De-Stress Your Way Into Leadership

Written by Joe Anthony

Presented by Todd Lemense

https://www.re-engineeredyou.com/

In our quest to understand high-performance leaders, we found ourselves researching Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd president of the United States. Here is a golden example of a leader who shined under stress.

Most of us remember FDR as the “wheelchair president.” And, if we were especially good students, we might recall that he led our nation through the Great Depression and the Second World War. FDR was an under-the-gun leader who literally rebuilt America to drag us out of the great depression. This man did not cave under pressure. Pressure hardened him like a diamond.

He looks like it too, doesn’t he? This is the face of every grandfather who’s not mad, just...disappointed.

So let’s talk a little bit about what made FDR a great leader, because the “secret sauce” of great leadership, which FDR definitely had, isn’t what we thought it would be...

Why We Identify Great Leaders As “Action Leaders”

School and television has taught us that great leaders are forged in fire. Like FDR, great leaders are battle-hardened. Do you remember the movie Patton? That part where General Patton jumps through the window with a pistol to shoot at a plane because it interrupted his meeting? Do you still associate great leaders with guts-and-glory action? Because we sure do...

(Uncoincidentally, we’re writing this article at a time when our president, Donald Trump, was elected on a platform Strong Man Leadership. Keep that in mind as we go forward.)

FDR also got a lot of credit for connecting with the American people. Great leaders, we’re told, represent the working man. Teddy Roosevelt spoke to the labor unions. President Trump made a show of visiting the coal workers. And FDR had his fireside chats, where he soothed public fears over the radio. That’s our second myth about leadership; great leaders shine under fire, but they also know how to connect with the common man.

Lastly, we all know that high-status leaders are trained under fire, and they keep their teams sharp by exposing them to the same sort of pressure. Jeff Bezos famously keeps his Amazon team tightly strung, like harp strings. According to the New York Times, Amazon employees are encouraged to criticize each other’s ideas at meetings, and can be found crying at their desks afterward. But that’s how strong leadership is developed, right? Like a forge, pounding leaders into hardened steel.

Well, according to science and history, not so much…

Franklin D Roosevelt Died During Spa-Day (And Why That’s Important!)

Do you remember from history class how FDR died? Before this research, we thought we did. FDR succumbed to stress, from fighting the Nazi’s, and he died of a cerebral hmorrhage one month before Germany’s surrender. He was so dedicated to his job, so tireless, he died winning.

But do you know where he died? At his mineral spa. Which he purchased, with his own money, so other polio patients could relax with him.

We also see criticism over Trump’s golf trips on the news. And before him, Obama was called out for his basketball sessions. Bush had his painting. Clinton played jazz. Etc. Etc.

But do you know the key difference between high-performance leaders, and low-performance leaders? Would it surprise you to know it might just be cortisol levels?

Cortisol is the stress hormone that gets you pumped up when the neighbor’s dog barks through the fence. It’s the hormone that gave us the speed and strength to run away from lions when we were hunters on the savanna.

Well, it turns out, there aren’t many lions in the boardroom. High-Status leaders (leaders with lots of underlings) operate best when their cortisol levels are low and their testosterone is high. Low-stress, high-initiative. That’s the magic formula. That’s the common bond between leaders with thousands of subordinates.

Do you know what a leader looks like when he has high cortisol levels? He’s the stressed-out middle-manager who screams at his people when a deadline is approaching. He’s the red-faced team leader who can barely manage a handful of nervous subordinates. We’ve all worked for the reactionary boss, right? That’s what cortisol looks like in leadership: Lots of drive, and lots of panic when things go wrong.

That gives us our first solution to the leadership misconception: that great leaders and generals and high-earning CEOs thrive under pressure.

Nobody thrives under pressure.

In reality, FDR had what all great leaders throughout history have had, and what CEOs today should strive to achieve; Incredible stress-coping techniques. Techniques to manage, and lower, cortisol levels.

That’s the secret sauce. FDR was a master of stress management.

