You're It

INTRODUCTION

It was a relaxing spring day on Cape Cod. Staring out at the ocean, Lenny Marcus whispered to his wife, “People on the Gulf Coast look at this same scene and have to worry about the oil hitting their shores.” It was May 2, 2010. Twelve days earlier, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig erupted, killing eleven workers and threatening the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem with the largest oil spill in history.

It was a busy weekend for crisis leaders. The day before, a mammoth water main break west of Boston interrupted service to two million people. Massachusetts officials were coordinating with local leaders to ensure a safe water supply for the metropolis. The night before in New York, vigilant Times Square street vendors spotted a suspicious car and alerted police, thwarting what would have been a deadly terrorist explosion. Lenny knew that alumni of the crisis leadership program he codirects at Harvard were active in each of these incidents.

Suddenly, his phone rang. The screen read “Peter Neffenger.” Quietly, he said, “Sorry, I need to take this one.”

Peter was a captain in the Coast Guard when he completed Harvard’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative executive crisis leadership program. Afterwards, Peter and Lenny stayed in touch. Peter had been promoted to admiral and led Coast Guard operations on the Great Lakes. “Lenny, Thad Allen [commandant of the Coast Guard] asked me to head to New Orleans and serve as deputy national incident commander for the oil spill response. I want you to come down and observe what’s going on.”

Lenny sat up. He had gotten calls like this before. When H1N1/swine flu erupted the year before, Joe Henderson at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called, and Lenny was quickly on a flight to their offices in Atlanta. During the Hurricane Katrina response in 2005, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Michael Brown, emailed him from New Orleans: “You want to study leadership? Come on down.”

By Friday, May 7, Eric McNulty and Lenny Marcus (two of the four authors of this book) were also in New Orleans to observe Admiral Neffenger as he assumed duties as deputy national incident commander. The next day Peter, his staff, Lenny, and Eric were flying over the oil spill in the Gulf. Barry Dorn later joined the national incident commander, Admiral Thad Allen, in New Orleans. The inquiry about leadership of the spill response would stretch all the way from the Gulf to Washington as they observed both the government interagency collaboration and the wrangling that marked the crisis response. There were frequent update calls to discuss ongoing leadership quandaries.

From one crisis to the next, the “come on down” calls continued. Each at a pivotal moment. Each when it mattered most.

Your leadership moment. The curtain rises and everyone looks to you. They count on you. A solution must be found. You take the helm. You’re it.

Some situations you anticipate. Others come as a surprise. Whether you are a crisis leader professional, an organizational leader, or an unsuspecting bystander, in an instant you can be leading a crisis response or leading a part of it. Suddenly, you are responsible. What do you do?

The pages ahead chart steps for those crisis moments: ideas, methods, and pragmatic tools that will guide you as you guide others. Bringing those lessons to life are examples of real-life leaders in crisis scenarios: a terrorist attack, a pandemic, an oil spill, an active shooter, hurricanes. Crises, large and small, will happen. Financial shortfall, sexual harassment allegations, product liability—you as a leader must be prepared for whatever comes.

We, your authors, believe that you’ll be most likely to embrace and execute the crisis leadership practices you’ll learn about in this book if they are rooted in your everyday leadership and relationships. At the crisis moment, you’ll pivot, using the same practices already deeply embedded in your leadership tool box. With precision, you seamlessly adapt what you do to the situation at hand.

Leadership moments and complex problems routinely arise. Workplace leaders face situations demanding change. At home, there are personal issues, life-and-death decisions, disappointments, and transitions. Then there are the life-changing crises—you find yourself in the midst of an active shooter scenario, a terrorist attack, or a weather-related disaster. No matter the situation, when you are the leader, others await your direction and instructions. They count on you to have the confidence to respond effectively.

You own your thinking, behaviors, and actions. Refining them—as you become the leader you hope to be—is the theme of this book. Your life and your career traverse a wide range of human dilemmas, crises, and opportunities. And the way forward isn’t simply through the words you find here. You are the starting point for exploring and enhancing your capacity to lead. It’s important to be continually reflective and intentional about who you are, what you do, and how you do it. We turn the attention and responsibility upon you, the leader.

Fulfilling your potential as a leader requires a keen awareness and understanding of how your personal experiences—your decisions, stumbles, and triumphs—got you to where you are now. Each prepares you for the moment when “you’re it.”

