An Introduction to Ego, Authority, Failure
“One of the deepest principles about life and leadership: it’s not about you.” — Ken Blanchard
Over the next weeks, I’m going to be sharing excerpts and stories from my book, Ego, Authority, Failure: Using Emotional Intelligence Like a Hostage Negotiator to Succeed as a Leader in this blog series.
Ego, Authority, Failure launches on February 22, 2019. If you’d like to be the first to get a copy, you can pre-order it on Amazon here.
My time as a hostage negotiator allowed me to examine the psychology behind hostage negotiations, giving me a unique understanding of the human nature response. Hostage Negotiator-Leadership (HNL) requires understanding the human nature response which dictates that everything you say causes an emotional reaction on the part of the person receiving the message. That reaction may be positive or negative. It may be mild enough to be unconscious but is often strong enough to cause a major response. Negative emotions, like those associated with ego and authority, negatively impact decision-making and behavior. As a hostage negotiator, my job was to de-escalate emotions, address the negatives and return people to, as the FBI’s Crisis Negotiations Unit (CNU) puts it, the NFL — the Normal Functioning Level.
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I tend to be a hit in social settings:
“So what do you do?”
“I’m a cop…a retired cop.”
“Oh. I bet you have a lot of stories.”
“I have a few.”
“Were you a detective or something?”
“For some of the time. Most of my time was as a hostage negotiator.”
We’ve all seen the cartoon version of a double-take. I get that exact, cartoonish action every time.
“You what? Like Kevin Spacey?”
The conversation usually takes on a similar theme from there.
“I loved Denzel in Inside Man.”
“Have you ever shot anyone?”
“How many times did you draw your gun?”
It’s a common conversation for me, so I’ve gotten good at navigating, downplaying and moving it on to a more “normal” conversation.
For a guy trained in gathering information in order to influence people enough to change their behavior, I use these opportunities to prompt other people into conversations about their lives and workplaces. Most people seem a bit sheepish to talk about their work when they’ve surmised what they do on a daily basis pales in comparison to what I do…or did. But with a little empathetic listening, I’m nearly always able to get them to share a bit about their work and life experiences.
And here’s the fascinating thing. The challenges at their jobs and with their bosses or employees nearly always reminds me of my work with hostages and hostage-takers. Their stories contained a negative emotional component, resistance and difficult conversation; all common denominators in hostage negotiations. As I thought, it became clear to me that this is all hostage negotiations are…difficult conversations.
How can hostage negotiations skills be applied to leadership? All leaders, regardless of the environment, are compliance professionals. Sales people, in other words.
Sales is just about compliance.
Even if you are not involved in traditional selling of a good or service, you are involved in “non-sales selling” as identified in Daniel Pink’s 2012 book, To Sell Is Human. You spend up to 40 percent of your day trying to influence your peers or those under your charge to bite off on an idea, motivate a change in their behavior or encourage them to keep pursuing the mission of the organization.
As a hostage negotiator, I was the ultimate compliance professional. I sold jail time and I got hostage-takers to buy it all the time. An armed hostage-taker with threats, demands and seemingly all of the leverage eventually agrees with me that spending the next twenty years behind bars is an acceptable alternative — not just because the twenty SWAT guys surrounding the crisis site are ready, willing and able to rock his world, but because I have built enough rapport that I have established trust-based influence with him.
“I’ve never been a negotiator, but it seems to me there are a lot of parallels between leadership and hostage negotiations. It’s how you treat people. Do they feel like they matter? Do they feel like you care about them at all? In your negotiations, it’s listening to him and showing some empathy. You matter. I care. Yeah, there’s a lot of parallels to leadership.” — David Nye, Chief of Police, Fredericksburg Police, Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Ego, Authority, Failure is currently available for pre-order on Amazon — here is the link: www.amazon.com/dp/B07NF3HQV7. If you want to connect, you can reach me here via email or connect with me on social: LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram.
