Two curves that were never meant to meet
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On 6 February 2018, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy lifted off from Kennedy Space Center. I watched the livestream in awe. Its 27 Merlin engines created more than five million pounds of thrust to lift this massive spacecraft into space. There was a good chance it would end in a catastrophic explosion. Those engines had never been flown in that configuration.
Until then, the world had been watching the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s smaller and thinner craft powered by nine Merlins, come back down and land. That still blows my mind. Falcon Heavy was that problem multiplied by three. Not even SpaceX was confident it would hold together.
Two SpaceX engineers were narrating the launch, and they were working hard to contain their excitement. About a minute in, with the most powerful rocket in the world climbing through the last of the densest air in earth’s atmosphere, one of them called out ‘MaxQ’ in the tone you and I would use to read out a train timetable.
On the most dangerous flight the company had ever attempted, the point of peak pressure on the ascent had arrived with a name, a predicted time, and a planned response. Nobody in the space industry was surprised by it, because it’s a feature of all space flight plans.
Two curves
As a former CEO and now a CEO coach, much of my thinking goes into the forces that put pressure on senior leaders, and what relieves that pressure enough to sustain performance and make leadership enjoyable.
And as it turns out, space travel and leadership have more in common than you might think.
Try this.
Take a sheet of paper and draw a chart. Along the bottom, the x-axis, is age from 30 years old to 60 years old. Up the vertical side, the y-axis, is intensity from 1 to 10.
Draw two curves on that chart, call the first curve work and call the other one family.
As you draw each curve, map the intensity over time against age. The start of the curve, for the first few years from age 30, is likely to be close to linear (increasing diagonally from left to right as time goes on). On the work curve, at the point where you started to accept (or expect to take on) more senior leadership roles, the shape of curve changes from neatly diagonal to almost vertical. That signals the increasing intensity of the work part of your life.
A similarly shaped curve will appear when you draw the family curve, especially if both parents work, you have children or ageing parents, or if you are a woman.
For the baby boomers and the generations before them, those curves rarely met. Career intensity, typically for men, peaked well after the children were raised by their mother and that intensity continued as their wife would then usually care for ageing parents.
For a range of reasons, from women making up a greater proportion of the workforce, to increases in the cost of living to the separation of work and home life free-falling thanks to technology that forces most of us to be ‘always on’, those two curves now intersect.
The term ‘intersect’ is also generous. For Gen X, and increasingly for Gen Y, the two generations who are bearing the brunt of this phenomenon rightly call it a collision.
When it comes to first-time CEOs and their work curve, they turn up with two decades of hard-won functional expertise and almost no preparation for what the role will feel like. The timing is also often cruel. The years a leader steps into the top role are the same years their personal life (the family curve) peaks in demand: ageing parents, children at their most complicated ages, a body starting to change, financial stress, and a marriage carrying strain it has not had to carry before.
Two curves that were never supposed to meet arrive at the same time, and almost nobody has a name for what is happening to them, let alone a method for getting through it well.
Without one, leaders tend to default to one of two modes. They push harder using the expertise that earned them the seniority, which tends to fail because that expertise was never built for this scope of role. Or they retreat into the corner of the role where they are still the most competent person in the room.
Both prove costly and lead to reactive, lower-quality decision-making, an eroding relationship with the team that is watching their every move, and, most expensively, the health, the marriage, and the relationships they promised themselves they would protect.
The making of MaxQ
Here’s where the intensity of work and family life meet a very helpful analogy used in space travel.
In the context of space travel dynamic pressure, the pressure applied to a space craft as it tries to escape the earth's atmosphere, has two ingredients: The density of the air, and how fast the vehicle is moving through it. On the launch pad, the air is at its thickest and the speed is zero, so the pressure is zero. In space, the speed is enormous and there is no air left to push against, so the pressure is zero again. The peak pressure, known as MaxQ sits in the middle, where the rocket is moving the spacecraft fast enough to be punished by air that is still thick enough to punish it. On most launches MaxQ is entered 60 to 80 seconds after liftoff, somewhere between 11 and 14 kilometres above sea level.
The predictable response to this pressure isn’t intuitive the first time you hear it.
Just before entering MaxQ, flight control or the pilot throttles back the engines. In the case of Falcon Heavy, at the point of maximum load, on the most expensive machine the company owns, with the entire mission still ahead of it, the answer was less power. Once MaxQ is successfully negotiated and the atmospheric air density starts to thin, the engines throttle up and the mission continues.
And herein lies the mapping to our leadership lives.
Career velocity is at its highest in the years when family life is still at its densest. At this point it’s also important to recognise that while multiple factors can influence the intensity of each individual curve, the pressure that’s created is dynamic. The increasing load comes from two curves intensifying, not from one curve getting worse.
In my experience, the intensity starts somewhere around 35 and runs to about 55. It is a phase with a shape and unlike the ascent of a spacecraft, there are many MaxQ moments in this phase.
Throttling back is the reflex and the muscle to be built to negotiate each MaxQ moment.
Throttling back in a busy household trying to make the logistical puzzle pieces fit might mean a family meeting on a Sunday night before the new week starts.
Throttling back in a complex project might mean reviewing mission intent against the known factors influencing progress and likelihood of successful completion.
Throttling back to gain leverage as a CEO might mean reflecting on how precise your communication is with your leadership team. And throttling back when you have young children might mean making that bedtime story routine non-negotiable.
Throttling back today
Throttling back is what gaining perspective looks like when it’s deliberate. Here’s how you can start building that leadership muscle.
Name the phase. Say it out loud, first to yourself and then to one person who can help you carry the load. What tends to make leadership more difficult is believing that you are the only one buckling under that load. When a phase has a name, a plan can be built around it (and unnamed ones get treated as a personal failing, which is rarely the case).
Widen the gap. You’ve heard of the gap that lives between stimulus and response. Under pressure, that gap closes to nothing and every issue becomes a priority. Widening the gap happens in small, unglamorous ways: a rule that nothing decided today gets sent today, or one afternoon a fortnight with nothing in it.
Ask better questions in the gap. Time on its own rarely improves the quality of a decision. Good questions do. If I say yes to this, what am I saying no to? Whose decision is this, and why has it reached me? What would I need to believe for the other option to be the right one? What does this cost my family this month, and have I told them? The quality of the questions you ask sets the standard for each decision that follows.
The engines do come back up
The middle of the stretch when the intensity of home and work life is peaking does not feel temporary, but the engines do come back up. Parents pass, or their care settles into something manageable. Children get less complicated, or at least differently complicated. The role stops being new. The air becomes less dense, speed becomes easier, and the same power that would have torn the vehicle apart at 12 kilometres above sea level is what carries the mission the rest of the way.
Two engineers narrated the most dangerous launch their company had ever attempted, and when the load peaked, they said its name in a flat voice, because it was on the plan and they knew what to do about it.
Most leaders reach the same point with none of that. No name, no timing, no planned response, and a private suspicion that everyone else is managing it better.
Throttling back is the phrase you’ve been looking for.
See you next Wednesday.
Phil Hayes-St Clair
CEO Coach
PS If this essay helped, Episode 241: Former Medtronic CEO and Chairman Art Collins on what it means to lead, listen and deliver sustained excellence from my podcast is worth a listen. Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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