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Yards After Contact: How Great Leaders Turn Problems into Performance
By Jill Ratliff, Senior Client Partner
I once coached a Hall of Fame running back.
He told me that everybody thinks a running back gets the glory for how many yards they accumulate and how many touchdowns they score. While those things are important, they are results. The real measure of a running back’s success? Yards after contact. How did you perform after you took a hit?
Then he turned it on me. “You’re teaching leaders the same thing. The measure of your performance as a leader is yards after contact.” Anybody can lead on a good day. How do you respond when things get tough?
He was right. Years of working with the highest performers in professional services and consulting have taught me that leadership effectiveness is not determined primarily by what leaders know. It is determined by who they are, how they interpret the world, and how they lead under pressure.
So, I’d suggest that if you’re running into roadblocks and problems in your role as a leader, that’s good. Welcome to the club! These roadblocks are part of the job, and no amount of 3-day leadership workshops or binders of 21 tools is going to help you navigate them more effectively.
I say that as someone who coaches for a living. My words don’t teach anything. I can hand you the best reframe I have and it will do nothing until you go try it and come back and tell me what happened.
So, what works? Leading under pressure starts with a deeper understanding of your Human Operating System, how it responds in difficult situations, and what to do to turn these problems into performance.
What gets in the way of leading under pressure.
When I start performance coaching with a new leader, I tell them I don’t want to spend much time on what’s going well. If it’s going well, you don’t need me — go do more of it. What I want to hear about is what’s in your way. What’s keeping you up at night? What’s frustrating you, and who?
The leaders I work with are some of the highest performing people in professional services and consulting. They’re 20+ year veterans who are at the top of their game and executing at a high level about 80% percent of the time. But then roadblocks show up… and it’s the response that defines your performance and your effectiveness as a leader.
“This shouldn’t be happening.”
“They just need to get their heads in the game.”
“I don’t have enough budget, time, or resources.”
“I don’t have time for this people stuff, I need to get sh*t done.”
This is the 20%—the stress situations. And I can tell you from thousands of coaching conversations that this is commonly how leaders respond when they’re under pressure. We’re all human, and stress does this to every one of us.
But that 20% will sink you if you don’t know what to do with it. Because if the answer is always that somebody else has to move first, you’ve set yourself up to do the best you can with whatever you happen to have. And you will — you’ll figure it out eventually. But there’s no development in that for you.
So, it’s not about avoiding or trying to mitigate these situations, it’s about understanding how to navigate them more effectively when they come up. Because, I can guarantee you, they’re going to come up. A lot.
The only thing you can control is your mindset about the problems you’re experiencing.
A newly hired head of HR came to me feeling frustrated. She’d been brought in to be a change agent. She had ideas. Then she was told there was no budget for any of them. “So what am I supposed to do?”, she asked.
“Let’s start here,” I said. “What you’ve described to me isn’t a problem. That is what every single person hired to come in and do something great gets told. So, what if we stopped thinking about it as a problem and focused on what you control in this situation?”
Then I pointed her to what I could see in her data. “The other reason you got hired is that you’re a creative problem solver — you can look at complexity and put your finger on the one thing that will make the biggest difference. So how do you find that one thing, and how do you fund it?”
I could see her visibly shift in her seat. This is usually the moment when leaders love and hate me. I’m not going to let them pin their frustration and blame for any given situation on someone else. Nope. You, as a leader, have demonstrated that you are incredibly capable and therefore have the agency to control your responses and navigate roadblocks to deliver the results needed.
You have to start with the belief that the problem is not a problem — that’s what you got hired to do. Nothing about her situation changed. Her budget was still zero. What changed was the story she was telling herself about it.
What are the deeply held beliefs you have that you’re not even aware of? What’s the story you’re telling yourself? And how does it make you feel — because if you feel terrible, how are you going to outperform from that below-the-line feeling?
Your mindset and response are the only places you have leverage. You don’t control anybody else’s behavior, so you have to start with something you actually have authority over. I like to say agency. You have agency over yourself. Nothing else.
Getting calm, confident and clear—determining the next action to take to solve the problem you’re facing.
If more knowledge or information led to greater leadership effectiveness, then all those binders you’ve received and 21-principles documents would tell you exactly how to navigate these challenging situations. But leading under pressure isn’t about knowledge. It’s about understanding and navigating your stress responses, shifting your mindset, and developing simple tools that help you take action.
Here are two simple tools you could try this week:
First, ask whether you’re rowing upstream or downstream.
Nobody runs a level five rapid without a guide in the raft, and what the guide tells you when you hit big rapids is the opposite of instinct: row in unison, row hard, in the direction of the rapid.
What we do when we hit our business rapids is put the oars in and try to turn the boat around. We resist what is. So anytime you’re stuck, or your team is stuck, start with that question. Upstream is resistance. Downstream is moving with the problem the best you can. Which way are you rowing?
Simply naming it can be the catalyst. I had a client three months into coaching tell me, “This happened this week and man, I was upstream. But I turned it around last night.”
Second, get yourself calm, confident, and clear — in that order.
Calm. If you’re upset or spinning, you have to get to a calmer state of mind before anything else works. Sit and breathe for four minutes. Box breathing. It will literally calm your nervous system.
Confident. Why should you believe you can solve this? State three reasons. Look at the evidence of your own life — you have already proved it to yourself. I bet you have. And since that’s the case, this is just the next hurdle you need to overcome.
Clear. From where you are, what is the next right thing you need to do? Not the entire plan — the next right thing you have the agency to do from where you’re standing. It might be a conversation. It might be going to find the money. Just pick one right next step and act on it.
And if you have to run that process five times a day, run it five times a day.
In the case of this HR leader, I knew from her assessment data that she happened to be a creative problem solver, and that was why she was hired into this role.
After she became calm, confident, and clear, she was able to come up with a creative idea for the right next step to take. In her case, it was a conversation with the CFO to present an idea and figure out how they could find the budget for it.
Leading under pressure is what defines you as a leader.
The reality is that the measure of how well you perform as a leader will never be the good days. It’s not in the 80%. It’s the yards after contact—the 20%. How do you respond and lead when things get tough?
Leading under pressure is a skill, not a trait. Your ability to understand your Human Operating System—how you respond in these moments—and employ simple tools to make you more calm, confident, and clear will help you navigate roadblocks more effectively and lead your teams and organizations to greater performance.
Jill Ratliff
Jill is a Senior Client Partner at Kinavic Leadership Acceleration, where she brings over 25 years of Fortune 500 Human Resources management experience to help leaders navigate constant change and reach their full potential.
