BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

What Is Needed When The Unexpected Happens...And It Will

Following
This article is more than 8 years old.

This article is by Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, safety advocate, speaker, author, CBS News' aviation and safety expert, and chief executive of Safety Reliability Methods, Inc.

If there is one thing that we know about business—and every other aspect of life—it is that the unexpected happens.

The New York Stock Exchange is forced to suspend trading. United Airlines has to ground all its flights. The Wall Street Journal's website crashes. And those three things all happened on just one day, July 8, 2015.

Which raises an important question in a society as heavily dependent on technology as ours: What kind of leadership best enables men and women in positions of authority to navigate unexpected situations that range from the merely inconvenient to the truly grave?

This much, in my experience, is clear: It takes more than technical abilities. You also have to have great human skills to be a successful leader.

Consider, for example, my extreme encounter with the unexpected on January 15, 2009, when I served as captain on U.S. Airways flight 1549, which has been called the “Miracle on the Hudson.” Just 100 seconds after takeoff, multiple bird strikes caused us to lose thrust in both engines. Working in concert with my crew, and with a lot of help from our air traffic controller, first responders and rescuers, I had 208 seconds to do something I had never trained for, and to get it right the first time: safely land a commercial airliner on the Hudson River, with no engines and no fatalities.

The fact that we succeeded certainly had something to do with technical skills, as well as with years of training, decades of practice, in-depth knowledge and the kind of judgment that comes only from experience. But we would not have succeeded without also possessing the all-important human skills of teamwork, excellent communication and a deep sense of caring that caused us to do whatever it took to save the lives of all 155 people aboard.

In a similar way, I’ve found human skills to be central to the success of great leaders in a wide range of fields, from business to the military. Quite simply, it seems to always be the human part of the equation—the personalization of a mission or challenge, for example—that leads to greatness.

Some call skills such as empathy, humility and the ability to forge genuine connections with others “soft skills.” But frankly I bristle at that characterization. They are not soft skills. They are human skills that are equally important as, if not more important than, technical and financial capabilities, and they are among the things that set successful leaders and organizations apart from the rest. Having these skills prepares you and your organization to handle challenges by building a team based on core values and arming team members with the ability to effectively communicate, collaborate and innovate.

In recent years, there has been a growing discussion of the need for empathy in business. Yet the importance of the full range of human skills as essential to the nature of leadership has not yet been adequately recognized in corporate culture. There are at least two reasons for this: One is that, to my knowledge, business schools fail to offer the kinds of courses that teach human and team-building skills. Second, human skills are not measured, and in most organizations today, the only things that count are things that are measured.

One way we can begin to change this is by accounting for the real cost of having leaders who are unprepared to respond to sudden crises—or sudden opportunities. When we do this, we will quickly see that human skills pay for themselves.

Or consider, more specifically, what happens when we take a more human perspective on workloads. When people work 60-plus hours a week, there is something wrong that needs to be fixed. It is not sustainable, and there are some easy ways to start solving this. If you are a leader, you can tell your team to spend one hour a day not answering emails or looking at smart phones, and not just reacting to what is immediately in front of them.

The value offered is clear: Giving people time in which they are not just reacting gives them the ability to have the creative reserve to think outside the box and find solutions to problems that they could not have found otherwise. It enables them to take a longer and larger view to think and to plan. This often happens for me when I go for a run and, with a mind free of distractions, come up with solutions to problems I’ve been thinking about for days.

The late Warren Bennis, a great leadership expert and longtime University of Southern California professor, said that while you can manage things, people deserve to be led, and there is, in fact, no difference between becoming an effective leader and becoming a fully integrated human being.

In the end, being a fully integrated human being is also what is likely to help you the most when the next unexpected thing occurs.

Also on Forbes: