Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste
By Leslie Pratch, Ph.D.
Much of my work has to do with the ability to cope with change. Some of the terms I will use will be new to readers who are new to this blog; however, they are rather well established in the field. I apply them with a view to enhancing the performance of already high achieving professionals. I writing about qualities that have relevance not only to whom members of boards of directors or private equity investors select as executives also to your own ability to be as effective and high functioning as possible.
Let me be clear: I am not talking about finding qualified professionals. 90% of individuals I assess are top candidates for leadership roles. They have been selected on the basis of past history, experience, reputation, and functional skills. But within this highly-select group, who will succeed depends on the firm’s plans for the business. My job is to help clients identify which candidate has the composition to meet the firm’s strategy.
I am talking about being the best of the best. Measures of success vary by situation, and each situation may require different leadership qualities. BP’s CEO flunked crisis management; Tony Hayword got his life back July 26, 2010. Goldman, Sachs’ insensitivity to public perception of compensation policies cast an ethical pall over the entire firm. GM’s leaders continue to raise questions of business ethics. Even in White House, you don’t get to pick your crises. You get to deal with them but you don’t get to pick them. And of course you know Rahm Emanuel’s line, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
Being a leader is hard and it’s important and the more successful you are, the harder it gets. What can be done to improve the odds that executives you may wish to sponsor can lead effectively given today’s tough business environment?
It’s interesting to think about how investors and boards of directors pick executives. It doesn’t really matter for those of you who have already backed an entrepreneur; you have the chance to make the most of the executive you have already chosen. I suspect that for most equity sponsors, you pick entrepreneurs based first on the quality of the technology developed, second, in terms of their education, and third, on personality.
But performance in one setting is inadequate to predict performance in another. For example, say you are a lawyer. You may be a great student and get hired at Kirkland & Ellis but in a year or two, you may be told you really should start looking for work at another firm. It’s not enough to have gone to a top school and to have been at the top of your class. It’s how well you perform on behalf of the firm that determines whether your career will advance within that firm. If clients or associates give you bad reviews, those reviews probably get added to the decision to let a lawyer go. I don’t know the current statistics but about 10 years ago the turnover rate at Kirkland was 20%.
What can you do to increase the probability that high performers will remain effective in the face of unforeseeable change?
Previously I have written about our work at Pratch & Company, which helps increase the probability of selecting effective executives by combining methods derived from clinical psychology with more conventional evaluation techniques. Our approach is based on psychological assessments performed over the last 12 years on over 200 senior executives, mostly in Corporate America. The genesis of this approach was research I led at the business school at the University of Chicago. The school asked me to determine how to predict which high-achieving M.B.A. students in an elite program for developing leaders would emerge as the most effective.
I discovered that by assessing an individual’s coping style, I had a more reliable predictor of leadership among already highly-qualified candidates than any other tool then being used in American business. This finding was the basis of my doctoral dissertation. After completing my Ph.D., I earned an M.B.A. at the University of Chicago while working at a consulting firm. I wanted to learn how managers think and I chose Chicago because I hadn’t had any training in economics or finance, where Chicago is very strong.
Pratch & Company works with private equity investors to reduce the risk of uncertain management capability. Our work is to assess individuals to make sure that their psychological composition meets what the organization requires. We try to help clients to put round pegs in round holes. After the client has made its selection decision (and often there are at least two strong contenders for a CEO role), we stick around to help make sure the person succeeds. Does the organization accept the person or fight him? We want to make sure that the fit continues. If a client starts to see success, then we have sincerely helped in the equation and that’s where our benefit lies as a critical partner. Over time, we develop trust and get absolutely world-class individuals into leadership slots. We partner with clients such that we have a much higher hit ratio of critical hires that succeed.
Given we know that the future operating conditions are uncertain and that early stage investors in particular take additional risk by investing their own time and money on potentially untapped markets or unproven technologies, what can be done to do to improve the odds that the entrepreneurs they pick will perform effectively given the uncertainty of today’s economy?
The critical questions to ask are what challenges the firm might meet and what others are possible challenges? What then is required from the entrepreneur to meet both the likely and the possible challenges? How an executive has performed in the past may not bear on how he will perform in the future—especially as industry and organizational conditions change.
One can identify who should be on the list of finalists to lead a company who is likely to perform well but the final choice should be cannot be determined by past history because no one knows what the future holds. My techniques tell more about how someone will cope with the unexpected.
Whether you are evaluating a CEO or an existing management team, investors and members of corporate boards must be vigilant to ensure that the managers of companies in which you invest or have oversight can perform as expected. If you are a fundless sponsor, it is your time and money you are investing. What can you do to increase the probability that an executive’s future performance will be optimal? In addition to understanding the situation the executive is likely to encounter and the possible situations the executive may encounter, two steps are essential:
(1) One, determining the core integrity of the executive, in the context of an assessment of his or her whole personality; and
(2) Two, evaluating the active coping of the executive under the widest possible range of conditions and challenges.
Psychological Assessment in Selecting and Developing a Management Team
First, I will say a few words first about the role of psychological assessment in selecting and developing a management team. That is what I do, but I hasten to add that there are others in the field who use different methods but with the same goal–a kind of psychological due diligence. I conduct interviews and give managers various psychological tests, some of which get at nonverbal reasoning, some of which get at aspects of motivation and behavior. At the end of the day, I hope to come up with a prediction of how managers are likely to behave under particular types of stresses, their relations with others, and underlying psychological tendencies of which they may not be aware but which may affect their performance, for better or worse. Psychological assessment is a relatively new tool used in private equity but it’s a growing field. As an aside, if you have any experience using in depth psychological assessment in hiring or retention decisions and would like to share it with me, I welcome your comments.
Second, I want to focus specifically on ways to select management teams with the highest probability of success. Selection begins by understanding the situation in which the manager must perform. Understanding what clients expect to happen in the business is critical to predicting whether a particular executive will or will not perform successfully. Investors and members of corporate boards can minimize potential failures by spending the money and time up front to understand the situation and determining who the right manager for the situation would be.
