- For Bill Gates, the key was getting away from the office.
- For college football coach Joe Paterno, it was about getting above the playing field.
- For Abraham Lincoln, it was about getting absorbed in a mind other than his own: Shakespeare.
How great leaders achieve emotional balance in times of stress is the subject of a brief but interesting column in Fortune by Nancy Koehn, a professor at Harvard Business School.
Leaders need to step out of chaos in order to bring perspective to the organization, she says. Gates took biannual “reading weeks” where he could be alone in a cabin, just thinking.
For Paterno, the solution was simply to watch his Penn State Nittany Lions perform from an upstairs press box rather than the coach’s traditional space on the sidelines. Not only did elevation give him a much more telling view of how his team was performing on the field, but, as Koehn notes, “leaders like Paterno who step away give their teams space to do their jobs. Micromanaging is practically impossible from a distance, and that can pay off.”
According to HBS professor Rakesh Khurana and his colleagues, corporate leadership should not just be about improving the company’s financial performance and ROI for investors. Leaders must forge new meaning and purpose for an organization and its employees.
“Among the many functions of organizational leadership, one of the most important is the development of a worldview for participants. Organizations, like individuals, search for stability and meaning. ”
If you are going to achieve that goal, that worldview, leaders need a touchstone (Shakespeare), contemplation time (a cabin in the woods), or maybe just an elevator to offer them new perspectives,
How do you get away from work to think about work?
