"people look to you to see if you're calm, and if you're calm, then they'll stay calm"

What Does Great Leadership Look Like Under Pressure?

Sir Steve Hansen, Episode 2, The Shaun O'Neill Podcast

Sir Steve Hansen has been called the best to ever coach the game.

You can argue about that if you like, but you cannot argue that he has stood in more genuinely high pressure moments than nearly anyone in world sport.

So I asked him a question with no rugby in it at all.

What does great leadership look like under pressure. In sport, in business, in any walk of life.

He answered it without hedging, and it is one of the clearest things anyone has said to me on this subject.

Two things held together at the same time. Flexible enough to take other people's ideas, and consistent enough that you are recognisably the same person whether things are going well or badly. Then stay calm, because the room is watching you to work out whether it should panic. And keep the conversation on solutions instead of problems.

He opens with something that sounds like a contradiction

"great leadership is when you're flexible in your thinking, but you're consistent at the same time"

Read that quickly and it sounds like he wants it both ways.

Nearly every bit of leadership advice going picks one side or the other. Be decisive and hold the line, or be adaptable and listen to your people. Pick a lane.

Hansen is saying the lane is the wrong idea. You need both, and they apply to different things. Flexible about the ideas. Consistent about yourself.

The flexible half

"you don't have to have the all the ideas, but you do have to have the ability to listen and learn"

This is the one senior people struggle with, and I think it is because of how they got promoted in the first place.

You get the big job by having good answers. So the longer you are in it, the more it feels like producing answers is the job. Then the pressure comes on and you double down, because admitting you are not sure feels like the last thing you can afford.

Hansen coached the All Blacks and he is telling you plainly that having all the ideas was never his job.

The consistent half

The consistency he is talking about is not about strategy. It is about you.

He describes being the same person whether things are going good or going bad. Level. Calm. Not up on the good weeks and down on the bad ones.

And the reason is not that it makes you look impressive:

"people look to you to see if you're calm, and if you're calm, then they'll stay calm, and if we we find solutions rather than talk about the problems"

That is the whole mechanism in one sentence.

Your team is not reading the numbers to work out how worried to be. They are reading your face. Whatever you are doing, they will do, and they will do it within about a day.

So being level under pressure is not a personality trait he happens to have. It is a job he is deliberately performing, because it sets the temperature for everyone else.

What I take out of that

Most leaders I meet think their job under pressure is to have a plan.

Hansen's answer says the plan is the second thing. The first is to be the person in the room who has not changed.

Because if you are the same on the bad Monday as you were on the good Friday, people bring you the real problems early, while they are still small. And if you are not, they wait, they manage you, and you find out about things far too late to help.

Then the last part of what he said. Solutions rather than problems. Not because talking about problems is negative, but because a room full of people describing the problem is a room where nobody is moving.

You do not need everyone calm. You need one person calm, and everyone else looking at them.

Book Sir Steve Hansen

Sir Steve Hansen is available for corporate events, conferences, leadership days and in-house sessions through Essential Talent

He is a natural fit for any audience dealing with pressure, scrutiny, or decisions that get judged in public. Very few speakers in this country have led under that kind of spotlight for as long, or as successfully.