure?
When I know a client is under pressure, I applaud them for naming it. Or, I might respectfully name what I’m experiencing. Either way, my role is to offer compassion, care, and clarity.
I stay with whatever feeling is being expressed, and coach to their immediate next steps for focus and confidence.
Senior Consultant
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What We're Grateful for at TLG |
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At TLG, we’re grateful for a lot of things this year. We’re grateful for our amazing clients who we have worked with. We’re grateful for all of our strategic partners. Also, we are grateful for all of our coaches who have made an impact in the lives of so many this year.
However, the thing we are most grateful for this year, is YOU, the reader. Thank you for being a part of the TLG family, supporting our content, and helping us to grow. Here is to an excellent finish to 2021, and beyond!
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TLG at Women of Influence Awards October 14, 2021 |
The Women of TLG share a selfie with Women of Influence Lifetime Award Recipient Shan Cooper!
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In the Egyptian Ballroom at the Fox Theater with Lyn Turknett, Co-founder & Co-chair TLG, Lee Zak Agnes Scott College president, Susan Hitchcock, TLG partner & Women in leadership Founder, and Elizabeth Noe Agnes Scott Board Chair. |
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Agnes Scott alums Susan Hitchcock and Eve Barrett with Nancy Cranford at Agnes Scott College Athletics Hall of Fame Dinner. |
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Emotional Mastery and Intelligence |
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The Turknett Leadership Group offers a customizable Emotional Mastery and Intelligence course that gives individuals and teams practical tools, such as mindfulness training, that allow individuals the ability to manage their emotions so that they are aligned with goals and values. Don't let workplace stress & overwhelm negatively impact you or your team. Let us help you take charge with our Emotional Mastery and Intelligence offerings. |
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"From Entry Level to Corporate President: Pathways to the Top"
Featuring Venessa Harrison
Women in Leadership Signature Series
Friday, November 19th 8 - 10 am Virtual
This North Carolina native from a family of 10 children raised by a single mother is an exemplary role model for personal and professional success. Venessa began her AT&T career as an operator 40+ years ago in Raleigh. She advanced to the very top becoming AT&T’s N.C. president. Along the way, she led the push for early fiber deployment and was honored by being inducted into TechWire’s Hall of Fame. In 2017, Venessa stepped into her current position in GA which includes legislative, business, and civic responsibilities. In 2020, she was honored as the Women in Technology (WIT) Woman of the Year in Technology and as the Civic Diversity Champion in the Atlanta Business Chronicle Diversity & Inclusion Awards.
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Interviewed by:
Co-founder & Co-chair TLG
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Host:
Senior TLG Consultant & Women in Leadership Host
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Speaker:
President of AT&T Georgia.
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You asked for it and we are delivering!
Announcing FOUR (one per quarter) in-person Signature Series events for 2022.
We will meet at the Commerce Club at 141 Peachtree Street and just can't wait!
Annual Subscriptions for the Series available now at just $400 for the entire year for one person or $2,500 for a table of 8 (and yes, you can use the 8 seats with the same people or rotate attendees)
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Introducing NEW Feature: SHEroes |
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Susan Hitchcock Presents... |
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There are people who are fascinating to talk to, and Dr. Constance Dierickx is certainly one of them. Of course her credentials and accomplishments are impressive - a clinical psychologist; company president; trusted business advisor and executive coach; author and keynote speaker; HBR and Forbes contributor; and – an unabashed advocate for women’s leadership and advancement.
But what’s particularly unique is the moniker Constance has earned from her CEO and board member clients. To them she’s “The Decision Doctor”®. In addition, she’s also known as a consultant’s consultant. How all this came about is – yes – a fascinating story.
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Leadership in the Moment Episode 4: Passion Based Leadership |
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What does it mean to have a passion-based leadership approach? Tim Huff, TLG Senior Consultant, welcomes Dolores Mears, Chief Technology Officer for Hensel Phelps Construction, to discuss leading with passion and building that passion in others. Check out the latest episode of Leadership in the Moment now! |
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