10 Ways to Work With Intense Executives
Stop buckling under pressure — use these strategies to earn respect and get results with demanding senior leaders
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If you work in a high-performance company or industry, you will encounter your fair share of intense executives.
Your job is not to try to change or fix an intense executive.
It is to learn how to work with them in a way that keeps you effective, engaged, and on track to continue growing your career.
In this newsletter, we breakdown 10 ways you can make it easier to work with intense and demanding executives.
1. Intensity Isn’t Always Bad
Throughout my career, I worked with a number of intense executives.
Then, I became one myself.
Intensity often comes from caring about the work we do. Intense executives and employees care deeply about results, performance, and getting things right. That can be a great driver of success, but it can also be destructive. That intensity can cause people to get hurt or shut down under the weight of the executive’s demands. These executives often justify being so forceful by thinking of themselves as “straight shooters,” but they sometimes cross a line.
When “straight-shooting intensity” goes from being motivating and transparent to making your life harder, that is when you will need to develop strategies to handle the intensity before you can move up or get out.
Do not waste your time trying to make an intense person less intense.
You will not change who they are, but you can survive them, and if you do it right, you might even earn their respect and build a strong working relationship.
2. Understand What Drives Them
The first thing you must do to handle intensity is understand it.
You need to understand the underlying reasons why a person is intense, and also the triggers and flashpoints that cause them to bubble over.
Most intense executives are not intense all the time.
That’s key.
They are not yelling 24/7, and they usually toggle between “normal intense” (productive) and “triggered intense” (destructive).
You want to understand what triggers them so that you can avoid it.
Triggers (that are within your control) include lack of preparation, bullshit answers, making them look bad or going behind their back, wasting their time, etc.
If you want to avoid getting burned, understand what lights the fire.
Note that I am assuming here and in the next point that the triggers are relatively few and at least somewhat reasonable. An executive who gets frustrated at sloppy errors or numbers may be overreacting but they are not completely wrong. It is one thing to deal with someone who gets intense about real topics and another to tolerate a tyrant. With true tyrants, leave.
Remember, we all have triggers. Pet peeves.
Things that heat us up more than they bother most other people.
Your boss is a human and has these too.
What triggers others may seem nutty to us because those issues do not trigger us.
But remember, our triggers probably seem irrational to others for the same reasons.
3. Your Job Is to Be Useful to Them
Once you understand what triggers this person, you have two jobs (assuming that this person is your manager, your skip, or someone else with whom you are involved regularly):
Do not do the things that trigger them (again, reasonable triggers - see above).
Be as useful and as valuable to them as possible.
Come prepared, have your numbers, and know your stuff.
When it is your turn to speak, say what is happening, what needs to happen next, and how you will get there.
Keep your answers short, clear, and direct.
This gives you the highest likelihood of being useful without being triggering.
Executive meetings are not the time to express your full personality, especially if you know the executive is very intense.
4. The “One-Page Rule”
One of the best ways to deal with intense executives is something I call the One-Page Rule.
If you are giving an update, asking for a decision, or presenting a plan, do it in one page.
This could be one slide or one page of text, depending on the context.
In that one page, simply and directly address:
What’s the goal of the communication (why you are writing).
What’s the data.
What’s the ask.
If it is more than that, you are probably adding too much for an executive-level view, which can be triggering.
Executives are trained to make decisions with imperfect data, so respect their time by only including essential data and context.
5. Handle Their Questions Well
Intense executives will ask sharp questions.
They do not expect you to know everything, but they expect you to respond competently and clearly.