Leadership Principles

Module 1: Taking Charge

Stepping into a New Leadership Role

Leadership is about enabling those you are leading to arrive at the intended destination.
The work of leadership includes focusing people on a compelling objective, enhancing
and deploying their talent, igniting and coordinating their efforts, and developing yourself
to be able to do this work.

The starting point for leadership is clarity and purpose in every situation about what you
are setting out to accomplish with your actions and how you want others to experience
your leadership.

The Work of Leadership is Different

Stepping into a leadership role requires a shift away from being the expert and doing
the technical tasks yourself. Your new role is more complex, and involves:

• Fostering mutual learning

• Engaging people interpersonally
• Encouraging collaboration to get technical tasks done
• Helping diverse groups maximize their productivity

Leadership also requires a shift in how you see yourself. Your identity as a leader is
less about your individual accomplishments and more about the collective work of the
group. This requires you to derive value and personal satisfaction from enabling the
work of others, rather than directly accomplishing things yourself.

There are five different tools you can use as an emerging leader.

• Direction: Providing people with a vivid and engaging vision of the destination
where the team is headed, along with a clear sense of purpose.
• Relationships: Meeting people, establishing connections, and opening lines of
exchange. This will allow you to remove obstacles and gather resources so your
team can complete its work.
• Design: Establishing the systems, structures, and practices to enable performing
units to function well.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.
 • Process: Setting expectations for how people interact to get their work
done. Examples of this include: how you run meetings, how you share
information, and how you walk people through plans and feedback.
• Self: Using yourself as an instrument for developing your people and for
mobilizing them to get things done.

How you allocate time as leader should be different from the way you allocated your
time as an individual contributor.

Leadership is less about compliance (making sure people do what they are told) and
more about fostering commitment, so people develop their own internal desire to do
the work and do it well.

There are two common stumbling blocks for new leaders:

• The urge to do the work of an individual contributor yourself.

• The urge to focus on compliance and not commitment.

The Necessary Change

Self-awareness is imperative in leadership contexts.

• You need to see yourself as a leader and grasp that your role has more to do
with mobilizing others to action.
• You need to be thoughtful about the experience that you want people to have of
you as a leader.

A key tenet of leadership is the capability for growth and learning.

• It is likely that you will encounter situations as a leader that require you to learn
and grow at the very moment others expect you to be an authority.
• You will inevitably make mistakes in your introduction to leadership. Do not be
embarrassed to do what it takes to learn the role.

Stepping into a new leadership role requires a process of adaptation through which you
move away from familiar activities that previously drove your success, but are no longer
the center of your role as you bring out the best work in others. Moving from doing the
right thing well to the right thing poorly can be an uncomfortable but critical transition for
individuals who are new to leadership.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 2
 WHAT YOU DO

Wrong Thing Right Thing

Well Dis
HOW WELL YOU DO IT

co
m for
Ps t an
yc

Instrumental
ho d Re
l og

Guidance
sis

Learning
ic a tan
lS ce
up
po
rt
Poorly

As a leader you will also ask others to follow this learning path. The two central
dimensions of psychological support and instrumental guidance, which are what you will
need in order to move through the path, are also what others will need from you.

• Psychological support includes patience, tolerance for mistakes,

encouragement of risk-taking, and willingness to share experiences.
• Instrumental guidance is helpful, instructional input on how to do things better.

Adopting a learning orientation enhances your self-awareness so you understand who

you are and how others perceive you.

You can build your credibility as a leader through the three following activities:

• Taking time to understand what you have inherited.

o What context are you stepping into?
o What is the culture of the organization or team?
o How does the culture influence the way work gets done?
• Balancing your own diagnosis of the context with the reality of where the people
in the organization are.
o Ask questions and listen to appreciate the situation. You may have
already arrived at your own conclusions, but it is most important to
understand the perspectives of those you are leading in order to round out
your own perspective and meet these individuals where they are.
• Identify, build, and draw upon key relationships and sources of support.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 3
Building Self-Awareness
Emotional intelligence is critical to your success in leadership.

• Daniel Goleman defines emotional intelligence as “the capacity for recognizing

our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing
emotions effectively in ourselves and others.”

The Emotional and Social Competence Inventory (ESCI) is a competency-based

assessment that provides insight into four major facets of emotional intelligence. There
are 12 specific competencies within the four major facets of emotional intelligence.