Ways Deals Can Go Bad Because of Poor Manager-Situation Fit
Particular problems with management teams that might be of particular interest to investors include the following six areas.
(1) One group of questions you may ask is when you are coming into a company. Does management fit the situation? There are dozens of different situations. Is it a new investment or a mature investment? Is it a high growth company, a slow growth company, or a turn around? What is the investment management plan that you have in mind for the company, be it high growth or slow growth? How are you going to achieve that plan—through internal activities or add on acquisitions? How long do you expect to be involved—is it a two-year position or a 10-year position? Are there interpersonal dynamics that play a role–with other managers, family members, shareholders, or board members? Deals can go bad because the manager, however qualified for other situations, does not fit this particular situation. A turn around executive may not be the right person to lead a company in stable conditions but may be just who you want when dramatic change is needed. Different individuals cope with different levels of business challenge in different ways. Is a manager who was right for a stable growth trajectory right for a more challenging industry situation?
If you intend to grow the company fairly quickly, you want to ensure that you have the management talent internally to be able to step up to the next critical mass of bench strength so that you’re not left with managers who do well in a $50 million company but are in over their heads when the company gets to $200 million. Here, advisory services by successful, high integrity former CEOs can help. Increasingly, functional capitalism and economic growth require more transparency from management, establishing trust with new owners, the ability to raise unpopular views politely but nevertheless setting them forth.
(2) A second group of issues relate to retention, which, when you think about it, presents the same issues as hiring. If performance has gone sour, is it worse than it should be given an industry-specific or global recession? To what extent did management contribute to that performance?
I’m curious: Do you have anything to add? If you already own a company, what do you do with the existing managers and owners? If you are a fundless sponsor, you may be closer to an old venture capital or growth fund making smaller investments, often with a consortium. You may have influence, but usually not control of the enterprise. If that’s the case, one might be concerned in an owner cash-out scenario. The founder takes 80% of his chips off of the table but is part of the investors’ plan for the business as an operator, usually the CEO, or as a board member. Do you bring in someone else as the CEO, do you talk about these issue before or after closing, and what are the implications of hiring and retention issues for the other members of the management team in terms of their careers, and economically, for the firm?
The flip side is firing. The manager and investors do not mesh. Relations sour early on. The manager is mistrustful, is slow to deliver bad news, finds a particular investor abrasive or invasive, or the manager is too autonomous, does not draw strength from the collective wisdom of the team, and cannot provide leadership. Such a manager will lose credibility with investors and with his team. You then have two options. You can withdraw your capital commitment and look for another deal. Or you can ease the previous manager out and bring in a new one. A new manager who wants to bring about change fairly quickly needs to be fair and keep the trust and respect of his staff.
A related set of questions concerns the compatibility of new management teams when planning to grow an existing platform company through acquisitions. At times you are going to bring on an equivalent group from a similar size company; they may even be competitors. How do you determine whether the management teams are compatible, and how do you pick the new hierarchy? What have been your experiences and what have you learned from them?
(3) Assessment is not just when hiring or promoting a CEO; assessment should also be used for secondary roles. In fact, one of my clients has suggested that investors insist it be put in place when a strong-willed CEO is in charge because such a CEO may not easily take investors’ or corporate board members’ advice in hiring. Imposing at least that kind of check on the CEO can turn out to be as useful to the CEO as it is to the investors. Most of the time the assessment will confirm what the CEO wants but it is a useful double check. With weak-willed CEOs, it’s important to have them know how to use assessment tools when he is hiring in order to make sure that he gets the information that he needs about new management he may want to bring on board.
(4) It is unbelievably easy to be wrong when making substantial long-term commitments to an executive or management team. For all the reference checking and all the interviewing, the amount of perspective investors have is thin relative to where you would like to be. You may have worked with an executive for two years to develop some aspect of a growth strategy. It all looked good on paper before you made the decision to go forward with the investment, yet you make the wrong decision. How do you decide you were wrong? Do any of you have experience to share?
(5) What about the seedier sides of management, problems arise that you never would have anticipated including fraud and sexual harassment? Who among my readers has gotten that anonymous letter where you know it is probably a disgruntled employee but the PR has to be handled swiftly, with care? How do executives react when confronted? Do they own up, walk the 12 steps, or do they deny it without offering counter-proof in the face of strong evidence? What do you do?
Psychological Assessment
Let’s turn to psychological assessment and business advisory services, which is what we do at Pratch & Company. As mentioned before, we generally deal only with highly qualified candidates and certainly candidates at the Booth School are highly qualified for their first job. We discovered that by assessing an individual’s coping style, we had a more reliable predictor of leadership among already these highly-qualified candidates than any other tool then being used in American business. This finding was the basis of my doctoral dissertation. Pratch & Company assesses individuals being considered for key management roles. We also have a stable of former successful CEOs who provide senior executive coaching services to enhance individual and team performance.
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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit pratchco.com.
By Leslie Pratch
How does one maintain self-esteem and integrity under stress? This area suffuses the other three dimensions of active coping. It is what allows you to plan and to cope adaptively. Knowing what the issues will be in pursuing your goals, do you have the confidence to go ahead and will you be happy doing it?
Can you maintain self-esteem without resorting to maladaptive means to deal with threats or is the threat to self esteem so great that you resort to self-destructive or antisocial means of dealing with threats? Can you deal with the potential losses, threats, and fears of pursuing new goals without breaking down or giving up or developing psychopathology? Can you tolerate loss, failure, and stress? How do you handle challenges? How do you handle threats to your self-esteem? Will you get depressed or burn out? Will you take short cuts that wind up harming your longer-term success?
Stress and times of transition can produce psychological symptoms. Do you know the signs of psychopathology, stress, anxiety, and somatic symptoms?
Is your psyche such that you are able to use your resources appropriately? Your career and personal plans should converge and you should own the plan.
All of these areas feed into the self. The issue of self runs throughout the theory of active coping because who you are influences all of your motives. The original idea of the self is you want to be able to cope. You have to decide whether the goals you have given these other life areas leave enough energy left over for you to maintain self esteem. Do you think you’ll be happy doing whatever it is you are contemplating doing? Making a choice means giving up an alternative. Given what it will take, is it right for you? Will you be happy with the sacrifices and trade-offs you will have to make? Will you be left with a feeling of confidence and satisfaction?
