From crisis playbooks to organizational culture, leaders from different industries offer insight on leading through stress.
To explore how leaders make decisions and stay focused on their mission when the stakes are high, Duke Engineering convened a conversation on “leading through stress.”
Moderated by Sanyin Siang, a leadership strategist and coach, the panel brought together experts whose careers span the academia, entrepreneurship, outer space, medicine and military industries. From spacewalks to the federal government to startups, the panelists share lessons learned on overcoming failure, communicating in crisis and building a team culture.
Whether you’re in higher education adapting to new relationships with the federal government or in a totally different industry adjusting to rapid economic and technological change, there is relevant guidance for anyone from this conversation.
Below you’ll find video clips and lightly edited excerpts from the discussion. We hope you will take something away from the conversation that will help you reframe moments of uncertainty into moments of opportunity.
Sanyin Siang is the founding executive director of Duke University’s Coach K Leadership & Ethics Center (COLE) at the Fuqua School of Business and a professor at the Pratt School of Engineering. Inducted into the Thinkers50 Coaching Hall of Fame in 2023, she was also recognized in its ranking of top 50 global management thinkers. She shares insights on leadership and culture with her 1 million LinkedIn followers and on The Leadership Playbook. She pens the Coaching for the Future Forward Leader column for MIT Sloan Management Review and The Last Word for Dialogue Review. Siang received her MBA and BSE from Duke University. She lives in Durham with her husband and their three children.
Deborah Lee James has 35 years of senior leadership experience in the aerospace, defense and technology fields in both the public and private sectors. Most notably, she served as the 23rd Secretary of the Air Force and principal defense space advisor (2013-2017) and as the president of SAIC’s Technical and Engineering Sector, a $2 billion, 8,700-person enterprise (2012-2013). As secretary of the Air Force, James was responsible for 660,000 military and civilian personnel and a budget of nearly $140 billion. As the principal defense space advisor, she was tasked with the rewrite and coordination of space strategy and budgets for all U.S. National Security space efforts. James received her AB in comparative area studies from Duke University and an MIA in international affairs from the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. She holds honorary doctorates from Duke, the Citadel and the College of Charleston.
Jerome Lynch is the Vinik Dean of Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and professor of electrical and computer engineering. Lynch is an expert in the field of advanced sensing and information technologies for monitoring and control of civil infrastructure systems and is an advocate for community engagement in research. He holds three U.S. patents, has two patents pending and has founded two companies – Civionics and Sensametrics – to implement commercial applications of his research. He earned his PhD (2002) in civil and environment engineering, a Master’s (1998), in civil and environmental engineering, and a Master’s (2003) in electrical engineering from Stanford University. He also received his BE in civil and environmental engineering (1997) from the Cooper Union in New York City.
Robert Satcher is recognized for his varied career interests and notable successes, including his training as a chemical engineer, his practice as an orthopedic surgeon in oncology, and his service as a mission specialist astronaut and first orthopedic surgeon astronaut for NASA. Satcher flew on the Space Shuttle Atlantis, STS-129, in November 2009, during which he performed two spacewalks totaling over 12 hours of extravehicular activity. He is a professor of orthopedic oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) in Houston. Satcher received his BS and PhD in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his MD through the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.
Innovation is not possible without failure. Share a favorite failure from your career and tell us why.
I get asked a lot, “Why did you become an astronaut?” I had finished my training as a physician-scientist at the time I applied for the astronaut corps. A lot of my mentors recommended I not do it. I’d started a faculty position and that was going well. This was also following on the heels of some failures at NASA – the year that I applied was when the Columbia disaster occurred. There were a whole host of reasons why I shouldn’t do it, but I moved forward because it was something I was really interested in doing. Sometimes you do things that are unexpected, and they lead to unexpected outcomes.
I had a very specific dream to work in the state department. I’d spent seven or eight years pursuing this singular dream. When I graduated from Columbia, I moved to DC and applied to the state department. I thought I nailed it.
Guess what? I got a rejection letter. I wish I could say I was resilient in the moment. I was not. After about a week, I started applying elsewhere. Finally, I got one, and only one, acceptance: as a program analyst in the Department of the Army.
