The Leader's Mind

How Great Leaders Prepare, Perform, and Prevail

Jim Afremow, PhD, Phil White

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400225767
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Clear and concise steps to develop the confidence and mental edge that sets you apart as a trailblazing leader—the same approach thousands of professional athletes have used to become champions.

The Leader's Mind taps into the same tips and techniques honed by top-tier athletes, such as how to get in a "zone," thrive on a team, and stay humble, to become a champion at work and the ultimate team player at home.

Based on high-performance psychology research and Dr. Jim Afremow’s two decades of experience providing mental training services across the globe to athletes and business leaders, The Leader's Mind will help you master:

• Valuable leadership lessons through powerful parables and stories from well-known leaders.
• The actionable steps leaders must take to change their thinking and become the leader they want to be.
• The necessary mindset to push through the challenges you face and take control of your career and home life.
• Tips and techniques to excel and overcome seemingly insurmountable odds and challenges.

 

Stop struggling with the expectations you face at work and at home by fundamentally changing the way you process what’s happening in your life. The mental edge that sets elite athletes apart outlined in this book will help you become the champion leader you want to be.

CHAPTER 1

LEADERSHIP UNDER FIRE

Leadership can be summed up as just be a good person.

—NICK PETERS, District Fire Management Officer, United States Forest Service

How many of our leaders must perform at their best when death can come in an instant with a simple miscalculation of wind and terrain? Nick Peters is such a leader, having worked his way up from a grunt firefighter to a district fire management officer, leading teams across 305,000 acres of the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest in northern Georgia. Here is how he describes one situation in which he found himself:

I was already in place and the crew boss was nowhere around, so I grabbed a half dozen people and said, “Let’s go, we’ve got to burn this thing out.” As we’re going, we were working just off the top of this ridge, and, as you know, fire runs uphill, then it goes downhill. The fire was coming up one side. We were just on the backside of this ridge, and we had to burn out the ridge. The containment line was down below us, maybe a hundred yards to a road. I had these firefighters, and a bunch of them were new.

They had never been in that part of the country on that big of a fire. As we were moving forward, the fire started cresting the top, and we’re talking fifty- to hundred-foot flames, within fifty feet of us. Because fire goes uphill and goes up in altitude, we weren’t feeling the heat from it, but it was right there, and it was roaring fire, and all these kids froze.

But we had to get the job done. I knew we were good, and we could outrun the fire downhill if necessary, but all these guys were frozen solid. At one point, I had to look at them and say: “Hey, snap out of it! We got a job to do. Follow me. Do as I tell you to do.”

His example has much to offer in terms of its application to leadership. In an interview for this book, Peters shares with us several key concepts and techniques, including: “Living an Adventure,” “Life Is Communication,” “What You Can’t Control,” “The Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) Loop,” “It’s All About Values,” “Trigger Points,” “After Action Review,” and “Attitude: I Still Have a Roof over My Head.”

In this chapter, we’ll learn from Nick Peters as he offers several important concepts along with key values and practical techniques to apply to teams, colleagues, and your own leadership. (These are the personal views of Nick Peters and do not necessarily represent those of the USDA US Forest Service.)

LIVING AN ADVENTURE

Peters found his way to forestry because he was looking for adventure. It’s evident that he continues to live that adventure each day. His excitement and pride are palpable as he describes the particulars of his work:

As the district fire management officer, I am responsible for all fire operations that happen in this area. My district is about 305,000 acres. I have a full-time fire engine crew with a small fire engine. Some people call it a brush truck. We base it off of types, and each type is a size. A Type 1 engine would be what you’d see a structure fire crew having. A Type 3 engine would be a pretty large brush truck for out West. And then we have what’s called a Type 6 engine, which is a smaller package for being able to get back into the woods a little easier. It carries only three hundred gallons of water.

I’ve got the engine crew and an operator who is responsible for the dozer and various other equipment. We call our staff and secondary fire personnel our militia. Our recreation, timber, and wildlife people also have fire qualifications, and they help us out with wildfires and prescribed burns. Wildfires could be anything from a lightning strike to somebody tossing the ashes from their fireplace and catching the woods on fire, all the way up to arson. Prescribed burning is where we actually go out and put fire on the landscape to restore the forest. Because, as we know, fire is a natural part of the ecosystem.

