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Growth Spurt: The Importance of Steady Leadership · The Growth Project

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  You.
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  Doctor Drew Brandon here with amylose checking in for a growth spurt here today. And I wanted to share, an insight in reflection I had recently, while reading an article that kind of took me down memory lane and took me back in time a little bit.
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  It was an article actually talking about, leadership. And several former professional athletes had been polled and asked to talk about what do they feel like was like the the most important,
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  characteristics that they had seen in great leaders over the course of their career, which I think is a great question.
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  Right. Hey, you've been around all these leaders. If you had to really narrow it down and say, hey, this was the most influential, impactful trait or characteristic, what would that be? And so in the article, one of the athletes that was quoted was former Major League Baseball player Jeff Frank here. If you're from the South, like I, you definitely remember his days of playing for the Braves.
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  He actually grew up in the Atlanta area and was, a dual sport phenom athlete, playing both football and baseball. Eventually settled on baseball and had a great career in the major leagues. Many of those years were spent with the Atlanta Braves, which I'm sure had to be really meaningful for him, given that they were his hometown team.
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  But in the article, Frank core talked about the quality and characteristic of steadiness, steadiness in leaders. And here was his example. He gave, as he was recalling, kind of looking back on his playing days with the Braves. At the time, the manager of the Braves was Bobby Cox, and he he said that he can remember vividly.
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  He would walk into Bobby Cox, his office, and when he walked in, he said he would start to talk with him and interact with him, and he could never tell the difference.
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  Whether or not the Braves had won five games in a row or maybe lost five games in a row, or whether it was a good day or a bad day, because Bobby Cox was just so steady.
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  And that doesn't mean he didn't feel emotions. That
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  doesn't mean that he didn't feel better on days they won, and maybe not quite as thrilled on days they lost. But he had the skill and the characteristic of remaining steady and composed and level emotionally, which is a really, really important quality for leaders to have, obviously, because regardless of what industry you're in, regardless of what type of team you might be leading and impacting, your team will look to you in an effort to kind of calibrate their own emotions or pulse check or get a read on how are we doing?
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  How do things seem to be going? And if the leader is fluctuating a great deal emotionally in getting really, really up when things are going well and getting really, really down when things aren't going so well, it makes it that much more difficult for your team to stay composed and to stay steady, which we want and we need.
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  Right. What do we know about, all industries? What do we know about all forms of competition and performance? There will be ups and there will be downs. And if things are going really, really well, just give it time. That too will change. So as you're thinking about your own development journey, your own leadership pursuits, take a few minutes and reflect on and give yourself a little bit of a self-assessment on your steadiness, your emotional control.
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  How do you do when things aren't looking too great? Right? How do you handle bad news? How do you deal with those days and weeks and months and quarters and years, perhaps, where performance just isn't what you thought it would be, what you hoped it would be? Frankly, maybe what you needed it to be. But holding the line emotionally and by being able to remain steady is a really, really important trait and characteristic that leaders must have.
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  Doesn't mean you'll do it perfectly all the time. I can promise you you won't. But be sure that you're trying to remain in tune with where you are emotionally. And then once you array raise that awareness, be ready to make the adjustment in the tweak, whatever it might be, to get back on that kind of steady level playing to help your team and ultimately to, to be the leader that you aspire to be.