Did you know FDR once had a torpedo fired at him? This is a man who served his presidency from a wheelchair, and he almost died in a torpedo attack. During a trip to a war conference in North Africa, his own battleship, the William D Porter, accidentally launched a torpedo at FDR’s vessel. Do you know what his reaction was? FDR told his secret service to wheel him to the side of the ship so he could watch the torpedo racing toward him through the waves. He could see the bubbles through the water, and the ripple of its wake. It wasn’t a dud, either. When the USS Iowa made an emergency turn, the wave of the battleship detonated the torpedo. FDR watched the explosion from the deck, like a man with ice in his veins.

FDR knew the value of stress management. That same man took a three-year fishing vacation after he lost the use of his legs. We don’t talk about that side of leadership, do we? We’ll tag our emails with clever quotes by famous leaders; quotes about winning battles and inspiring men. But you never see an email with the tagline “Franklin Delano owned a day-spa and went fishing for three years”.

That’s what happened after Guillain Barre Syndrome took his legs. FDR had started to lose hope. The author of The Simple Faith of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Christine Wicker, wrote: 

“He felt as if god had betrayed him.”

To regain his sanity, FDR spent three winters on a houseboat called the Larooca, and he kept meticulous logs about it. That’s how important relaxation and stress management was for FDR. He kept a log for how little he was doing.

Tuesday, February 12

Uneventful day

Engines recovered from pneumonia

Left Daytona

Kept on South

Till we stuck in the mud

Before the “Haul?Over”

Anchored for night

Much playing

Solitaire and Parcheesi

Who does that? Who among us would keep a journal about doing nothing?

Great night,

beer and pizza,

didn’t move from the couch

much fun,

Netflix and Call of Duty.

FDR would, because he saw the value of stress management.

FDR saw the value in lowering cortisol for his people, too. His friends and assistants joined him on his vacations. When FDR bought and rebuilt a mineral spa in Georgia, he spent two-thirds of his net worth on the restoration, and when he was done he shared it with the people. Not just with his co-workers and family. He opened the Meriwether Inn to hundreds of polio patients—strangers—to relax and recover their strength and their faith.

The man who stared down a torpedo on the deck of a battleship, built a spa for him and his people to relax.

The Empathy Myth

Now let’s look at our second misconception; that great leaders know their people. Or, more accurately, that great leaders like FDR can empathize with everyone they govern.

It turns out, according to the APA and Harvard Business Review, the more power a leader has, the less capacity they have to empathize.

In that same study I mentioned earlier, where they measured stress hormones in high status leaders, they also tested them to gauge their “empathetic accuracy,” —Whether or not they could identify the emotional states of their subordinates. What they found may not surprise you.

It turns out the leaders with more responsibility had less capacity to empathize with their people. It was tough for high-status leaders to identify the emotional states of their subordinates, and this correlation was true at every level. The more subordinates a leader had, the tougher it was for them to empathize quickly and accurately.

We always imagine CEOs walking through their offices like generals surveying the troops; “Howdy son, I served with your father. Great man. You’ll do us proud. How about you? I saw your scores on the rifle range today. You ready to give ‘em hell?”

But the reality, and the science, tell a different story.

How did FDR seem to know his people so well? Remember, his fireside chats made a real connection with the American family. This is a man who restored the confidence of an emotionally shaken republic. They call it a depression because we feel an economic slump. We see the misery on people’s faces when they can’t afford food. We empathize. And empathy can be tricky for a high-status leader.

But here’s the secret...

FDR knew he couldn’t empathize with everyone in America. So he did what all great leaders do; he allied himself with people who could empathize for him.

Great Leaders Deligate Empathy And Listen To Their Team!

First, let’s talk about FDR’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. This is a woman who has had literal volumes written about her involvement in civil rights and charities. She volunteered for the American Red Cross and the Navy Hospitals during the first world war, and she was an activist in the Women’s Union Trade League, the League of Women Voters, and the Civil Rights Movement. Our whole article could be about her, and it wouldn’t scratch the surface. If FDR wanted to empathize with the American people, he couldn’t do better than Eleanor Roosevelt.

