Caring for the Leader when the Leader is You

Leadership is a holistic discipline. To lead well requires some level of knowledge, understanding and skill around topics ranging from vision and change to empathy and authenticity. One useful framework encourages us to think of the skills of leadership in three broad domains: self-leadership; leadership of others; and organizational leadership. I was slow to adopt the idea of self-leadership and tended to think of it as self-alignment, but I have since embraced the paradigm that people can sustain effective leadership only if they continuously engage in keeping their own acts together personally and professionally – not because I advocate a leader-centric perspective of leadership, but because I know that happier, healthier better-connected leaders are more effective leaders, and the science supports me.

Leadership is influence; people lead by successfully influencing other people. The science around leaders and leadership strongly suggests that people allow themselves to be influenced, in other words to follow, when they perceive a would-be leader as competent and trustworthy. Research also suggests that people form their perceptions of another person’s leadership credibility in part by what the would-be leader signals through their behavior and that follower perceptions make leadership possible.

There are clear links between self-alignment and leadership of others as well as between self-alignment and self-care. When would-be leaders struggle to manage stress, do not sleep well, let their fitness and nutrition slip, or turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms, their social signaling becomes disrupted in ways that unsettle people’s confidence in them as leaders: bad relationships get worse; good relationships go sour; leadership is undermined.

Leadership is a privilege and, often, a fulfilling and rewarding experience that provides many intrinsic rewards. However, leadership is also a duty and one which, at times, can feel stressful and overwhelming. In the Status Report section in this issue of Wildfire, we see how leaders in wildland fire management confront challenges as they prepare for the core of the fire year. Fire organizations and the people in them expect a lot from their leaders, often too much, and a good leader must be able to shoulder several burdens; prominent among those burdens is anxiety, a growing concern in our increasingly turbulent and complex work world.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Associa- tion of America, anxiety is a reaction to stress. If you want to know about the relationship between anxiety and leadership, I recommend a Harvard Business Review article titled Leading Through Anxiety (https://hbr.org/2020/05/leading-through-anxiety) by Morra Aarons-Mele, a leading voice on the subject. Anxiety can serve us well. According to Aarons-Mele, “When channeled thoughtfully, anxiety can motivate us to make our teams more resourceful, productive, and creative. It can break down barriers and create new bonds.”

However, Aarons-Mele also makes clear the dark side of anxiety when she points out that “left unchecked, anxiety distracts us, zaps our energy, and drives us to make poor decisions.” According to Nancy Koehn, a business historian at Harvard whose research focuses on crisis leadership, unchecked anxiety perceived by followers is distracting, destabilizing, destructive, and can create the impression that a would-be leader is defined by doubt and fear, none of which is conducive to giving would-be followers confidence in one’s leadership.

Lately, I have been reading about a personality type that some psychologists call “anxious achievers,” people who perform at very high levels in their work but who can regularly experience anxiety, pressure, worry and self-doubt. I consider myself an anxious achiever and I have known many anxious achievers, including some wildland fire legends. It has been my experience that one need not look far in wildland fire services to find a person whose anxiety drives their hard work, preparation, accomplishments, and reputation. However, I have also seen the dark side of anxious achievement, watching hard-charging leaders use their desire to do a great job as fuel, only to see their decision-making ability and overall leadership effectiveness damaged when their unmanaged anxiety became too much. If you are interested in knowing more about this personality type I recommend a more recent Harvard Business Review article by Aarons-Mele titled How High Achievers Overcome Their Anxiety (https://hbr.org/2023/03/how-highachievers-overcome-their-anxiety).

People can sustain effective leadership only if they continuously engage in strengthening and preserving their leadership capacity, and that requires not only a commitment to continuous learning and self-improvement but also, given the stresses of today’s fire management jobs, a commitment to self-care. At the risk of generalizing, it has been my experience that self-care is not a particularly strong skill for wildland fire professionals. Too often, at best, self-care is given passing attention while developing leaders in our discipline – ironic given the stressors of the work.

The Aarons-Mele articles offer some great advice, including links to resources that can help leaders understand the relationship between anxiety and leadership and how to keep that relationship positive. For leaders in fire management organizations, self-care is not a luxury but an essential building block of sustained, effective leadership. Taking good care of oneself also models good practices for others and signals to them that they can and should take care of themselves as well. Please remember, happier, healthier, and better-connected leaders are more effective leaders.

Mike DeGrosky is the former chief of the Fire Protection Bureau for the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, Forestry Division. He taught for the Department of Leadership Studies at Fort Hays State University for 10 years.