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PART I![]()
CHAPTER ONE
Your Leadership Opportunity
When working with leaders, George often tells the story of the first time he was physically taken hostage:
In the mid-sixties, I had just come out of graduate school and started working as a psychologist accompanying police on domestic violence cases. One night, I was riding with Dan, a lieutenant, when a call came through of a possible hostage situation at a nearby hospital. We rushed into the emergency room where we learned that a patient being treated for a stab wound had taken a nurse, Sheila, hostage. In a psychotic state, he was shouting and screaming.
Dan quickly assessed the situation and realized that since we were in the emergency room it was not possible to use tear gas or rush through the door. He decided that the best option was to have someone go calmly into the room and try to talk to the man.
With all the doctors, nurses and police officers standing around, I felt pretty safe that that “someone” would not be me, the “new guy.” Dan looked around the room once, then twice, and then he turned to me and asked, “George, how would you like to do it?” I said, “Sure, why not.”
I entered the room to find the patient, a man named Sam, holding a pair of scissors to Sheila’s throat. I began by asking questions: “What do you need, Sam?” “What do you want?” “How can we help you right now?” After a few minutes of screaming and yelling, he cut the skin on Sheila’s throat. Sam then started across the room. As he charged forward pointing the scissors at my throat, he kept screaming, “I’m going to kill you and everybody I can!” I kept calm, put my hands onto his arms and, looking into his eyes, asked more questions. I knew from the briefing that his ex-wife had stabbed him, injuring him severely, during an argument over the custody of their children. Focusing his mind onto what was important to him, I asked, “What about your children, Sam?”
“Don’t talk about my children. Bring them here and I will kill them too,” he answered.
Now, while not the response I wanted, his answer was a concession—a positive step because it was the first time Sam had responded to one of my questions.
“Do you want them to remember you as a murderer?”
Then there was a pause during which Sam’s energy changed. I had found a way to connect with him.
“We have to talk about your kids. How do you want them to remember you?”
We carried on talking and he calmed down enough for me to negotiate for Sheila’s release. A few minutes later, I asked him, “Do you still need the scissors? Would you throw them on the floor or hand them to me?” Given this choice, he hesitated and then gave me the scissors—a sign that he trusted me enough to give up his weapon.
I pointed out that we needed to continue his medical treatment. Since it was necessary to handcuff him, I asked, “Would you like me to handcuff you, or shall I ask the police to do it?” “Would you like to be handcuffed in the front or back?” He answered, “George, I would like you to do it and I want to be handcuffed in the front.” So I did, and we slowly walked out of the room.
As he was being led away, Sam said, “George, you’re all right. I am glad I didn’t kill you.” I replied, “Me too, Sam.” He then thanked me sincerely. I asked him what he was thanking me for and he said, “For reminding me how important my children are to me.”
After he was taken away, I held it together long enough to ask Dan to step away from the group of people. I then experienced a wave of powerful, overwhelming emotions. I shouted at Dan, “How dare you send me into that room! I could have been killed!”
“But George, you were the right person. I’ve been watching you and I knew you were ready to deal with a situation like this. I knew you could do it.”
I’ve since been physically taken hostage three additional times, and I’ve diffused hundreds of potentially violent situations. Now, more than 40 years later, when I’m in a challenging situation, I can still hear Dan’s voice saying, “I knew you could do it,” and I am once again inspired.
Dan saw a potential in George that George could not see in himself. Recalls George, “He didn’t treat me as a junior or a trainee; he treated me like all other members of the team. In a high-stakes situation, Dan decided that I was capable and I was the right person. He offered me the opportunity to stretch myself.”
In a tense moment, Dan remained calm in his general behavior, exhibiting confidence in his team. Instead of panicking or raising his voice, he simply and calmly asked, “George, how would you like to do it?”
After the hostage situation was resolved, he responded to George’s outburst with a single statement: “But George, you were the right person” which brought George back to the fact that he had been successful.