One, do you have the confidence to carry this out? As a self, can you handle it all? Do you feel you have enough confidence in yourself, enough trust in yourself, to carry it through?
Two, are you going to be happy doing it? When you look at all the potential frustrations and what you will have to do in order to cope with them, the time you have to invest in the plan, the sacrifices you will have to make, are you going to feel good about it? Is it really what you want to do?
Summary
Integrative capacity, articulating aims and sources of frustration, has to do with planning. Instrumental coping emphasizes the actual process of dealing with changing scenarios. Self-esteem and integrity has to do with the capacity to maintain self-esteem.
One, can you develop a sound plan? (Your work and personal plan ultimately must converge.) Are you able to see reality, the good and the bad, and plan for how to deal with possible impediments, frustrations, threats, and conflicts?
Two, do you have the psychological strength to deal with obstacles that might come up to challenge the actual execution of your plan? When things don’t work out, do you have the flexibility to alter your approach to develop new strategies to achieve your goals? Do you have the creativity and resourcefulness to survive changes (social, economic, legal)? You have to be flexible to cope with these changes, as well as consider the implications of what you do to cope with the changes.
It’s an attempt to understand “what does this mean to me as a human being.”
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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.
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A Schematic for Developing Active Coping II: Instrumental Coping and Psychological Autonomy
By Leslie Pratch
The adaptive side of coping is instrumental coping. It is seeing the reality of the situation and playing the ball the way you need to play it. It is the capacity to respond flexibly and adaptively, as reality presents itself. It involves flexibility, resourcefulness, creativity, persistence, and stamina. To improve in this area involves exploring where will you not cope as well as you need to given your goals and expected impediments and what can you do about it?
Once you have put together your plan, how will you actually deal with the problems you anticipate? Do you have the psychological strength to carry out your ambitions? Do you have the emotional capacity to deal with the contingencies that arise without developing psychopathology or giving up? What can you do to adapt to contingencies? How will you handle the challenges if events do go as planned?
It terms of coping with the interpersonal realm:
How do you connect with others in carrying out your plan? How will you deal with colleagues, friends? What is your strategy for relating to others? Are you authoritarian? Can you delegate? What are your social skills in dealing with customers?
In terms of psychological autonomy, can you empathize with others without dominating or over-idealizing them and losing yourself? Can you maintain psychological autonomy and come up with what you think is fair—rather than overvaluing yourself, minimizing yourself, or devaluing others? Can you recognize others’ needs, consider others’ feelings, and maintain your independent mind?
Can you articulate a vision that others believe in it? Can you communicate a goal that everyone buys into it—your peers, colleagues, subordinates, family?
Some people might resist insight. That means you need help dealing with your defenses. You might think “My wife will love this” but how do you know? Did you ask her? What does she say? What makes you so sure? If you resist insight, you may need help from another person to see your defensive coping as well as your active coping tendencies.
How will you deal with multiple demands on your family? What are you going to do in terms of spouse and children, what will be your strategies for dealing with these aspects of your life? How have you coped with past problems? Is there evidence of running away? Does your work history show a change in jobs every three years, and is that career instability owe to the fact that you reached a limit of your coping and needed to leave? Try to identify your past coping or defending patterns throughout your whole life, business and personal, and how you have coped. Have you balanced the two in the past? Be careful not to repeat patterns that previously got you into trouble.
If you want to leave Corporate America, you should investigate why. Do you want to leave in anger? Do you have problems with bosses or authorities and want to be independent? Being independent is okay but even entrepreneurs need to deal with people (customers, collaborators, etc.) that arouse the same hostility that bosses arouse. There will always be some force bigger than you . Don’t run away from those forces. Instead, figure out what may sets off maladaptive coping tendencies.
Look for how you might engage in magical thinking–believing unrealistically that everything will be okay at some point when things get too difficult. First, look at past patterns and second, identify possible negative coping strategies. Then make sure you don’t engage in those at crucial points as you pursue your new goals.
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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.
By Leslie Pratch
Reader beware: the “plan” I refer to must be vague because I am trying to cover a variety of types of adults, including aspiring entrepreneurs and individuals involved in major life transitions such as a career change or the loss of a spouse.
The first dimension of active coping that I will take up here is Integrative Capacity. Integrative Capacity has two parts: articulation of positive aims and goals and articulation of sources of frustration. How clearly and specifically you define your positive aims and goals and how clearly and specifically you identify sources of frustration, impediments to achieving those goals, is obviously the first step in working towards realizing those goals
Articulation of Aims and Goals
What are your aims and goals? What are your business/career goals; your personal goals; your social goals; and your overall life goals? Answering these questions requires identifying what motivates you. What is the personal meaning of pursuing these goals? What motives do these goals satisfy?
What is your life plan? What is your developmental plan toward your life – how do your career goals fit into your life cycle goals? Are you planning for long-term security? How much are you willing to gamble to pursue a particular career goal?
What are the implications of the above goals 10, 15, and 20 years out?
As for personal goals, what are your spiritual goals, family goals, interpersonal goals? What are your existential needs, your needs for meaning and purpose?
Your personal and career goals should be linked. Another area is whether you can coordinate your interpersonal and generative (i.e., having children and/or fostering the growth of subordinates or others) goals with your career and personal goals. How will each life area affect the other areas of goals?
Articulation of Frustrations
There will be frustrations and setbacks in terms of meeting these larger goals above. To create a plan that will be successful, you have to be able to think in terms of potential problems as well as goals. Can you recognize problems? Are you even open to the possibilities that you might not achieve your goals? To what extent are you willing to perceive frustration, threats, or conflicts? A plan should be realistic in anticipating impediments and identifying strategies for dealing with these situations.
What are the potential problems that can affect your career goals? What contingencies can occur to disrupt the plan? How will your plan enable you to deal with those contingencies? Think through potential problems. Develop several scenarios of contingencies that are built into your overall plan.