• Self-Awareness: Self-awareness, the heart of the model, is your ability to

understand your emotions, your drives, your strengths and your weaknesses. It
enables you to sustain your emotionally and socially intelligent behavior over
time, despite setbacks.
• Social Awareness: The social awareness quadrant contains the competencies
of empathy (your ability to sense others’ feelings and perspectives) and
organizational awareness (your ability to understand the power relationships
within your organization).
• Self-Management: Self-management includes four competencies, referred to as
the “fire and brakes.” The first two (achievement orientation and positive outlook)
are the fire—they drive your motivation and provide momentum. The last two
(emotional self-control and adaptability) are the brakes—they hold back
destructive or counterproductive responses to change or pressure.
• Relationship Management: This quadrant includes the five competencies that
are most visible to others: coach and mentor, conflict management, influence,
inspirational leadership, and teamwork. Relationship management is how you
take awareness of yourself and others and channel it into how you interact with
others.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 4
 SELF OTHERS

AWARENESS
Self-Awareness Self- Social Empathy
Awareness Awareness Organizational Awareness

Coach and Mentor

Achievement Orientation
ACTIONS

Conflict Management
Positive Outlook Self Relationship
Management Management Influence
Emotional Self-Control Inspirational Leadership
Adaptability Teamwork

Social awareness and self-management are key levers in relationship management. To

be effective with others, you need to have a handle on your emotions and be able to
channel them in an effective way.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 5
Module 2: Leading Your Team

Setting Up Your Team for Success

Teams that work well are characterized by:

• Commitment to an engaging, common purpose;

• Active and fair participation from all members;
• Healthy and productive debate;
• Openness to take risks and share ideas and perspectives without fear of
judgment; and
• A set of shared norms that govern the way they operate, especially in regards to
decision-making and information sharing.

Teams work best when they are well suited to the situation. Specifically, teams
work better than individuals do under the following conditions:

• When the task is so complex that no one person has the expertise or time to
figure it all out and get it all done;
• When diverse views, knowledge, and functional experience are necessary in
completing the task, and when those inputs build on one another in reciprocal
ways to deliver insight and application;
• When buy-in from multiple constituencies is necessary.

Teams also serve common functions:

• Exchanging ideas, perspectives, and best practices;

• Ideating and innovating potential new approaches, applications, or options;
• Identifying core issues and problem solving;
• Making recommendations from various options;
• Implementing solutions or team recommendations;
• Executing a multi-faceted plan.

Model of Team Effectiveness

When managing a team, you can apply three criteria of effectiveness, or indicators,
called the Dashboard of Effectiveness.

• Performance or Results: The team successfully delivers in a manner that

satisfies relevant audiences (such as bosses, customers, and/or investors).

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 6
 • Team Strength and Flexibility: The team gets better at what it already does
together (strength) and builds capacity to take on new work and respond to
unexpected challenges (flexibility, sometimes referred to as adaptability).
• Individual Learning: Individual team members learn and grow, so they are
equipped to work in new ways and take on new tasks and responsibilities.

DASHBOARD OF EFFECTIVENESS

Dashboard of Effectiveness

Team Strength Individual

Performance and Flexibility Learning

You can create high performing teams by using five levers to design and run teams that
meet all three criteria on the Dashboard of Effectiveness.

Model of Team Effectiveness

Team Design

Team Culture

Leader’s Team Process Team

Use of Self Effectiveness

Team Launch

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 7
These five levers make up the Model of Team Effectiveness and include:

• Culture: The definite do's and don'ts about how the team works together that
everyone on the team knows implicitly, and how the team solves problems and
addresses challenges.
• Process: The practices you establish for how people interact to get their work
done—for example, how you run meetings, how you share information, and how
you lead people through plans and feedback. As you think about your own team
or department’s process, you can map two dimensions of process:
o Decision Making: Decision making refers to the way decisions are made
by the leader and the team. With a consensus-based approach, all
members of the team are comfortable with the decision and feel that they
can adequately support it. In a top-down approach, the decision rests
with the leader.
o Information Flow: Information flow refers to the manner in which
information is disseminated across the team. In a centrally orchestrated
format, the leader curates the information available before presenting it to
the team. In the distributed process, individual members of the team
continually adjust their sense of who else needs the information or who
else they need information from, and that information flows freely among
team members.

