The Smart Way to Deal with Crises & Not Lose Your Cool, While Enhancing Your Leadership Skills!   

Have you ever been under pressure at work? Like really under pressure? Where you were in a meeting and your superiors are giving you ridiculous deadlines to finish a mountain of work, and while in this meeting that is running twenty minutes into your next meeting, you realize that you also need to go to the restroom, plus you didn’t get lunch due to being in back-to-back meetings all morning, and are ravenously hungry — and oh, by the way, during your morning commute, the air conditioner in your car stopped working when it was 100+ degrees outside, so you need to figure out when you are going to take the car in for repair work?

And it’s not over yet: while all of this was going on, you also had three texts and two voicemails from your husband, as well as a plethora of group texts from your girlfriends, and your boss asked you to stop by when you had a moment, and a colleague on your team is begging you for five minutes via text, email and voice mail. What happens next: you leave the meeting (running late, of course), and find yourself heading towards the exact restroom that the colleague who is begging you for five minutes is heading towards. How in the world do you keep your cool when talking with her, given this semi-catastrophe of a morning? 

Staying Composed and Professional – Even on Crazy Days

This is an age old problem in the corporate world, and we’ve all been there. Our patience runs thin at times, and truthfully we feel we can only be available so much. We also don’t want to explode at a co-worker, as this only makes things worse, and really, it isn’t the co-worker’s issue that you are so busy — it’s yours!

Here then are 3 different ways to manage yourself and keep from becoming an office Attila the Hun (whose name is synonymous with terror – not a great things to be associated with at work!):

Stop and Take a Deep Breath. When you sense that you are pressured, stop yourself. Take a deep breath and slow down. As Type A’s it may not be easy to do this, as sometimes we feed off the excitement and chaos when we’re in charge of a big undertaking, so we bring a lot of this on ourselves. But the truth is, the meeting will be okay without you for a few minutes, maybe even an hour. Remind yourself that you’ll get caught up, you always do. Then, as noted, take a deep breath (by now you’ve hopefully taken a good 3 – 4 deep breaths!), and don’t look at your phone or emails or listen to your voicemails. Ask yourself what is most important in your project agenda, and make a short little list of the top priorities to get you back on track.

Lastly, to the co-worker who is standing in front of the restroom, apologize. Then tell her you’ll get to her when you can, but that you need a few minutes to re-group and re-prioritize. Be polite, with a smile, but be firm.

The More Organized you Can Run your Day, the Better. Some days become really crazy and out- of-control at the last minute, and in order to be prepared for these types of days, it’s good to inject a sense of order and proportion whenever you can.

So – while it’s nice to have lunch with colleagues in the company café, or go to a restaurant for a change of scenery, maybe it’s better for you to have lunch in your office by yourself one or two days a week? This will give you anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour to get caught up on emails or answer those group texts with your girlfriends, or talk to your husband about getting a personal assistant to help you with the air conditioning in your car (a girl can dream!). Having a little bit of time in the middle of the day to yourself might be the tweak you need to get your day where you need it to be.

Delegate! As you think about your team and your top performers who want more responsibility and are looking for growth, give them some new duties. Your direct reports can’t be the ones to take in your car to fix the (still-broken) air conditioning, but they can be the ones to respond to the vendors who are leaving you messages and emailing you for fifteen minutes of your time. So take your top performer, and tell her that since you can’t clone yourself, you’re going to have her attend a few special project meetings with you so that you can begin to transition her as the point person for the project. She can keep you in the loop, give you status updates and pull you in as needed. Not only does this take the load off of you, it gives her the responsibility and exposure she’s seeking. (Before long, you’ll be giving her counsel and advice on how she can keep her cool!)

Unfortunately, we all have bad days, and on one of those days, you may have crossed the line and become unprofessional. When that happens, walk away, cool off and then go find the person/people, and apologize for your unprofessional behavior. You’ll likely have all the justification in the world for why you behaved badly (i.e. “She followed me to the bathroom” or “She wasn’t listening to me” or “I don’t have time to correct everyone’s work, I need some smart people on my team!”). That said, unprofessional behavior is never okay, and never justified, no matter what you tell yourself. So find the person, apologize for your behavior, and take all the ownership for it. The person may handle the apology well or not. That isn’t your concern; you want to be a fair leader, and fair leaders admit when they’ve behaved badly or are in the wrong.

Remember: using the tips above, you can ensure that any day where there is a confluence of personal and business crises (or even mini-crises) does not end up leaving a black mark on your office persona.  After all, ideally, who would you want to be known as: Attila the Hun or the cool, calm, and collected type?  It’s clear which one will likely get you ahead at the office and rally others around you with confidence.