How will you deal with failure? Can you anticipate it and what would happen if you did not succeed in one or more of these aims and goals? What are your alternative plans if your original plan doesn’t unfold as expected?
Integrative Capacity
Integrative capacity links articulation of aims with articulation of frustration and what might hold you back from achieving your goals. For example, it can often difficult to bring into balance work and personal goals.
This recognition of potential threats to success is part of the active coping framework. Passive coping is to cut off your personal life, to deny that your career ambitions will affect your spouse or your children. Active coping is to think about your career and connect it to your overall life goals. You need a personal plan, a life plan. This is where developmental differences come into play. If you’re 50, your ambitions at work might be very different than if you’re in your 30s. If you’re in your 50s you might want to pursue your last chance to do your own thing. If you’ve just lost a spouse and are now a widow or widower, how will your goals change? You are suddenly a widow and you’re not sure where you want to go, your goals didn’t include your husband dying, so you have to formulate your goals and overcome whatever guilt may be associated with those goals, assuming you have the coping and strength to go when to the goals you define.
You should spend some time understanding your personal motivations and personal fears. Your job is then to articulate the personal dimensions and link them to the career dimension and back to the personal again to understand how they are related.
Second, how will you juggle self, business, family, church, and/or community goals? This part of the exercise is the holistic linking of these parts. One, what are your personal goals; two, what are the sources of frustration, and; three, how will you deal with all of it, with the gestalt?
The first step is to identify the complexity of goals and problems and articulate it in such a way that it is not so overwhelming that you run away from it. This is the linkage involved in openly perceiving internal and external sources of motivation and frustration–integrative capacity.
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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.
By Leslie Pratch
For those who want to be as high functioning as possible, here are some suggestions for developing oneself along the dimensions of active coping.
One dimension of active coping is openness to perceive complexity. This includes awareness your personal goals and threats and opportunities in the environment. Can you define what it is you want to achieve? Understand this can be difficult. Are your goals realistic or are they grandiose? Are they specific or are they nebulous? Are they compatible or do they conflict?
Take the young woman I’ll call Caroline. I began working with Caroline after she received a major promotion at her investment bank. Caroline had achieved a great deal in her career while being unclear about what it was she wanted to achieve. Her promotion meant she had to generate new business. It was a job she both wanted and feared. Though pleased with the recognition, she also confided she preferred being number two.
In the course of our work together, it became evident that Caroline had a complicated relationship with her father growing up. He belittled her achievements while letting her know he expected her to excel. Understandably, she was unable to throw herself into work with the full commitment success required. As a result, she was unhappy with her promotion and not performing to anyone’s satisfaction.
This brings us to the second part of openness to perceiving complexity, clearly articulating sources of frustration. Often reality interferes with the ability to articulate sources of frustration. But if one knows what one wants and what is getting the way of its attainment, one has a better chance of overcoming the obstacle. Without identifying the treat or obstacle, one depends on luck to make it go away. Caroline was ambivalent about what she wanted. Her goals were unclear. In her case, the source of frustration was internal. She was her own worst enemy (with a little help from her dad). She had worked hard to achieve while carefully avoiding ever taking the initiative. Not until she identified the discomfort associated with making a success of the promotion did she see how she was sabotaging her career. Once she felt safe enough to talk about what motivated her self-defeating behavior (such as missing flights and being late to important client meetings) she could resolve her ambivalence about success.
In other cases, the source of frustration may be external. What stands in the way is the real world. We are competing with others who want the same job and only one person is going to get it. Or family demands keep us from staying at work. Or there truly is a glass ceiling.
The best strategies anticipate setbacks, develop options, and prepare us to identify solutions. How openly, how realistically we perceive problems profoundly influences our chances for success. Some individuals cannot even imagine they could fail. They’ll point to ways they’ve turned every situation to their advantage rather than admit weakness. They just never fail.
When we do not acknowledge our fears, we cannot see how much our workplace performance is designed to avoid them. We go through life with one hand tied behind our backs. Many jobs can be performed with one hand. But, when we rise in our careers, performing consistently well requires both hands.
In my experience, successful executives shine because they have the active coping that allows them to confront, acknowledge, and overcome sources of frustration so they can move toward their positive goals. To attain a certain status in a corporate hierarchy may mean surpassing a parent we were afraid to beat or rising above those who have mentored us. A long-sought promotion like the one Caroline sought may terrify us once we finally get it because we are forced to confront a conflict that was obscured by being number two.
Even if we learn what we want, reality usually does not immediately gratify our desires. When we pretend that a conflict between what we want and what we can have does not exist, chances are, we are coping passively with a part of ourselves. We are cutting off our humanity. When we ignore our desires and passions, we not only make ourselves unhappy, we also are not as successful as we could be.
This brings us to the third dimension of active coping, instrumental coping, the process of actually dealing with resistance and overcoming threats as opposed to avoiding, withdrawing, or giving up. How prepared are you to deal with obstacles that may hinder the execution of your plans? When stressed, do you retreat into yourself or lash out at others? If so, you may fail to motivate and inspire at a time the need for leadership is greatest.
The fourth dimension is self-esteem and integrity. This is where we put it all together. Do our activities reflect our values, aspirations, and ideals? Do our efforts to pursue our ambitions take our weaknesses into account? We feel good about ourselves if we are pursuing what we really want in a way that is consistent with our values. That’s why it is important to know what drives us, and to reassess our goals as we change and the world around us changes. Knowing what is really most important to us, we are able to commit to pursuing meaningful goals and accept the fact that we may not succeed. And, we are confident if we pursue goals that are realistically within our grasp – but high enough to stretch us.
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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.
Insights for Developing Active Coping
By Leslie Pratch
A CEO of a wireless networking and telecommunications company once described himself to me as a “scavenger of good ideas.” I love this self-characterization because it captures the information acquisitiveness and resourcefulness at the heart of active coping. One fabulously successful and ethical investor makes a case for active coping as a developmental process.