Meta-Leadership

The theme of this book—and what we hope you’ll achieve—is meta-leadership. This framework and practice method we developed is key to your expedition. You will learn to look at problems, opportunities, and solutions from a “meta-” perspective.

The overarching prefix “meta-” encourages you to seek a bigger picture. You perceive beyond the obvious toward an understanding for how multiple connected factors act and interact with one another. With that, you begin to grasp the complexity of what is going on and you take action. A lot is happening and it demands your attention.

Meta-leadership consists of three dimensions for shaping this holistic view of your leadership:

You will learn to use the three dimensions to define the complexities, relationships, and interdependencies that determine your success or failure, and that of the others on your team. The practice method incorporates strategic concepts and practical tools for engaging these stakeholders. Once you master it, you’ll work on exercising your leadership effectively throughout your expanding network of influence. Meta-leadership is a force multiplier for all that you and others hope to accomplish together.

The “you” in “you’re it” deliberately has a double meaning. On the one hand, “you” is singular, a reference to one person, as in “you are the leader.” Singular “you” highlights your personal leadership responsibility, accountability, and opportunity. It points to your development, experiences, and learning. The meta-leader is personally willing to assume the challenge of thinking and acting broadly. You are intentional about leading with both depth of understanding and breadth of perspective.

On the other hand, “you” is also plural, referencing the many other people with whom you lead—as in, you all share a problem, opportunity, or challenge in which you choose to engage. Together, “you’re it.” Your meta-leadership manifests in convening people to work collectively on a matter of shared purpose. Plural “you” also refers to being part of following, leveraging, or contributing to others who share complementary objectives. Rallying and engaging people to that meta-purpose emerges from your relationships, mission, and accomplishments and from the trust you build.

In this way, “you’re it” is a mutual endeavor to do more than you could do by yourself or as separate entities working in isolation (often called organizational silos). The practice of meta-leadership is about forming the plural “you” to achieve the objective. Not everyone grasps the benefit. The meta-leader understands what motivates these many stakeholders and aligns those motives to shape the common you.

This premise shapes our definition of leadership: People follow you. And when circumstances require the opposite, the phrase can be reversed: You follow people.

Astute meta-leaders grasp this double meaning, which defines and animates both the personal “me” and the collective “we.” Your meta-mind-set is one of personal responsibility combined with the strength and advantages of leveraging a wider crowd.

The meta-leadership framework and method grew out of our observations and research conducted with leaders during times of crisis and change, as well as from our own experience leading in routine, day-to-day situations. As a physician, Barry Dorn led the response to life-and-death events and made decisions as a hospital executive. Joe Henderson, following the 9/11 attacks, was a key national leader of CDC bioterrorism preparedness efforts and was later instrumental in reorganizing CDC operations. Eric McNulty and Lenny Marcus have studied numerous US and international crises and change situations. Together we integrate practice realities and academic perspectives into a tool box designed to advance your meta-leadership development.

Through our research, we were given the rare opportunity to accompany leaders—or catch up with them as quickly as possible—as they faced momentous disasters and maneuvered to cope with them. Some leaders rose to the challenge. We learned a great deal from them, and what you read here is a compilation of those insights. We also learned a great deal from leaders who stumbled. From the outset, we never judged an individual as a “good” or “bad” leader. Effectiveness is often circumstance-contingent. Instead, we identified the pitfalls along with the opportunities that leaders and others can expect to face in the midst of a crisis or significant change.

Our work is based at the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI), a joint program of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Center for Public Leadership. The NPLI was established shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The federal government asked Harvard University to invest intellectual resources and research in studying and teaching leaders in crisis. Lenny Marcus and David Gergen of the Kennedy School were the founding codirectors. The mandate was to “join the country on the steep learning curve of preparedness and response leadership.” Hence, the case illustrations you find here stem from our work in “joining” leaders in the midst of crises.

Our work began with an after-the-fact study and analysis of the 9/11 attacks. Early field research also included on-site observation of the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We later watched our students put the meta-leadership lessons learned into action. Alumni from our NPLI executive crisis leadership program were schooled in meta-leadership and led the CDC response to the first stages of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic in the United States, as well as the response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, Super Storm Sandy in 2012, the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, the domestic response to the outbreak of Ebola virus cases in the United States in 2014, the transformation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in 2016, and the series of devastating hurricanes in 2017. We also observed and interviewed students in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors on their use of meta-leadership in response to more localized crises or predicaments. These were crucible moments for the organizations and communities affected, and certainly crucible moments for the careers of these leaders.