Secondly, I want to tell you about a woman named Missy Lehand. FDR had Eleanor to help empathize with the voters, but he needed someone to help connect with his whitehouse team. Missy LeHand was that source of team empathy.

Missy LeHand was a blue-collar Irish American worker who came from honest roots. Missy knew the business of the president’s people so well, she eventually became the White House Chief of Staff—the only woman to ever hold that position.

The staff called her the Queen of the Whitehouse. And if you wanted to see the president, you had to go through Missy. Even senators and ambassadors tried to get on Missy’s good side. Not because she showed favoritism or took bribes; but because she was fair, and she was devoted to the president’s people. She knew everyone and everything that happened in FDR’s orbit, and she was his personal gatekeeper.

Great leaders know they can’t empathize with everyone. But great leaders, like FDR, don’t just accept this as fact and move on. They employ underlings, secretaries, and skilled managers who can empathize on their behalf.

Under-The-Gun Training Is Like Giving PTSD To Your Troops Before Sending Them Into Combat

Finally, we get to the myth that great leaders like FDR are discovered during times of stress. And you know how I know this is a common myth? Because we have sayings like “Great men are forged in fire.” and “Adversity builds character.” and “Training under fire.”

We like to use that last one in business, don’t we? We learn under fire. It builds character.

But, according to science, you’ll have a better time uncovering great leaders hiding amongst your ranks by lowering the cortisol of your people, not raising it. The misconception we love to tell ourselves is that stress helps reveal true character.

Shake this notion out of your head, because this simply isn’t true. 

“But I was trained under-the-gun, and it made me a better leader.”

“But I put my new people through their paces, and it always gets results.”

“But my office is full of stone-cold killers who can make the sale 9 times out of 10, and they were all trained under fire.”

Under-the-gun training techniques may reveal people who have already mastered stress-coping, but it won’t encourage people of raw, untrained talent to step forward. It does the opposite; it teaches them there is no safe place to hone their skills.

FDR, for example, was home-schooled in a fabulously wealthy environment. And he attended college. Twice. Once at Harvard and once at Columbia University. And he was mediocre at both!

FDR got into politics because he was selected by the democratic party. They thought it would look good if they could turn a Roosevelt to their side, and they knew his family could pay for his campaign. In 1910 the democrats asked him to run for state assembly, in a “safe” race, and he didn’t even win. Because the Democratic incumbent, Lewis Stuyvesant, chose to run for re-election. FDR respected his party, and the incumbent, and he stepped aside.

FDR was home-schooled, educated, trained, selected, and slowly exposed. We’re taught that this kind of caudling should have produced a weak leader. A hothouse flower. But it didn’t. It’s true that FDR gave up the state assembly to the party incumbent. But that’s because he ran for the senate seat instead. And he won.

FDR wasn’t on his own after he became Senator, either. He always had mentors. Men and women who helped train him at every step. Men like Louis Howe; a journalist who spotted FDR early in his career, and coached him all the way to the white house.

Leaders aren't revealed by being put under fire. They’re revealed by careful mentoring, slow exposure, and adequate training!

Be The Low-Cortisol Leader!

We need to give FDR proper credit for doing what every great leader knows to do: FDR knew how to relax, and he knew how to manage his cortisol level.

Earlier I told you that FDR died in the winner’s circle, one month before Germany surrendered. I also said he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. That’s a stress-related ailment.

And do you know where he died? It wasn’t on the deck of a battleship. It wasn’t in the whitehouse. FDR, the winning president, died relaxing at his spa in Georgia.

That’s not an “under the gun” smile on the President. Jeff Bezos looks pretty mellow in his press photos too. This is not a coincidence.

Nobody is born stress-proof. No leader is born reading minds. It’s just that the best leaders know they need a little help connecting with their team. The best leaders know the value of slow exposure and mentoring. The best leaders know how to de-stress, whenever they aren’t staring down a speeding torpedo.