“I haven’t met anybody who was born great. A lot of times learning involves feedback and a lot times the career counseling aspects of having a mentor are very important just to talk these things through. Otherwise, who do you consult with? If you have only yourself to consult, it is often not a very productive consultation. I have gotten more appreciation for even consciously knowing how these factors involved in active coping come together but it is very complex and it is something you don’t learn about when you are going through school. Our colleges are more like trade schools, without tying the more esoteric things that need to be considered in being an accountant, accounting is more an art and not a science, but the reality is there is an ebb and a flow, that it was an art form in its pure sense. So I think those four attributes are important for the entire management team, not just the lead dog, all this has to fit together around the leadership of the company, and even in interviewing for board members, board members who don’t know how to contribute without being invasive, to understand the difference between setting policy and setting tactics.”
Perhaps by now you are wondering how to develop more active coping. Let me begin by commenting on a few areas. First, all of us bring our personal lives, our past, and our unconscious into the workplace. Often it plays itself out in something called transference. This is where we repeat old patterns of relationship, some useful; some not. A boss may remind us of a parent we wanted to please; we may work particularly hard to be a star in his work group. I’ll continue this discussion in my next post.
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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.
By Leslie Pratch
I once worked with an investment banker named Ethan. When Ethan came to me for coaching, he was 39, unfocused at work, angry at his boss, uncertain about whether he would be able to continue working at the Wall Street firm that had employed him for 15 years. His first job after getting a master’s degree in math was as an analyst at this firm. Over 15 years he rose steadily to the level just below the CEO. He had survived three major layoffs and worried he might not survive a fourth, expected to occur soon. In addition to feeling angry at his boss he felt insulted by the success of a few superstar investment bankers who were 8 years younger than he. He whined about their brazenness, ridiculed the half-baked ideas they came up with, and complained that he lacked a “Rabbi,” a mentor, to guide and structure and protect him within the company.
Growing up Ethan’s father divorced his mother when Ethan was child. Ethan”s mother developed bipolar disorder. his father could not live with his wife’s increasing instability, leaving Ethan to live with her. Ethan saw a social worker and eventually told this social worker that he felt he would be better off living with his father whom he felt could provide a safer environment.
His mother, although she always communicated that loved him, was the center of her own world, and did not provide him any structure or guidance. For example, during grade school he complained that other children picked on him and he felt defenseless. He complained that she gave no structure and let him watch television instead of doing his homework.
Ethan’s mother was the daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur. Ethan’s early recurring memories included driving into New York City and being deposited at his grandfather’s office by his mother, who stuffed a wad of bills into his palm for cab fare and anything else he might need. His grandfather had little time for him and similarly sent him on his way. Small wonder then that Ethan felt felt abandoned, unprotected, and without guidance. His mother during her manic periods spent her way through “two fortunes” on clothing and haircuts. By the time Ethan was 24 she was penniless and unable to keep even a job as a clerk at a museum store. She lived with her boyfriend, who was kind to her and had a stable pension.
Yet Ethan expected eventually that he would have to care for her financially. The thought enraged him because he could never have expected her to take care of him. To this day he sees “red” whenever his mother says she can’t see him or his children because she has to get her hair done. Although he knows she is mentally ill, he can feel only rage or guilt in relation to her.
Ethan moved in with his father at about age 10. His father didn’t know how to relate to children and to Ethan he was like a distant stranger. Gradually, as Ethan matured, he and his father developed an adult relationship and his father has been a source of good counsel. As a child, however, Ethan’s father like his mother could provide little emotional support and nourishment. Certainly, neither made him the center of their worlds.
Ethan was good at math and strategy and was a natural for a career in investment banking. He had a thick enough skin to maintain relations with colleagues. But he had a knack for getting involved with bosses who did not have his interest at heart. This view was also his transference to the world: “No one is going to take care of me; I don’t have anyone to run interference for me; to introduce me to those who could help me rise in my career.” Although Ethan lived in one of the wealthiest the suburbs of New York City, had a loving, competent wife, and two healthy children, Ethan was miserable when he sought help.
He admitted initially he felt depressed and angry. The anger was secondary to the sadness he felt, but he had trouble processing either his anger or his sadness. Intense feelings frightened him because they reminded him of a negative identification he had with his mother, who in the intensity of her feelings, lost control over herself and lost touch with reality. Ethan learned instead to constrict his emotions and to turn his anger on himself. The result that his self-esteem was very poor and he grew increasingly depressed.
We worked together for five years. Our work is a good example of what it takes to acquire active coping. It is not like learning a skill set. It is not going to a weekend workshop or learning skills from exercises in the magazine you may read in your health club. It is an emotional process, involving changes in how we relate to others, and how we internalize new objects (in Ethan’s case, the new object was me, as a figure whom he could trust to be supportive), giving up the old objects (his uninvolved father and his crazy mother), and giving up some of his infantile and unrealistic needs (that his mother should take care of him).
As far as his adult development, the challenges he faced were to resist the temptation to stay at home, cook (he loved to cook), throw parties, spend too much money on art (like his mother), and play with his kids. The forces of development were pushing him to be a responsible husband, father, and community member. Nevertheless, a part of him was pulling him back. That tendency to regress indicates that the ultimate acquisition of active coping is a complex and longer-term process than merely learning cognitive and behavioral techniques for coping.
Compounding his resentment at his boss was that he was simultaneously raising two latency-aged children. When we raise children, we encounter memories of what it was like when we were their age. The better the father Ethan was–and he was a very good father–the angrier he got unconsciously that his own father hadn’t been and wasn’t more supportive of him. Part of our work was to identify and work through the painful developmental aspects he did not get from his real father as he helped his own children grow up.
My first step in working with him was to assess his coping style. What I learned was that he was weak in two areas: (1) articulating positive aims and goals and (2) self-esteem. (Integrative capacity has two parts: articulating positive aims and goals and articulating sources of frustration. Ethan could articulate sources of frustration—these were mostly his boss and his mother and of course he blamed himself whenever he was in pain.) As for self-esteem, Ethan’s ideal self was based on his grandfather, an ideal that was unrealistic. The impossibility of realizing the immense wealth and power his grandfather had made Ethan even more depressed.