This research took us from practice to theory, not the other way around. We studied the disaster preparation and crisis response actions of leaders in high-stakes, high-pressure situations, as well as during the normal give-and-take of organizational and interpersonal problem-solving. The circumstances through which they led and their openness to our analysis allowed us to observe and assess both their thinking and their actions. From those investigations, we formulated the three dimensions of meta-leadership that can improve the performance of leaders. These dimensions are not a simple checklist or set of characteristics. They are pathways to knowing yourself, the context in which you lead, and the full range of assets, resources, and relationships necessary to succeed.

From Everyday Leadership to Leadership During Change and Crisis

Although meta-leadership was developed through the lens of crisis leadership, its value extends to everyday routine and transformational situations as well. Like Olympic athletes, meta-leaders do not begin their practice and performance on game day. For you, this book is a guide to both the ordinary and the extraordinary.

There is another distinction between meta-leadership and other approaches to leadership. We begin with the belief that no two meta-leaders are identical. Some are introverted, some extroverted. Some are left-brain-dominant, others right-brain-dominant. Whether you work in an entrepreneurial start-up or an established organization, the three dimensions help you fully inhabit yourself as the leader you are truly capable of becoming. We don’t believe there’s such a thing as a “born leader.” Rather, we find that certain personal characteristics can be cultivated and leveraged to enhance your capacities. The most important—and perhaps the most obvious—is your willingness to lead. Combining that with development of your own expansive meta-leadership outlook, you will grow to understand how you—not some mythical perfect leader—can act quickly, confidently, and with maximum effectiveness.

The author and systems theorist R. Buckminster Fuller once asked, “If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?” Although you might not cast your endeavors in such grand terms, ask yourself a parallel question: When everything is on the line, how will I be? What will I do? The three dimensions of meta-leadership are a guide to answering these questions in terms distinctly suited to you and the many tests you face as a leader.

To be sure, there are those who, acting in isolation and with detached authority, believe themselves to be “leaders.” These individuals believe that the formal authority of a lofty title or position confers the mantle of leadership. They order and they command, viewing their work in transactional, self-serving terms. They expect the world to conform to their expectations. They employ boasting, fantasy, and self-promotion to reaffirm their perceived position. They lie and lack integrity. These people aren’t leaders—they’re autocrats. We’ve met and worked with such persons, and no doubt you too have your own book of experiences with the type.

There are others who genuinely perceive, engage, connect, and generate influence far beyond their span of formal authority. They earn the designation of “leader” from their followers. They are authentic. They know and understand themselves and help others do the same. They perceive themselves as part of a larger system. They think deeply. They practice leadership expansively. They grasp a puzzle, shape a strategy, and courageously guide others on a path barely seen.

It is these remarkably captivating people we call meta-leaders. You will encounter them throughout this book. You too can choose to be one.

Becoming a Meta-Leader

We, your authors, have woven our perspectives and experiences into the concepts, tools, and stories in this book. The real author of your leadership experience, however, is you. Experience the book. Don’t simply read it. If you passively peruse these pages without actively integrating what you learn into your mind-set and practices, you will not derive the full benefit of the time and effort you invest.

Leadership is active, not passive. So too is the process of expanding your leadership capacities and capabilities. We suggest that you keep a journal—a record of your thoughts, experiences, victories, and challenges. It will be a powerful exercise in reflection and revelation as you explore what meta-leadership means to you. We get incredibly positive feedback from our students once they try it. When you keep a journal, you reflect on yourself in ways that are both surprising and reaffirming. You take responsibility. This is part of what “you’re it” means.

Your journal doesn’t need to be a fancy leather-bound volume, and your entries don’t have to go on for pages. You may only jot down a few bullet points at a time. The aim is to learn more about yourself by taking a moment in time to document your experiences as a person and as a meta-leader.

To help, we provide you open-ended questions at the end of each chapter to launch and inspire your thinking. Ideally, you will ask yourself throughout the reading: What am I learning about myself? What am I missing that hinders my ability to accurately assess what is happening around me? How can I learn best from the mistakes I’ve made? These are tough questions, and many leaders avoid them because they are embarrassing and sometimes painful.

The journal is just for you. It is a gift you give yourself. If our questions don’t motivate you, ask yourself different ones. There are no right or wrong questions. Make this book your own, a guide and a challenge to develop knowledge and ways of being a meta-leader when it matters most.