Walk a jobsite under pressure, and you’ll recognize the signs immediately. Tight schedules. Stacked trades. Late material arrivals. A lack of patience.
In moments like these, superintendents push harder. Project managers get louder. Forepersons snap orders, and the jobsite becomes tense. What everyone needs is calm. But that skill tends to be lacking, management scholar Lynda Gratton says.
The Calm Minority
Gratton studies the “calm minority”—the 10% of leaders who face the same pressures as others yet remain consistently composed.
“They are no less busy, no less driven and no less accountable than their peers,” she writes in MIT Sloan Management Review. What distinguishes them “is not their workload but the way they move through it,” she says. “They manage to maintain a steadiness that others find elusive.”
The ability to remain calm matters a great deal. Volatility upstream almost always shows up downstream in poor productivity, and yet few realize it. If you’re not visibly stressed as a leader, you’re not pushing hard enough, the thinking goes. To the contrary, “slower pacing” and “rituals of rest” enhance productivity, Gratton says.
“For those willing to practice it,” she writes, “calm becomes a source of endurance, clarity and steady influence.”
Control and Support
Want calm leaders? Offer them job control and social support.
“Any company, in any industry, can pull these levers without breaking the bank,” writes Jeffrey Pfeffer in McKinsey Quarterly.
Here are some suggestions.
Publish a Weekly Signal Brief
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) urges companies to set up internal intelligence systems. The HBR article, “How to Lead When Things Feel Increasingly Out of Control,” suggests assigning a team to create a “weekly signal brief”—a report highlighting regulations and conditions expected to impact the business directly. The briefs help eliminate panic. They remove the noise of news headlines and social media.
“The result is a calmer organization that responds to facts rather than fear or rumors,” say the article authors, Eric Solomon and Anup Srivastava.
Be Learn-It-Alls
Calm leaders are full-time learners, which makes them trustworthy and admired. In fact, a “behavioral science-informed way” to shape one’s impact as a leader is to “stay more in learning mode than performance mode,” write Ron Carucci and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in the HBR article, “Leaders, Bring Your Best Self into the New Year.”
The authors point to Microsoft’s chair and CEO, Satya Nadella, as a model example. Nadella shifted the company’s ethos from “know-it-all” to “learn-it-all,” and in so doing “signaled that curiosity and humility are the real currencies of progress.”
Create a Calm Checklist
Ask your forepersons, project managers and leadership team members to do the following:
- Pause before responding to bad news.
- Reduce unnecessary emails and texts.
- Add time for reflection to your calendar.
Yes, Calm Can Be Built
One of Gratton’s most important findings is that calm is not fixed. “Calm is partly inherited and partly innate,” she writes, “but it can be built, strengthened and deliberately practiced.”
That means with effort, a foreman can learn to stay measured during a punch-list crunch and keep the crews focused. A project manager who absorbs bad news can act without panic while coordinating a project.
Calm leaders pause before reacting to a missed delivery. They ask clarifying questions before issuing directions. They claim brief windows of time for uninterrupted thinking—even on chaotic days—to protect their decision-making abilities.
They’re not the ones who burn hottest. They’re the ones who endure.
Mark L. Johnson writes for the walls and ceilings industry. He is also the editor of BuildSteel.org. He can be reached via LinkedIn.com/in/markjohnsoncommunications.