His self-esteem was poor because his work was not meaningful to him and he could not define what kind of work would be meaningful. If he could identify and pursue the kernel of ambition at work, he would feel better about himself because he would be doing work that felt substantive to him. Merely making money and keeping up with his neighbors was not making him happy. His desire for validation from peers and bosses was not pathological; we all want that. What was problematic were the fantasies of revenge he had when he expected peers and bosses to deny him validation.
For some, having compensatory fantasies makes them feel better. Walter Mitty seemed to have enjoyed his fantasies. For others, having intensely negative feelings towards others gives rise to a sense of power and energy.
For Ethan it had the opposite effect. It sapped him of energy. He felt guilty about having revenge fantasies, as if the feelings made him a bad person and moreover, in fantasy, he expected those he took vengeance upon would get back at him. He was a bit paranoid.
Ethan’s developing more active coping was not learning a skill. It involved digging into the core emotional part of seeing the wish that he had since his earliest breaths which he carried into his 40s of being the person that his parents (or a boss or a rabbi) would care for, bail out, nurture, and validate. They had not provided these functions for him. Consequently, he had not really engaged in a normal adult development. He still felt himself to be a child—and like a fraud for pretending to be an adult. Developing active coping involved recognizing and mourning those infantile wishes.
Ethan shows that developing active coping is not learning a skill; in his case, it was being with someone whom he trusted, who pointed out the issues that were hard for him to see and deal with emotionally. It meant giving up some infantile wishes. It also meant tolerating the anxiety around the meaning of those losses. Some parents perform these functions as part of their good parenting. Ethan’s parents did not. As an adult, he had a sufficient base of mental health to be able to internalize a relationship with a soothing, stable, maternal figure that believed in, validated, mirrored, and supported him both during and between sessions.
Ethan successfully dealt with his anxieties. He developed more active coping across the board. He eventually became a partner in a hedge fund, playing a meaningful role in defining winning trading strategies. But he had to work on overcoming the regressive pull to be the kid again to develop more active coping. Even though he had a stable, loving wife, she could not be his coach or counselor. He could not play coach or counselor to himself because his defenses seeped in too readily and interfered with his being able to see reality.
His transference to our relationship was initially cynical. “What’s the point? I won’t get anything emotionally from you.” He expected to be left alone in the end to handle it on his own. He resisted help because he didn’t believe anyone would really be there for him. His resistance was not rational. Eventually, he did relate to me as a female mentor who gave him structure. It gave him an emotional experience with a maternal-like figure with whom he could identify, who was there for him, guiding him, who was available when we met and in between sessions. I didn’t abandon him the way his mother did. I could empathize with his infantile wishes while pointing out the reality of his adult developmental issues. My mere presence allowed him partly to identify with that presence rather than the sense of being out there on his own. It gave him a sense of security and support that allowed him to leave the investment bank where he had worked for his entire career and make truly positive career changes.
In addition, the fact that I stood with him consistently over time was sufficiently gratifying to enable him to give up his revenge fantasies. He felt more protected when he accepted guiding mentoring support. It helped him with his family too; although he talked about having an affair outside his marriage he did not act on it. He was able to see it as an expression of his desire to feel better about himself and instead took positive steps with his wife and children to make family life and work life gratifying to him. The process pushed him in an upward developmental movement rather than sliding back into a wish-fulfilling mode. My playing a structuring guiding role mobilized his coping, enabling him to use me as a figure with whom to identify in order to move beyond his anger and hurt.
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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.
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By Leslie Pratch
At Pratch & Company we combine diagnostic methods of learning about the self with processes and concepts used in short- and long-term psychotherapy. Our goal is to help already basically high functional individuals enhance their functioning across many different life areas because they are all of a piece. The treatment plan is not preordained; it develops in the evolving relationship between client and coach.
Most coaching involves setting some goals for what the client wants to achieve and by when. The client and coach then decide if the plan is realistic. Limited time is not a vice; it’s a virtue by reminding us that we have, say, only 6-10 weeks to accomplish what we hoped to achieve. The clock is ticking: I can tell you all abut yourself. Tell me what do you want to learn and how you want to benefit from this process and let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.
This structure provides a setting, and within that setting the model maximizes choices rather than dictate the timing and sequencing of interventions. It allows the coach to change depending on the new information that will invariably come in. This is the idea of a structural model as opposed to a program model. The assessor/coach is giving the clients insights into their personality systems (ways of perceiving, acting, and reacting) so that the client can chance (how they see, act, and react).
Some people would sooner bite off your head than smile at you. They react negatively. The problem with a rule-bound approach to helping bring about change is it goes against the spirit of the active coping model. It’s hard to know how a given client will react to feedback from the assessment until we go through it.
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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.
Was U.S. Grant an Active Coper?
By Leslie Pratch
Even leaders who show instrumental coping and other dimensions of active coping, may not demonstrate the consistency in active coping tendencies that is required to be designated an active coper through and through.
Grant resigned from the army in the 1850s having achieved the high rank of captain. He was not cashiered. The circumstances around his resignation had to do with accusations of drinking. He was a devoted family man but the circumstances of the war separated him from his family—he was in California while his wife and children were in the east. Understandably, he was depressed, and his depression manifested as drinking too much. There is absolutely no evidence during his years of success (he was never more alive than on the battlefield) that he drank to excess.
Grant’s depression owed to a combination of intolerable circumstances and crushing loneliness. In July of 1852, then-Lt. Grant was sent to California as quartermaster of the 4th Infantry Regiment. The trip west was a nightmare of difficulties and disease, with the troops crossing (pre-canal) Panama during one of the severest cholera epidemics in history. A third of Grant’s party, including 17 of the 20 children with the regiment, died; Grant’s efforts during this passage were regarded as not only competent, but heroic. One observer recalled, “He was like a ministering angel to us all.” On the last part of the voyage, from Panama to California aboard a cholera-ridden ship, Grant was playing cards with his close friend, Brevet Major John Gore, when “Gore suddenly put his cards down. ‘My God!’ said Gore, his face turning white. I’ve got cholera!’” Gore died before morning. In California, Grant’s health was bad, he had superiors who disliked him, and he was desperately lonely for his family. He didn’t dare ask them to join him and subject them to the same dangers he’d faced. His letters to his wife, Julia, then pregnant with their second child were full of longing.