DECISION-MAKING
TOP DOWN
INFORMATION FLOW

CENTRALIZED DISTRIBUTED
ORCHESTRATION ADAPTATION

CONSENSUAL

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 8
 • Design: The systems, structures, and practices you establish that enable
performing units to function well. The lever of design includes:
o Establishing a compelling team purpose that explains what the team is
trying to achieve and why;
o Considering the team composition and building the team in a way that
focuses on hiring for individual members and the team as a whole;
o Defining systems and structures that foster collaboration and allow the
team to deliver on its purpose.
• Launch: The beginning or starting point of a team, which a leader facilitates
deliberately as an opportunity to discuss how the team will operate, including the
team's purpose, objectives, and norms. Five aspects that make up a successful
launch include:
o Shared understanding of purpose;
o Awareness and appreciation for the team’s resources, knowledge, and
expertise;
o Norms governing collaboration;
o Strategy for performance;
o Perspective on leadership.
• Leadership Style: Your patterns of behavior that are consistent across
situations and your interactions with others, discussed in detail in Module 3.

The strongest predictors of team performance are social sensitivity—that is, the ability
to read the emotions of others—and turn taking, or the extent to which each team
member speaks.

Key Challenges to Teams

One of the most common challenges teams face is conflict.

• Teams need healthy conflict and disagreement. The work of leadership is to

enable the team to draw on different perspectives, learn from conflict, and devise
solutions that reflect contributions of the team’s individual members.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 9
 • As a leader, you can monitor the amount and type of conflict.
o Too little conflict can be a sign people do not feel safe sharing their
authentic views or that the team does not have sufficient diversity of
perspectives. Too much conflict can distract a team, and suggests the
team has lost track of its collective mission or that people see more at
stake than the issue at hand.
o Type of conflict refers to how people disagree and what they disagree
about. You want teams to focus their disagreement on the work to be
done—the tasks, problems, challenges, opportunities, questions, and
decisions facing the team—rather than focus on the people or
personalities on the team.

You should strive to manage your team in a way that reaps the benefits of intellectual
disagreements while also ensuring team members are learning from the disagreement
and growing closer and more trusting of each other.

Diversity is an essential component of team composition. The effectiveness of a team

should outstrip the sum of its parts, and hinges on making the most of the differences
within a team. You can increase the potential impact of diversity by thinking of the 4 E’s
of Diversity:

• Enhancement: Teams get more from their differences if they share a common
belief that the differences within the team enhance the team and its capacity to
deliver.
• Empathy: You can help your team develop the habits of first understanding
others’ perspectives, truly understanding those perspectives, and putting
themselves in others’ shoes.
• Exploration: The practice of inquiring into different perspectives and
backgrounds, even taking the initiative to tap into the differences on the team
when they are not voiced or before they arise.
• Esteem: Ensure that everyone on the team feels appreciated for what she or he
distinctively brings to the team, rather than feeling discounted, sheepish, or
apologetic for being different. Truly making sure that every member of the team
knows their differences are valued and crucial for team success is the work of the
leader and is essential in making the most of a team’s diversity.

Dispersed or distributed teams require heightened roles and responsibilities of the

team leader.

• As a general guideline, you will tend to feel you are communicating enough
whereas your team is likely to feel they are getting insufficient communication. As
such, you need to feel like you are over-communicating.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 10
 • You must ensure ongoing communication, reinforce team norms, encourage
collaboration, and actively solicit the input and perspectives of everyone on the
team, especially those that are not co-located.
You must foster psychological safety, which is a team climate in which everyone on
the team feels the team is safe for risk taking. In this type of team climate, there is a
high level of trust and respect within the team, and individuals feel comfortable speaking
up and challenging opinions. To foster psychological safety, you can:

• Frame the work of the team as a learning process, so that people realize their
ideas and others’ ideas are valid and worth sharing, even if they are incomplete.
• Foster in everyone a sense of humility, so that each person feels that their
knowledge, expertise, and experience are essential but not comprehensive.
• Model careful listening and be vulnerable about your own gaps in
knowledge and your own mistakes.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 11
Module 3: Unleashing Potential in Yourself and Others
The most significant tool at a leader’s disposal is the way in which you use yourself,
often called your personal style. Leadership style refers to the patterns of behavior that
are consistent across situations and across your interactions with others. You can
examine leadership style through three frameworks: Leadership Imprint, Functions,
and Motivations.

