Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Night the Board Went All Red
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Night the Board Went All Red. Here we go. Mary Barra became CEO of General Motors in January 2014. A few weeks into the job. GM recalled millions of cars over an ignition switch defect that had been sitting inside the company for more than a decade. She had not made that decision. She had not even been in the room for most of it. She inherited the fallout anyway, and reporters asked her about it constantly in the months that followed. Around that same time, she was also asked a different kind of question. What was it like leading a car company as a woman in a room that had been mostly men for her entire career? She said her gender had probably helped her sometimes and probably hurt her sometimes. That is the same way some other factor helps or hurts everyone else in that room. Then she said something that reaches far past the question she was answer actually answering. She said, I don't focus on what you can't control, and I just don't focus on it. Here's what that looks like when the thing you cannot control is a lot bigger than one interview question. Renata Cole ran operations control for a regional airline out of a hub in the upper Midwest. On a Thursday in January, a stormfront stalled directly over her airport for nine hours straight. By 6 p.m. that evening, the departure board behind her was almost entirely red. 300 flights were grounded. 11,000 passengers had nowhere to go that night. Renata could not move the storm. Nobody in that building could. What she could move was the order in which those 300 flights got rebooked once the runways reopened. She could decide which crews were still legal to fly and which ones had timed out. She could decide whether gate agents got a script that told the truth about delays or one that promised times nobody could actually hit. She picked a method and stuck with it. Rebook the longest stranded passengers first, not the easiest routes first. Give every gate agent the real worst case arrival time, not the hopeful one. Keep every crew's legal flying hours current in the system in real time, so nobody got assigned a flight they could not legally take off on. None of that touched the storm. All of it touched what happened once the storm passed. Here's where people usually misread a line like Mary Barra's. They hear, don't focus on what you can't control and take it as permission to stop caring about the hard thing. They wave it off. They act like the storm was not actually bad. That's not what she was describing. And it was not what Renata did either. Renata never pretended 300 canceled flights were fine. She said so plainly, more than once, to a room full of exhausted staff. The real reframe is narrower than don't care about it. It's don't spend your decision-making energy on a question that is already closed. The storm had already happened. No amount of frustration, replaying, or wishing the front had stalled somewhere else was going to move it one mile. Every minute Renata might have spent arguing with a locked in fact was a minute she did not spend on the thing that was still open. That thing was what her team did in the next hour. Now think about where an AI tool sits next to a night like that one. Feed it every radar return and every delay code from that storm. It will hand you an optimized rebooking order in under a second. It would probably be cleaner than the one Renata built by hand. What it will never do is sit in that operations room wanting to relitigate the storm. It will never wish out loud that the front had moved faster. It will never burn its own attention on a question that was already settled. It has no attention to protect because nothing in it was ever pulled toward the closed question in the first place. Renata's real skill was not the math behind the rebooking order. It was the discipline of yanking her own focus off a fact she could not change and putting every bit of it on the fact that she still could. That pull toward relitigating the unchangeable is a specifically human cost. And learning to resist it is still nobody's job but yours. Here's something worth trying this week. Find the one thing on your plate right now that's already decided. A budget that already got cut, a deadline that already moved, a call from somebody above you that already landed. Notice how much energy you are still spending wishing it were different. Then pick the next open decision in front of you, something still genuinely undecided, and move every bit of that energy there instead. The leaders worth following are not the ones who never face a storm nobody saw coming. All of them do eventually. They are the ones who can tell the difference quickly and without much drama. They know which part of the night is already written and which part is still theirs to decide. The board at Renata's airport went green again a little after four in the morning. The storm got credit for none of that, but the method did.