Simpson (see below) wrote, “Grant felt incomplete without Julia; friends did not compensate for her absence . . . He wanted so much to be the father who spent time with his boy, walking and riding about—the sort of father he never had.” He quotes letters from Grant to Julia. “I sometimes get so anxious to see you, and our two little boys, that I am tempted to resign and trust to Providence, and my own exertions, for a living where I can have you and them with me.” When Grant arrived at his last and unhappiest California post, Fort Humboldt, he was, according to Perrett (see below), “suffering from the flu, in agony from a rotten tooth, prone to migraine headaches, and suffering acutely from rheumatism in his legs.” His new commandant was Brevet Lt. Col. Robert C. Buchanan, whom Perrett calls “one of the most disagreeable men in the army,” a martinet who delighted in tormenting his junior officers.
On April 11, 1854, Grant sent two letters to Washington—one receiving and accepting his commission as captain, and the other resigning from the United States Army. Grant was haunted for the rest of his career by rumors that he had resigned under pressure, a drunkard drummed out of the service by threat of court martial. Whether he resigned under pressure or not is impossible to tell. He did drink—he was drunk once when Brevet Capt. George McClellan was visiting Fort Humboldt, which cost him McClellan’s respect forever. McClellan was later major general in charge of the federal Army of the Potomac during the early years of the Civil War. He does not appear, however, to have been a heavy drinker. Rather, small amounts affected him greatly. “One glass would show on him and two or three would make him stupid,” said Robert McFeeley, an officer who served with him in California. There is no evidence that Grant drank more than most of his fellow officers.
To Grant’s active coping credit goes his willingness to bring his family with him on the battlefield; he knew that their being close was integral to his ability to function effectively. This decision reflects the point made by Joel Shanan that active coping has a great deal to do with the social networks in which we are embedded. It also reflects the essentially social nature of the wellsprings of the active coping style, which continues to develop throughout one’s life.
My sources for this, which agree on the above although they differ in details, are Geoffrey Perrett in “Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier and President” (Random House, New York, 1997) and Brooks D. Simpson in “Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822-1865” (Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2000).
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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. Her other posts on Grant can be found on lesliepratch.us. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.
By Leslie Pratch
To illustrate the power of presence or absence that instrumental coping has on a leader’s functioning and achievement, let us revisit the contrast between General Grant and General McClellan as a commanders-in-chief of the Union forces.
Grant and McClellan are famous generals. They are merely one of many pairs of historically important figures who can be compared to give us insight into leadership. The contrast between the military leadership of these two Civil War generals gives a penetrating view of instrumental coping. Grant was singularly effective as a general. McClellan was singularly ineffective. Grant was a master at instrumental coping. McClellan was not. When McClellan’s army was bloodied in battle, he would retreat to safe place, regroup, replenish and retrain until he deemed his army ready. This usually took months until finally an exasperated Lincoln ordered him to move. In marked comparison, when Grant’s army was damaged, he learned from the experience and was thereby able to attack immediately along a new and more productive line. McClellan constantly thought he was outnumbered—which he never remotely was—and always said he didn’t have enough men, fresh horses, or barrels of flour to advance. Grant always believed he could win with whatever he was given.[i]
Grant is often characterized by critics as a drunk. In his earlier life, he had been but this was not a factor in a single Civil War engagement. (Some high up civilians in the government told President Lincoln that rumors were flying about how much whiskey Grant was drinking. Lincoln responded, “Find out which brand and send a barrel to General McClellan.”) He was also said to be a straight-ahead plodder and butcher of men, which was also a mischaracterization. He was, when not constrained by presidential orders or political circumstances, a master of maneuver and one of the architects of the principles of modern war. Grant’s greatest and most creative achievement was the Vicksburg campaign, which is one of the most brilliant, long-running campaigns of maneuver in military history.
Campaigning with Grant is a first-person memoir by Grant’s aide, Horace Porter.[ii] It begins with Grant arriving in Chattanooga in 1864 to take command of a Union army that had just suffered a terrible and surprising defeat at Chickamauga and was almost totally surrounded in difficult terrain by a dangerous and triumphant Confederate force.
Grant was tired from travel, but he sat on a wooden chair in his muddy uniform and listened for an hour as his new subordinates described the apparently hopeless situation. Then he calmly began writing orders—securing the army’s supply line and shifting its defenses toward the eventual offensive that would shatter the Confederate besiegers. It was a brilliant and charismatic performance.
Grant made mistakes during the war. Every general did, and some of Grant’s were big. But he was never disheartened or derailed by failure. A memorable and characteristic moment came at the end of the first day of the Battle of Shiloh (1862), in which the Confederates had taken Grant and his men by surprise and mopped up the field with them. As darkness fell and the weary armies licked their wounds before resuming the fight in the morning, General William T. Sherman, Grant’s subordinate, rode up to him.
“Well, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we, Grant?” Sherman said.
“Yep,” said Grant, chewing on a cigar and quietly surveying the field. “Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.”
And he did.[iii]
No leader ever has enough barrels of flour. It’s the readiness to engage that demonstrates instrumental coping.
Grant illustrates instrumental coping in another sense. As an active coper, he had a clear vision of the broad accomplishment to achieve. His logistical planning was always purpose-driven. He “brought every available soldier to the field, sublimating those secondary considerations that so often consumed the attention and resources of weaker generals.”[iv] He assessed the strengths and weaknesses of Confederate generals who opposed him, and, always a risk-taker, he took bolder risks where he sensed indecision or weakness.
Jean Edward Simpson, in his biography of Grant,[v] says that the “whole campaign against Forts Henry and Donelson seemed a marvel of generalship, a superb combination of simplicity and determination—in stark contrast to the dilatory maneuvering of the forces of Major General Don Carlos Buell or the Army of the Potomac under McClellan.”