Developing Your Leadership Imprint

Your leadership imprint is how you are experienced by those you are leading and
working with and can be mapped along seven dimensions:

• Authenticity: the quality of being true to oneself and genuine in

interactions with others;
• Competence: the capacity to do the work of leadership and take the
team where it needs to go;
• Humility: making space for and acknowledging others’ contributions,
and recognizing your own areas of limitation;
• Resolve: a steadfast commitment to see things through to completion;
• Warmth: likeability and caring about team members as individuals;
• Elevation: understanding how to set high expectations that others feel
energized to pursue;
• Faith: creating a sense of possibility and confidence in what can be
achieved.
The seven dimensions of leadership imprint form three composite groups, or Master
Dimensions, that are essential to effective leadership but require careful balance and
interplay:

• Approachability is the combination of authenticity and warmth, which

are the behaviors and expressive tendencies that help build rapport with
others.
• Credibility is the composite of competence, humility, and resolve, which
together convey know-how and authority. Being perceived as credible
means you are trusted to set a direction and guide others to follow that
direction.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 12
 Approachability Credibility

Warmth Warmth

Authenticity Competence Authenticity Competence

Faith Humility Faith Humility

Elevation Resolve Elevation Resolve

o The approachability/credibility matrix highlights the risks of

emphasizing one of these composites over the other.

APPROACHABLE

ar
Fe
CREDIBLE

d r
nte ve
co
u sho
Dis Pu

• Aspiration combines the elements of elevation and faith. It enables you

to create in others a sense of high expectations, a desire to achieve
those expectations, and a belief that together those you are leading can
meet or even surpass those expectations.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 13
 Aspiration

Approachability Credibility

Research indicates that certain attributes of a leader can cause those they are leading
to interpret their behavior in a distorted or biased way, or to hold expectations for the
leader that reflect unconscious and unfair biases. In these instances, it is important for
you to pay attention to context so that you can effectively navigate the way to present
yourself.

Core Functions of Your Leadership Style

Leveraging yourself as a leader is also about the practices you use to enable people to
get things done. There are two sets of practices that leaders draw upon to mobilize
others, also referred to as the functions of leadership style:

• Structure and direction: A pattern of behavior you employ to mobilize others to

get things done by communicating with them a clear sense of what to do;
• Support and development: A pattern of behavior you employ to mobilize others
to get things done by providing a psychological boost and instructional guidance
to get the work done.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 14
 Leadership Functions

2
STRUCTURE AND DIRECTION

SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT

Learning Frontier refers to how you stretch your range, that is, your potential for
movement along the spectrum of leadership functions based on where you want and
need to be as a leader.

Motivations as a Leader
Motivation is the third framework to look at one’s leadership style. It is the desire,
stimulus, or incentive to pursue a particular course of action. As a leader, you must work
to understand not only your own drives and motivations, but also those of the people on
your team. Motivation takes two forms:

• External rewards are tangible markers of success including salary, bonuses,

status, recognition, or perks.
• Intangible forms of motivation are the experience to stretch oneself by
taking on new challenges or learning new content, the opportunity to work
independently, be part of something meaningful or important, or to feel a
sense of belonging to a team or organization.
The Personal Values Questionnaire (PVQ) is one assessment that offers you a
perspective on the underlying basis for your motivations. The assessment measures
three core needs we all have:

• Achievement: Individuals with a high need for achievement are task

focused, and prefer to spend time and energy getting things done on
their own.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 15
 • Affiliation: Those who have a high need for affiliation derive energy and
satisfaction from building and cultivating relationships.
• Power: Individuals with a high need for socialized power are driven by
influence, persuasion, and having an impact on others.

Motivating Individuals and Unleashing Capability

As a leader, you must work to motivate and equip your team members in order for
them to succeed in the work they do individually and collectively.

Inquiry is when leaders take the time to ask questions in order to grasp team members’
perspectives. It is key to fostering relationships, managing your emotions, and providing
insights.

Advocacy is when leaders advance their own perspective directly and firmly.

Leadership requires relying on both inquiry and advocacy equally, and realizing that
asking questions and listening are not passive activities.

• Aggressive listening is locking in on what people are saying, making

sure you are grasping what they say and signaling your attentiveness
through body language. It also means that you ask for clarification where
you need it, and at times, paraphrase back what you heard to confirm
you understand correctly, permitting the other party to clarify and
elaborate if necessary.

Mobilizing your team requires you to address your team’s three distinct needs through
three actions called engaging the head, hand, and heart:

• Head: Orient the team’s beliefs about themselves and the challenge and
opportunity in front of them.
• Hand: Equip your team with the practices and habits to take on the
challenges and opportunities that will allow them to arrive at the desired
destination.
• Heart: Ignite team members’ emotions so that the drive to learn and to
deliver comes from within.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 16
There are three broad categories of motivators to engage your people.
• Visibility means illuminating the unseen effects of a team member’s work, effort,
or accomplishments, and, by making them evident, fuel motivation. Within this
category, there are three unique levers leaders can use:
o Recognition refers to how you as a leader acknowledge and
express appreciation for something a team member or colleague
has done. This can include something as simple as a one-on-one
communication recognizing the exemplary performance of your
team member.
o Impact involves connecting your team directly to the effects their
work is having on others, who are either within the organization,
or, most powerfully, outside the organization.
o Progress is a motivational tool that makes visible to those you are
leading the ground they have covered so far. This will help them
appreciate the distance they have traveled. Showing team
members their progress connects to the “progress principle,” a
desire people have to make steady advances every day.
• Structure of the work refers to the role a leader plays in the way a team
member will go about their work. To explore the aspects of how you
structure and shape the work your team does, consider three
psychological needs:
o Competence, or structuring jobs and tasks to provide team
members with opportunities to learn, to grow, to build their
capabilities, and to feel like they are on the path to mastery;
o Autonomy, or providing team members a sufficient amount of
freedom to make decisions, especially about how to get from point
A to point B;
o Relatedness, or creating the opportunity for engagement with
others so that members of your team feel like part of a whole.
• Common purpose is a clear, unifying direction allowing individuals to
experience the camaraderie of working together to achieve objectives. It
also allows individuals to generate consequences they care about and
that they know others care about.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 17
Module 4: Your Network
Your Network
A key tenet of networking is the “law of reciprocity,” or that people feel a sense of
obligation to repay in the future what another person has done for them in the present.

Base the effectiveness of your network on the closeness and diversity of relationships
within it, not the sheer size.

It is most important that your network provides access to new information or resources
and that the relationships are strong enough that there is a willingness to help one
another.

A robust network includes three core subnetworks:

• Your strategic network includes those who help you keep abreast of
priorities, constraints, or capabilities in your organization.
• Your operational network represents the individuals on whom you rely
to provide you and your team with key advice, information, support, or
resources pertaining to your current job.
• Your developmental network involves the individuals you rely on for
coaching, exposure to new opportunities, protection from adverse
situations, and social support.

A robust network of effective work relationships provides you with the resources and a
source of learning to drive your personal and professional development and your
capacity to get things done.

In building your network, keep in mind the following:

• The foundation of building relationships is your genuine interest in the

other person. Learn about them, find areas of common interest, and
discover how you differ and how that can be a source of learning.
• It helps to tell yourself that building and sustaining networks is less for
you and more for the people you are leading.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 18
 Relationships

Learning Resources
• Others’ perspectives and • Access
experiences • Information
• Of the situation • Material / Funding
• Of you • Ideas (insight, advice)
• Others’ input, mentoring, needs
• Others’ style and approaches

Personal and Professional One’s Own Capacity to Get

Development and Others’ Things Done

Leadership Capability

Managing Up
When managing up, you position yourself to support your boss if you take the time to
understand their context (the pressures and challenges they face), the ways in which
they like to consume information and make decisions, and their overall strengths and
weaknesses, including their potential blind spots.

Managing Your Direct Reports (Coaching)

Empathy is key when coaching and providing feedback, so that your message and
efforts to help the recipient have the effect you want them to have, and effectively
register and reshape behavior.

When delivering feedback or engaging in a coaching conversation, think carefully

through the following:

• The content of what you want to say;

• The process you will follow in delivering the feedback, and;
• The tone you want to adopt in conveying the message.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 19
Here is a simple, straightforward process you can follow for delivering feedback, which
is designed to make the development of the feedback recipient the focal point of your
efforts:

• Be direct, speaking directly to the recipient about the exact issue you
want to coach them on.
• Identify the specific behavior, resisting the urge to speak in
generalities and instead pointing to specific behavior that is problematic
and needs correction.
• State impact, connecting the problematic behavior to the consequence
of that behavior.
• Be specific about who is affected, and what the impact of the
problematic behavior is on others and even on the feedback recipient.