Let’s look also at the keys to George’s success in this harrowing situation. He, too, remained calm. He developed an empathetic understanding of Sam’s motivation; by the end, Sam even felt bonded to George. George tapped into Sam’s potential and possibility by bringing up the subject of his children instead of focusing on the negative aspects of the future (including certain prison). He asked questions and gave options, thereby granting human dignity and choice to the very man who held scissors to his neck.
In this anecdote, the real interest lies in the fact that Dan “led” George in essentially the same way George “led” Sam. They were both, to be precise, a “secure base”—Dan for George and George for Sam. They each provided a sense of protection and comfort from which another person received energy and inspiration to explore, take risks and seek challenge.
Dan and George are not unique. Great leaders all over the world unleash astonishing potential within themselves, their people and their organizations by building the trust, delivering the change and inspiring the focus that together underpin engagement and create the conditions for innovation. They achieve sustainable high performance simply by tapping into their own secure bases and becoming a secure base for other people. We define high performance as:
challenging yourself and others to see and achieve what is beyond normal expectation.
In this place, you push beyond your comfort zone and do what you thought was impossible. You move to the very edge of risk and possibility.
You, too, can become a Secure Base Leader in your work and your life. No matter where you work and with whom you work, how little support you feel, how small your budget, or how busy you are, you can learn specific skills and develop a way of being and doing that delivers sustainable results through inspired relationships. You can learn to care to dare.
If you are like many executives we meet, you may have been “taken hostage” by a boss, a team, an employee, a customer, a situation or by the pressure to achieve results in the form of numbers, targets or key performance indicators. In other words, you may feel powerless and unable to escape these constraints. In the pursuit of financial success, you may even have lost sight of the importance of relationships and how they impact real and sustainable success. Secure Base Leadership, based on trust, confidence and challenge, is the best way to liberate yourself, your team and your organization from being held hostage.
Although extremely deep and powerful, Secure Base Leadership does not take years to learn. In fact, the keys to developing as a Secure Base Leader are already within you: within your life story, within your experience and within the way you have internalized successes and failures. Through our research, we identified the nine characteristics of a Secure Base Leader, and over the course of this book, you’ll learn how to develop these characteristics in yourself. We’ll answer these questions:
- Why should you be a Secure Base Leader?
- How do you provide care, safety and comfort?1
- How do you provide daring, challenge and risk?
- How do you put these ideas into action right away? In other words, what do you do next Monday morning at work?
What is a Secure Base?
Let’s start by going back to the beginning. Your beginning.
Your first secure base was likely your mother, your father, a grandparent or another significant caregiver. Your relationships with these people are fundamental to understanding yourself as an adult and as a leader.
The term secure base arose from the post-war attachment theory research of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.2 Attachment theory revolves around the basic premise that all humans have an innate desire to seek closeness to and comfort from a person who gives them a sense of protection. In the post-World War II period, the United Nations hired Bowlby to find out why babies in “sterile” hospitals died of infection while those surrounded by disease often lived. He determined that mother-excluding protocols and severe nursing styles in the sterile hospitals often deprived babies of attention and loving care. On the other hand, babies who had access to their mothers or sensitive caregivers tended to survive the diseases around them. He concluded that a bond gave the babies resilience and strength.
Following Bowlby’s work, researcher J.W. Anderson noticed how children would explore but always keep their mothers as a base—a secure base. Toddlers would play around the area but from time to time return to the mother for some form of comfort. It was intriguing that different children appeared to behave differently. Some would stay very close to their mothers, afraid to take a risk, while others would explore the outer edges of the play area while paying very little attention to their mothers. What was common, however, was that when frightened or upset all children turned to their mothers, who demonstrated two sets of behaviors. On the one hand, their behaviors of acceptance and being accessible indicated a provision of safety, while on the other hand, their behaviors of providing opportunities for risk empowered the children to discover their own solutions and to pursue their autonomy.3
Building on this concept, for the purposes of our work in modern organizations, we define a secure base as:
a person, place, goal or object that provides a sense of protection, safety and caring and offers a source of inspiration and energy for daring, exploration, risk taking and seeking challenge.
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