He goes on to say—and I find this important— “Grant, like few American generals before or since, understood the momentum of warfare. He had a quickness of mind that enabled him to make on-the-spot adjustments. His battles were not elegant set-piece operations—as Scott’s textbook victory at Cerro Gordo had been—but unfolded unpredictably as opportunities developed.” Grant made his quickness of mind actionable.
Failure in a battle never caused Grant to lose sight of the greater objective. He focused on the long term vision. But he took care to make the short term functionally effective. He maintained a balance between maintaining a long term vision and being practically effective. His analysis was typically aggressive, as he said later: “Both sides seemed defeated, and whoever assumed the offensive was sure to win.”[vi]
Grant’s effectiveness went beyond his own determination. As Simpson says, “A general imparts an attitude to an army. It is not simply a matter of issuing orders, but infusing spirit and initiative. An inchoate bond develops between a successful commander and the army. His will becomes theirs.” This non-verbal communication is a manifestation of the importance of the leader’s active coping in engendering group effectiveness.
Civil War writer Noah Andre Trudeau, interviewed in “Civil War” magazine, made this wonderful observation: “The way I would characterize (Grant’s) Overland Campaign (in 1864 against Robert E. Lee) is that it was perhaps the first campaign in which the individual battles mattered less than the ultimate result of the campaign. Grant worried less about winning or losing a battle than he did about whether he had been diverted from his ultimate goal.” In this sense, too, Grant’s leadership of the Union army illustrates instrumental coping.
McClellan is one of the most divisive figures in the Civil War. To this day he has his supporters. The fact is that McClellan was masterful at organizing, training and inspiring armies. There was no federal general more popular among his men, even when his campaigns produced one failure after another.
But one could cite innumerable instances of his leadership faults. The prince of over-analysis, he obsessed over his enemies’ movements and strength to the point where he and his armies were frozen to the spot. He always over-estimated his enemies’ strength. Some have said this was to give him an excuse in case of failure, but his biographer, Stephen W. Sears, thinks that McClellan truly believed these wild over-estimates. He simply could not bring himself to pull the trigger, looking for opportunities to take the defensive even when on the strategic offensive. As Sears explains, McClellan had a gift for imagining the worst-case scenario until he believed it, then acting in a way that made it come true.[vii] McClellan’s focus on the worst case is related to a passive coping predilection. From the point of view of analysis within the framework of coping theory this is passive coping. His tendency to focus on the worse primed him to capitulate when pressed, to flee from threats, to give up rather than seize an enemy’s momentary weakness.
One important characteristic that was not unique to McClellan among Civil War generals is that he fought battles one at a time; that is to say, he fought a battle, and afterward, whether he won or lost (mostly he lost), he stopped to reorganize his army, set up supply lines, and rest the horses and men while deciding what to do next.[viii] Grant, and under him Sherman, initiated a new way of warfare that has resonated through even the 20th and 21st century. War for them was continuous, not episodic. If you were tired, so was your enemy, and there was no better time of press him. Grant’s campaigns of 1864 and 1865 consisted of continuous pressure in all theaters of war from Louisiana to Virginia. And the pressure was not only on the enemy’s soldiers but also his means of production and communication.
You may well ask, what does this have to do with coping? The answer is that the capacity to innovate is an aspect of active coping and that is one reason we are examining Grant’s innovations at war. The attentive reader will by not perhaps have concluded that there is a relationship between active coping and innovation and indeed that is the author’s view but as yet we do not have hard evidence.
McClellan had a tin ear for communication. He treated his civilian bosses, President Lincoln, for example (the chairman, if you will, of his board of directors), with open disdain, and despite his popularity he gave his political foes the ammunition they used to finally cashier him.
Grant, conversely, while rumpled and apparently unsophisticated, was, with Robert E. Lee, a consummate political general who always treated his superiors with respect and always got what he needed. Grant was able to negotiate for a reasonable level of resources. He also made do with what he had. While McClellan was continually asking for reinforcements and said he couldn’t win without them, Grant always made the most with the forces at his disposal because he was a highly effective instrumental coper. McClellan who was less effective as an instrumental coper was vastly inferior to Grant as a battlefield commander, however well-regarded, charismatic, and organizationally-skilled McClellan may have been.
[i] These points are applied to a specific situation in James R. Arnold’s Grant Wins the War: Decisions at Vicksburg (NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1997). Arnold calls Vicksburg “one of the great campaigns in military history” and notes Grant’s employment of rapid forced marches to place his army between two wings of the enemy’s army, which he then defeated one after the other.
[ii] The first chapter of Horace Porter’s memoir, Campaigning with Grant (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2009) gives the most personal and revealing account of Grant in action: Facing a nearly impossible situation, assuming command of a starving army surrounded and besieged in Chattanooga, he arrives on the scene and in a few hours assesses the situation and issues a few terse orders that set in motion one of the Union’s most crushing and unlikely victories.
[iii] See James M. McPherson’s book, This Mighty Scourge: Perspective on the Civil War (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007). This book, especially pp. 110-115, gives a pretty good sense of Grant’s salient characteristics as a general: His calmness under pressure, his ability to size up a situation quickly, and his decisiveness, his clarity of expression, his physical and moral courage, and his “sense of self.”
[iv] See James R. Arnold’s Grant Wins the War: Decisions at Vicksburg.
[v] Jean Edward Simpson, Grant (NY: Touchstone, 2001).
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] That point is made in Steven W. Sears’ Landscape Turned Red, (NY: Houghton-Mifflin, 1983), the authoritative study of the Antietam campaign.
[viii] Civil War writer Noah Andre Trudeau, interviewed in “Civil War” magazine, made this wonderful observation: “The way I would characterize (Grant’s) Overland Campaign (in 1864 against Robert E. Lee) is that it was perhaps the first campaign in which the individual battles mattered less than the ultimate result of the campaign. Grant worried less about winning or losing a battle than he did about whether he had been diverted from his ultimate goal.”
_________________________________________________________________________________________ Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com. Other references to Grant can be found on www.leslieprath.us.
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