I started applying for fire jobs because I wanted to live an adventure; I wanted to go do something. I ended up getting hired on in Happy Camp (California) for my first job in 2004. Since then, I’ve been on engine crews, hand crews, and one season I spent on a helicopter crew where we actually rappelled out of the helicopter into forest fires. That was a really cool job, by the way.

As a leader, what is your adventure? Take a few moments to reflect upon your personal, academic, or career journey so far. How did it start out? By simply listening to your parents? Or maybe you followed a set academic path. Did you start your career in a job that interested you? Did you land an internship just by chance? Did you have a vision or passion that seemed to guide you toward opportunities? Did opportunity present itself because you shared and communicated your aspirations to others, who then helped you move along your path? How have your approach and attitude toward leadership developed over time?

LIFE IS COMMUNICATION

In the US Forest Service, people often travel around the country, going from one job to another. Peters worked at the Wayne National Forest in Ohio, then the Kaibab National Forest in northern Arizona, then on to Oklahoma and Georgia. While moving around can keep things fresh and exciting, there is no denying that it is stressful. Dealing with stress and potential conflict is to be expected in leadership positions. Peters makes it clear: communication is life.

When dealing with a move, a lot of it—especially if you have a spouse involved—is communication. That’s the biggest thing with anything we do in life. I’m not going to tell my wife: “Hey, guess what? We’re moving to the middle of nowhere in Nevada. Hope you enjoy it,” even though my wife did tell me, “I’ll follow you wherever you want to go.” I took her to western Oklahoma, and that was not the greatest of places. But as long as you have that open communication and the support of your spouse, you can accomplish anything.

Probably one of the greatest orators in US history was President Abraham Lincoln. How many of us have memorized parts of his Gettysburg Address? President Ronald Reagan was known as the Great Communicator, because he knew how to speak to Americans. When leaders communicate, they transform their audiences into one body that is greater than the sum of its parts.

WHAT YOU CAN’T CONTROL

Many see leadership as a decision-making role. We’ve all heard of alpha males making top-down “executive decisions.” While certainly this is true in many situations, realize that the flip side of decision making is a situation where one has very little control. Imagine being Nick Peters in the midst of a fire. What variables are outside of his control? The wind, weather, and equipment failures, just to name a few. Imagine the stress of trying to protect homes, personal property, forest, and lives as countless variables swirl around uncontrollably.

A lot of that boils down to stress management and knowing what you have control of and knowing what you don’t have control of. Is there a way you can take control of the things that you don’t have control of? If not, then you let them go.

Peters sees stress as a human construction and recognizes that there are some things you can change and some things that you can’t. Most important, he reflects on something that leaders can concentrate on: the emotional and physical toll of stress. What are his techniques for recovering and bouncing back strong after being on a big burn for days and sometimes even weeks on end?

One of the hardest parts of my job right now is that I’m no longer digging the line to actively stop the fire. Now I’m managing and directing the firefighters who are doing that on the ground. I’m out there in the field with them all day long, supervising, making sure that they’re doing the work, that it’s timely, that we’re going to be able to meet our objectives, and that everybody goes home at the end of the day. With that comes a lot of critical decision making.

The last fire that I was on, it seemed like every twenty minutes we were adapting our plans, sometimes because the weather or the fire changed so our initial plan wasn’t going to work anymore. So, I had to make new decisions and relay them to everyone on the line. That constant decision making, especially in a time-critical, highly dynamic environment, is extremely fatiguing.

After that fire, I told my wife, “I’m not making a decision for three days.” That was my way of countering the mental fatigue of a constant decision-making matrix. When I got home, I didn’t care what we ate, I didn’t care where we went, I didn’t care what we did. Just because of mental fatigue, I didn’t make a single decision. As far as physical fatigue, we do a lot of physical training. I think I heard somebody refer to wildland firefighters as tactical athletes. Every morning we’re in the gym, and by 6:00 a.m., we’re working out, whether it be running, lifting weights, whatever. We’re working on our physical fitness because our bodies need it for what we do. This makes recovery that much easier when we get home and we’re totally physically drained. A couple days of relaxation, and we’re ready to go.

