5 Minutes and 5 Phone Calls

 

As a leader it’s important to set the tone for your team or organization, especially as it relates to handling difficult or crisis situations. If the leader wigs out, stresses out, worries or has a heart attack during high stress or crisis situations; there will always be undertones of that stress transferred to the rest of the team.


As you can imagine running a prison presents the daily opportunity for high stress, crisis and potentially life & death situations. During my tenure as a young prison Warden, I realized that Most Leadership Stress Was Self-Induced. I had the personal choice of whether or not I allowed events or people to stress me out. I would watch the previous Warden get stressed out by the most trivial things. Realizing that it was up to me, I developed philosophy and mindset to handle these potentially high stress or crisis situations.


The philosophy was simply this, ”There is nothing that we can’t begin to fix in 5 Minutes and 5 Phone Calls.” I trained my Chief of Security and my Officers to not sweat the small stuff and embrace the fact that crisis situations will happen… it’s not about the situation it’s about how you handle the situation.


If there was a full-blown prison riot the process within the first 5 Minutes would be to make the following 5 Phone Calls:

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 Link to reading article: Why Most Leadership Stress Is Self-Induced is a post from: Big Is The New Small