We Lead the Way We Live: Crisis, Values, and the Leader You Become with Doug Babcock

I often talk about leadership through three different lenses, clarity that liberates, structure that supports, and soul that sustains.

And I love this conversation because crisis leadership really touches on all three, right? Clarity matters because people need to understand what matters now.

Structure matters because chaos cannot be managed through good intentions alone.

And soul matters because ultimately there are human beings living through whatever is happening.

From your perspective, where do leaders tend to struggle most when the pressure rises?

Inside that framework, which I absolutely love, I think one of the things that gets lost first is soul.

It gets glossed over as a soft skill.

And frankly, staying connected to the human being is one of the most important and also one of the hardest things we can do.

As a police officer, I used to arrest people.

That was part of the job.

and every single police officer i know can tell you that at some point somebody that they arrested said thank you to them i have one person who um they're on my facebook and they said hey i've been you know like sober for 10 years and you know they're celebrating and i said hey fantastic that's great and she went yeah thanks doug you were the guy that arrested me and put me in jail that started my sobriety thank you for doing that

right

and here's the thing It wasn't the arrest.

It wasn't the charge.

It wasn't the affidavit.

It was that I treated her as a human being.

I didn't treat her as a problem.

She had a problem.

I treated her as a human being.

And that was part of what created an opening for her to ground her life and rebuild and 10 years sobriety and all those other things.

And so I think the first thing that often gets lost is we look at the technicals, we look at the charts, we look for the strategy, and we forget that all of those things are actually done by human beings.

And we have to stay connected there.

If we don't stay grounded to our own humanity, and if we don't stay connected to the humans doing this work, we're absolutely, you know, sailing upstream, sailing into the wind, or maybe even pouring water into our own boat instead of out.

Yeah.

You're definitely speaking my language.

I often talk about leadership through three different lenses, clarity that liberates, structure that supports, and soul that sustains.

And I love this conversation because crisis leadership really touches on all three, right? Clarity matters because people need to understand what matters now.

Structure matters because chaos cannot be managed through good intentions alone.

And soul matters because ultimately there are human beings living through whatever is happening.

From your perspective, where do leaders tend to struggle most when the pressure rises?

Inside that framework, which I absolutely love, I think one of the things that gets lost first is soul.

It gets glossed over as a soft skill.

And frankly, staying connected to the human being is one of the most important and also one of the hardest things we can do.

As a police officer, I used to arrest people.

That was part of the job.

and every single police officer i know can tell you that at some point somebody that they arrested said thank you to them i have one person who um they're on my facebook and they said hey i've been you know like sober for 10 years and you know they're celebrating and i said hey fantastic that's great and she went yeah thanks doug you were the guy that arrested me and put me in jail that started my sobriety thank you for doing that

right

and here's the thing It wasn't the arrest.

It wasn't the charge.

It wasn't the affidavit.

It was that I treated her as a human being.

I didn't treat her as a problem.

She had a problem.

I treated her as a human being.

And that was part of what created an opening for her to ground her life and rebuild and 10 years sobriety and all those other things.

And so I think the first thing that often gets lost is we look at the technicals, we look at the charts, we look for the strategy, and we forget that all of those things are actually done by human beings.

And we have to stay connected there.

If we don't stay grounded to our own humanity, and if we don't stay connected to the humans doing this work, we're absolutely, you know, sailing upstream, sailing into the wind, or maybe even pouring water into our own boat instead of out.

Yeah.

You're definitely speaking my language.