THE OBSERVE, ORIENT, DECIDE, AND ACT (OODA) LOOP

Peters uses the OODA loop to structure and facilitate his decision making. Such conceptual tools are important to apply and can help to work through a precarious, stressful, and urgent situation, as he explains:

The OODA loop was developed by John Boyd, who was a military aviator. He said that the fighter pilot who could go through the OODA loop the fastest is the one who wins dogfights. OODA is an acronym for observe, orient, decide, and then act. You’re making an observation of your overall surroundings. You’re then orienting yourself to that. Next, you make a decision based on your situational awareness, what you’ve just obtained, and act upon it. Then you immediately go right back into the observation phase.

The great thing about the OODA loop is that it breaks out the bias of split-second decisions. It allows you to be in the moment on a specific task, and, at the same time, to focus on the big picture. We use it within our agency as a decision-making tool. It works very well with just cutting through the BS, looking at what is really going on. What’s happening? Why is it going on? Where are you involved in it? What is the task at hand? What are our overall objectives? How do we get to our mission results?

We make a decision based on this information, act on it, and then reevaluate. Then we go right back into the observe phase and ask, “Are we meeting the objectives? Are we going to make our deadline? Are the jobs that we’re doing out in the field going be successful or not?” If they’re not going to be successful, we have to reevaluate, because in the end, we’re trying to find the highest likelihood of success. The number one priority is that everybody goes home. Number two, we put the fire out.

As a leader, what decision-making tools do you typically employ? What concepts or steps help you to break through the fog of an emotionally charged situation? Do you even activate physical circuit breakers such as pausing for a count of three or ten before responding? Are you able to reset a situation to remove some of the political or personal conflicts that can prevent things from moving forward on a rational tack? Peters’s approach, he said, is to help bring people back to the mission and policies:

I would resort to our standard operating procedures, to our core beliefs in firefighting and in leadership. Those are duty, integrity, and respect. These are ingrained in every single one of us from the beginning. If an individual is outside of those realms, if they’re not respecting their coworkers or aren’t following their duty, or have less integrity, I resort to these three values. I won’t make the problem between me and an individual. I’ll fall back on our standard operating procedures, our protocols and procedures, and make it about those. That’s what we are supposed to be following and adhering to.

If an individual is bullying, that’s not being respectful toward others. I would pull them into my office and say: “Look, I have witnessed this going on, and you know that our standard operating procedures are duty, integrity, and respect. Please explain to me how you felt this action was respectful toward others.” Then I’ve completely eliminated myself from the problem, and I’ve resorted to our policy.

IT’S ALL ABOUT VALUES

Contemporary leadership principles and corporate policies are constantly promoting values. While corporations often fall short, it is still crucial that a person holds particular values close to heart. According to Peters:

The key principles of duty, integrity, and respect help build a better, more resilient US Forest Service. Duty is being proficient in your job, technically and as a leader. Your duty is to make sound and timely decisions, ensure tactics are understood, supervised, and accomplished. My duty as a leader is to make sure that everybody’s doing their job and doing it safely and accurately. Another part of leadership is developing others to bring them up in the future. Because I wouldn’t be where I am if it wasn’t for people along the way who have mentored and guided me, and steered me in the direction that led me here. If I don’t do the same thing for the people who work for me, I am doing a disservice to them.

It’s amazing that you actually have to explain to some people what respect really looks like. To me, it’s knowing your subordinates and looking out for their well-being, keeping my subordinates informed. I can’t tell you how many supervisors I’ve had who didn’t do that. They thought information was power, and so they held onto it. Well, information isn’t power if you hold onto it. Information is power when everybody knows it.

The core of leadership is building your team to be a stronger, more resilient, functioning group. And then utilizing employer subordinates in accordance with their capabilities. Obviously, I’m not going to have my first-year rookie firefighters grab a chainsaw and cut the most dangerous tree out...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Leadership Under Fire
• Chapter 2: The Sharpshooter
• Chapter 3: Grace Under Pressure
• Chapter 4: The Man In Black
• Chapter 5: On the Cutting Edge
• Chapter 6: Shaping Future Leaders
• Chapter 7: Lead Like a Roman Emperor
• Chapter 8: The Leader’s Mission
• Conclusion: Your Strongest Attribute Is a Leadership Mindset
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Index
• About the Authors