My friends Merom and Louise Klein have for 30 years run Courage Advisors, a consulting company focused on courage in leadership. I’m sure they appreciated, as I did, the comments made by Antoinette Tuff on CNN tonight about her act of courage in Atlanta yesterday.
She is a bookkeeper at an Atlanta school that was evacuated after a gunman armed with an AK-47 assault rifle and 500 rounds (!) of ammunition appeared on campus.
Antoinette found herself trapped in the same room as the gunman. After calling 911, she passed information between the gunman and police, acting for the world like a trained hostage negotiator. More astoundingly, she eventually managed to talk the gunman into surrendering to police. No one was hurt.
Antoinette said that, although she sounded calm and in control on the phone with 911, “she was terrified on the inside”. Yet, she did what good leaders always do. She found a way to act in spite of the fear, and did what needed to be done.
I saw this phenomenon more than once with the US Army in Vietnam. Good leaders, in spite of being scared, sprang into action in tough situations and took charge, relying on their instincts and training. They usually said later that it was kind of like an out-of-body experience. They felt compelled to act, in spite of being afraid. It was only later, they said, that they realized what they had done, and the dimensions of the peril that they had faced.
This is what Antoinette apparently did yesterday in Atlanta. She set aside her fear and courageously did what needed to be done to defuse a potentially deadly situation. In spite of her fear, she mustered the courage to take action, and resolve a potentially deadly situation, in spite of the possible consequences.
We should all take a lesson in courage from Antoinette Tuff.