Character under pressure: Leading through crisis and disruption

I'm John J. Lentini, The Leadership Engineer. I spent over 20 years leading teams at some of the world's largest investment banks, and the leadership lessons I trust most were not learned in a classroom. They were revealed under pressure. Crisis is not a chapter of my story. It is the through line.

The morning that rewired everything

On September 11, 2001, I was standing at the foot of 2 World Trade Center when the second plane passed directly over my head and into my building, straight through my desk on the 80th floor. I survived. Twenty-four of my colleagues did not, including five senior executives who stayed behind to force the evacuation that saved the rest of us. In total, I knew close to 40 people lost that day. I could hardly speak about it outside of my closest inner circle for nearly a decade.

Surviving something like that changes your relationship with time. I emerged with a ferocious carpe diem attitude: global assignments across Asia and Europe, exotic jet-set expat life, and hundreds of scuba dives from tropical reefs to Arctic waters. From the outside, it looked like the man who survived the towers had decided to truly live. But privately I carried a question I never said out loud. Was I running toward something, or away from it? Away from roots, from an ordinary life. Was the adventure a passion, or a well-disguised escape?

Authentic credibility

While still overseas, I attended a particular corporate training session. The facilitator handed everyone in the room two cards with abstract images. The card in your right hand represents what you are leaving behind. The card in your left, what you are moving toward. Reflect, then present to the group.

In my right hand: two solid, parallel, upright lines. I did not see two lines. I saw the Twin Towers. In my left: two wavy lines. The ocean fascination I had chased down like an addiction while others built families back home. A stranger with a random deck had placed my entire unspoken question into my two hands.

I was volunteered by my small break-out group to share my powerful story with the entire room. When I stood to present, before peers who knew me only as a composed executive, the emotion overcame me without warning. My voice cracked. My eyes welled up. For the first time, I came to grips with what September 11th had actually done to my life. And something unexpected happened: my credibility grew when my composure broke. Colleagues now felt they truly knew me. Authenticity accomplished in three minutes what years of polish had not.

A seismic lesson

From 2009 to 2013, I was based in Hong Kong and then Singapore, managing a regional role for one of the world's largest investment banks, with a team in Tokyo. On March 11, 2011, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan struck, followed by the tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. My Tokyo manager called me from under his desk as the office tower swayed and fires raged in the distance. Peers, recalling my emotional 9/11 story, looked to me for seasoned advice. My leadership did not.

One team member, an American I had recently transferred from New York, alone in a country whose language he did not speak, was in absolute terror. He begged to fly to Hong Kong. As the only senior leader in the region who had lived through a workplace catastrophe where lives were both lost and saved, I was inclined to support his unique predicament as a new and unacclimated expat. My management did not. They insisted he stay put. I pushed back, briefly. Then, having burnt political capital on earlier disagreements, I toed the line.

I can still remember drafting the email telling that terrified young man he needed to stay. I knew it was wrong. I had stood in those revolving doors. I had seen how seasoned leadership saved lives on 9/11, while other friends and colleagues were lost at other firms where different decisions were made. And I was ignoring my experience and suppressing my values. I felt my soul shrink as I hit send. He flew to Hong Kong anyway, in defiance of guidance, and I received him at my office until the crisis leveled out. Politics and power beat Empathy and experience.

What a meltdown teaches

Crisis does not build Character in the moment it is needed. Crisis reveals it. The cards revealed a truth I had hidden from myself, gently. Fukushima revealed a harder one, brutally: I had climbed the corporate ladder by leading myself with Discipline, Mindset, and Resilience, yet hadn't properly managed the second control panel for leading others. All three of its dials failed me.

• Integrity: I did not stand by my convictions under pressure.
• Empathy: I let politics override a human being's terror, and enabled a lack of Empathy from above.
• Influence: I failed to persuade upward, so I could not protect downward.

Here is the distilled lesson. Leading yourself and leading others require different control panels, and a crisis will not give you time to build either one. It will only reveal what you have already engineered in advance. So audit your dials now, in the calm. Ask which convictions you would actually defend at a cost, and whether your Influence can push upward on behalf of the people below you. Because when the ground shakes, your Character will be revealed exactly as it is. Make sure it is something you engineered on purpose.