Like You Are Staring At Death
There are thirteen train tracks on the chemical plant grounds. Some tracks have filling stations, others repair houses, and one is the scale track. Here's the thing, when you are switching rails, you are basically leading a blind train conductor. When he's pushing a line of train cars, he has no idea where the last one is, or how many cars he's pushing. Through radio communication, the switchman is the conductor's eyes. What this really means is that the switchman has the lives of an entire chemical plant in his hands. If he loses focus for even a couple seconds, train cars full of chlorine, caustic soda, and a whole slew of other deadly chemicals, could crash or derail. Quite often it's the switchman's job to stop a line of 15 train cars within 10 feet of a car that is hooked up to the filling tubes. The slightest bump of that car being filled could have grave repercussions. One drop of caustic soda will burn straight through a human arm. On slow chlorine leak can destroy human lungs in no time.
When you are a switchman on chemical plant grounds, you are quickly forced to become a strong leader. Perfect, not good, communication is required. A broad understanding of the environment is essential. You have to have the absolute trust of the conductor, the filling station operators, and everyone else working nearby. To sum up, when you are leading with lives on the line, you quickly learn how to lead. This is similar to the message Thomas Kolditz put forth in his new book, In Extremis Leadership: Leading As If Your Life Depended On It.
Simply put, the leadership qualities that we exhibit in dangerous settings are the very same leadership qualities essential to good leadership in all walks of life. When you think about leadership as "defining the promise and hope or future life," this message becomes even more convincing.
Through rigorous research on what Kolditz calls "In Extremis Leadership," he has pulled from these life and death situations all the characteristic of good leadership. Are you hiring a new manager? Maybe you should see if he or she has ever switched rails or lead a group of Marines on the battlefield. Maybe you should take current employees on a ropes course retreat to see who stands out, because if a person knows how to lead like his or her life is on the line, chances are, they have what it takes to lead in business or in a school setting or even community based projects.
To take the point one step further, good leaders should always lead like their life, and the lives of those being lead, is on the line. This is, after all, true in a sense. Most people rely on income from to fulfill basic needs. Lives ARE at stake. As a manager, you should take this personally. Instead of simply trying to attain goals and achieve success, you should approach every situation as if everyone's life is in your hands. Trust that if you do, you will quickly knife through your own supercilious tendencies to allow the important characteristics of strong leadership display themselves.
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