Hold Steady

Hold Steady

Taking action to manage political relationships, orchestrate conflict, or give back the work assumes that you are able to meet a more basic challenge -maintaining your poise so that you can plan the best next step. Holding steady in the heat of action is an essential skill for staying alive and keeping people focused.

Take the heat

Learning to take the heat and receive people anger in a way that does not undermine your initiative is one of the toughest tasks of leadership. When you ask people to make changes and even sacrifices, its almost inevitable that you will frustrate some of your closest colleagues and supporters, not to mention those outside your faction. At some point, you will feel the heat.

People respond differently to their environments. Some have higher tolerance for heat and stress than others. Thus, the more you can take, the better off you will be in keeping your issue alive and keeping yourself in the game.

Increasing your capacity for taking the heat takes practice. You must train yourself to be deliberate and keep your cool when the world around is boiling. Silence is a form of action.

Once you have taken the heat and refused to take a stand, you can calmly begin considering everything at stake and try to find a solution. By holding steady, you can retain access to everyone and eventually find a way to get two opposing sides to face each other and accept the legitimacy of each others' concerns. The most difficult part is taking the heat and the pressure from your own allies, but the challenge of exercising leadership often involves taking intense heat from people whose support you value and need. Thus, to withstand such pressure demands a broad perspective and extra measures of patience, maturity, courage, strength and grace.

The people you challenge will test your steadiness and judge your worthiness by your response to their anger. Receiving people’s anger without becoming personally defensive generates trust. If you can hold steady long enough, remaining respectful of their pains and defending your perspective without feeling you must defend yourself, you may find that in the ensuing calm, relationships become stronger.

Receiving anger with greace demands that we remain true to our purpose beyond ourselves and stand by people compassionately, even when they unleash demons.

Let the issue ripen

You will often be thinking and acting ahead of people. But if you get to far ahead, raising issues before they are ready to be addressed, you can create an opportunity for those you lead to sideline both you and the issue. You need to wait until the issue is ripe, or ripen it yourself. Holding on until the issue is ready may be critical in mobilizing people’s energy and getting yourself heard.

An issue becomes ripe when there is widespread urgency to deal with it. Something that may seem to you to be incredibly important, requiring immediate attention, may not seem so to others in your organization. This is a matter of perspective.

Raising an issue in a meeting and having it fall on deaf ears, only to see the same issue come up again later and dominate the conversation may confuse and generate dismay. Notice the outcome: the issue became ripe.

But what determines when an issue becomes ripe? we have identified four key questions: what other concerns occupy the people who need to be engaged? how deeply are people affected by the problem? how much do people need to learn? and what are the senior authority figures saying about the issue?

First, when your organization is handling a crisis, your issue can get a better hearing by postponing it to a later time. Sometimes, you have to hold steady and watch for the opportunity. However, if you notice that there is never a time for your

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