Core Content of Feedback

Be Direct

Identify Specific
Behavior

State Impact

On Whom

There are five steps in the process of feedback and coaching:

• Formulate what you intend to say, thinking about the content in terms of
behavior, impact, and parties affected.
• Practice or rehearse what you will say multiple times, taking time to
imagine possible reactions you might hear in response and how you will
respond.
• Deliver your feedback at the right time and in a quiet location that allows
both you and the recipient to speak confidentially and be vulnerable.
• Engage in inquiry, either at the beginning of the feedback conversation
or after delivering the feedback.
• Join as a partner with the feedback recipient to help coach them to make
changes in their behavior.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 20
 Feedback Process

Formulate Practice Deliver Inquire Coach

rehearse anticipate test for explore root

possible understanding causes
reactions

To be an effective coach, hone in on developing the following skills, qualities, and

practices:

• Patience and empathy;

• Analysis of where an individual can improve;
• Clear communication;
• A leadership imprint that conveys faith and elevation.
After the discussion of the problematic behavior, coaching will require you to do the
following:

• Provide psychological support through listening, reassurance, and

offering your own experiences for perspective;
• Offer instrumental guidance through collaborative instruction aimed at
improving the recipient’s future performance.
Managerial coaching requires establishing a constructive coaching relationship in which
the following conditions, based on the work of psychologist Carl Roger, are met:

• Mutual perception that each person in the coaching interaction is

important;
• The coach is genuine;
• The coach has empathy for what the person being coached is
experiencing;
• The person being coached experiences the coach as empathic and
understanding.
When coaching a peer or friend, it may be helpful to begin with inquiry, then discuss and
establish a workable solution.

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 21
Adversity and Stress
When faced with the inevitable setbacks of leadership, it is important for you to stay
positive and avoid the common reflexes of blaming others, jumping to conclusions, and
deciding future actions in a state of raw emotion.

Re-framing setbacks is a key feature of resilience, which is the ability to confront crises
quickly and constructively.

When you encounter a setback, engage in thoughtful deliberation about the underlying
causes and the scope of the adversity, and shift gears to think about what actions you
can take to address the adverse events effectively.

Pay attention to your reaction and response when faced with a stressful occurrence. A
reaction, your reflexive emotions and thoughts in the moment, should not govern your
response. Before responding, hit the pause button, breathe, collect yourself, and first
do what it takes to manage yourself so that you can move to more resourceful action in
response to stress and adversity.

Pulling the Plug on Emotion, a tool developed by Bruce Cryer, Rollin McCraty, and
Doc Childre, refers to steps you can take when faced with adversity or an overwhelming
wave of negative emotion:

• Name the emotion, hit the pause button, and give yourself a timeout.
• Breathe through your heart for at least 30 seconds.
• Invoke a positive feeling that will effectively bring to mind experiences
that have positive associations for you.
• Engage in constructive thinking around action steps to take moving
forward. Take a moment to write down the challenges and your thinking
around them.
“CORE”, a set of questions formulated by Paul Stoltz of PEAK Learning, encapsulates
four dimensions of human reaction to adversity. These questions can be used to
discover your reflexive reactions to an adverse situation:

• Control: To what extent can I influence the situation? How much control
do I perceive I have?
• Ownership: To what extent do I hold myself responsible for improving
this situation? To what extent am I playing a role in making it better?
• Reach: How far does the fallout of this situation reach into other areas of
my work or life? How big am I letting this become?
• Endurance: How long will the adversity endure?

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 22
A second set of questions can help you move toward resilience. Ask them explicitly or
use them to coach someone who seeks your guidance in handling adversity in their
own lives:

• Questions to Enhance a Sense of Control:

o Do: What are the facets of the situation you can potentially
influence?
o Visualize: How would the person you emulate and admire act?
• Questions to Enhance a Sense of Ownership:
o Do: What can you do to address the potential downside? What
can you do to maximize the potential upside—by even 10 percent?
o Visualize: What strengths and resources can you and/or your
team develop by addressing the adversity?
• Questions to Reduce the Reach of the Adversity:
o Do: How can you step up to make the most immediate, positive
impact on this situation?
o Visualize: What impact will your efforts have on those around
you?
• Questions to Reduce the Endurance of the Adversity:
o Visualize (first this time): What do you want the situation to look
like on the other side of this adversity?
o Do: What can you do in the next few hours to move in that
direction?

© Copyright 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved. 23