It was the only job offer I had, so I decided to throw myself into it. Before I knew it, I went from the army to the House Armed Services Committee to the Pentagon. Thirty something years later, I got the call to be the 23rd Secretary of the Air Force. It all started with what felt like a complete and utter failure to me. My lesson is you can have a lot of passions in life and it’s great to have a Plan A, but those Plan Bs can be the absolute best of all.
When I decided to get a PhD, it was with the intent of being an entrepreneur. I learned a tremendous amount, but after two years, it was clear we didn’t have what it took to be successful at scale in the market. By all measures, it was a failure. But it was a great failure, from which I learned so many things.
What are lessons you’ve learned while leading organizations through difficult periods?
I have a five-step process I try to apply to any challenge, problem or crisis.
As a leader, I’ve gone through two major crisis moments. One was the pandemic and more recently the changing relationships between higher education and government partners.
What I learned in both those scenarios is you need to shift your mindset. If you’re a leader and you want to have impact through leadership, these are the moments where you have that impact. You have to embrace the moment.
In moments of uncertainty, not everyone’s going to be excited. When these moments happen, what’s going on in the organization?
During periods like this, people get scared. They can become unduly focused on themselves, though it’s a big deal if you might lose your job, so perhaps unduly is unfair. People can look at cutting corners. To counter some of these behaviors, this is a time for big communications from the leader. It has to be truthful. Optimism is a good move. Keep on the north star.
My experience is mostly with smaller teams in the operating room doing a surgery or other endeavors. Leaders establish a culture. It’s one of the most vital things they do. A culture of learning and valuing learning. You always have things to learn from each other and the best teams I’ve seen are ones with a level of communication and trust.
Be aware that everybody’s watching what you do as a leader. It’s important to be poised, stable in how you’re presenting yourself. Be positive. Show confidence – people want to see that we have a plan. The other is a notion of togetherness. Acknowledge this is hard for everybody, but the only way to get through that is together.
You have to keep your eye on your mission. If you do that, you’re going to have to make tough decisions. Some decisions may appear to be illogical to your team members because the decisions are about protecting the vision for the long term, not the short term. For example, if you have to make tough personnel decisions, one decision is to try to keep everyone together and keep going along. But you may also look to reduce your personnel, and that is to protect your mission long-term. Your decisions have to stand the test of time.
Whether in times of prosperity or unease, culture is important. How do you build cultures of trust, learning and excellence?
NASA has been a gold standard for many of these concepts. We know the cost of getting things wrong – it’s life and death. There are thousands of employees at NASA responsible for building a spacecraft, and they’re doing it on a tight budget.
NASA has also had its share of problems rooted in lack of clear communication. With the Challenger disaster, there were critical people who didn’t speak up when they suspected the conditions weren’t right because they thought it was more important to do this launch than bring things to a temporary stop. That’s a universal lesson – you have to use the expertise you have to the best of your ability and that was a case where NASA didn’t do that.
It is very hard if you are a leader and you go into an organization with a long history of risk aversion. The formula is the vision of where we’re going, having a set of values, having a series of behaviors that match those values, having rewards for people who produce and accountability for those who do not, and the top leaders have to live those values. It’s a whole lot easier with a smaller organization than a large, well-established organization that’s not used to that culture.
One of the draws of academia is the culture. It’s a culture that draws a lot of people in. As we think about culture that glues it all together, don’t take it for granted. You have to protect the things that are positive about it. At the same time, don’t be afraid to identify areas where the culture is not perfect.
Higher education is a social mobilizer, probably the most powerful social mobilizer in our country today. A few decades ago, it was becoming clearer that it wasn’t mobilizing as well as it should be. There were aspects that were not inviting. We want to better serve society and ensure everyone has equal opportunity to access all that a university has to offer. We’re still working on that.
Final thoughts from Sanyin to summarize the conversation.
What is your mission and purpose? What are we for? Who do we serve? What’s your values?
There’s an old adage that you get out of an endeavor whatever you put in. But just as important as the inputs and outputs is the slash between them—the planning, the infrastructure, the programs, the relationships. We hope the content within these pages helps you not only discover a little more about Duke Engineering, but also ideas and inspiration that make your own slashes a bit bigger.
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