This month, we've been focused on high-stakes leadership here at Two Piers. Not just emergency response, but the steady-state leadership that happens every day.
A team's ability to navigate difficulty is largely determined well before an emergency or crisis arrives at our doorstep. It's the seemingly mundane groundwork, including processes, leadership skills, relationships, and organizational culture, that shapes how a team will respond when the alarm bells start going off.
We don't need to wait for our teams to be forged in the crucible of crisis before investing in their capabilities. This month's Two Piers Digest shares resources and reflections to help you and your team build healthier norms, stronger decision-making, and greater capacity to navigate complexity, whether or not you hold a formal leadership role.
In today's digest:
Coaches' Corner 🧭: Inquiry, Accountability, and the Lure of Firefighting
What We’re Reading 📚: Leadership, Ownership, and Psych Safety
The Podcast 🔊: Curiosity, Purpose, and Leadership Under Pressure
Where to Find Us 🗺️: Women Offshore, Maine Women’s Conference + ICF Converge
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Can decisive authority and curiosity exist in tandem? We (emphatically) say, “yes!” In fact, they can be complementary elements.
In “Bridging Humble Inquiry and High Accountability,” we explore why asking questions does not require us to relax standards, authority, or decision ownership. In fact, healthy inquiry can help leaders get better information, challenge assumptions, and build ownership before taking decisive action.
Our second article, “The Lure of Firefighting in Leadership,” examines a different common performance trap: being exceptionally good in a crisis. There can be something deeply satisfying about solving an urgent problem, rallying a team around a challenge, and saving the day. But when firefighting becomes the default mode, it rewards reactivity and deprioritizes prevention, capability-building, and addressing the root causes sparking the flames.
This month's reading is focused on how we can build teams that think, speak, and act effectively when it matters most. For a more extensive list, head on over to the Two Piers September Reading List.
Following in the footsteps of the classic, It's Your Ship, this book takes it further by examining what happens when a leader stops being the person with all the answers. Marquet shares his account of transforming leadership aboard a U.S. Navy submarine and offers a practical look at distributing authority, building competence, and creating more ownership throughout a team.
A thoughtful and practical look at how gender, expectations, and perception can shape decision-making, including how we interpret confidence, risk, hesitation, and authority in ourselves and others. It’s especially useful for anyone working on teams because it helps surface the assumptions we bring to both making decisions and judging how others make them. (Note: This book was published several years ago, so I am hopeful that a new edition will be released with updated examples and data, but the frameworks and insights remain incredibly valuable.)
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We had three very different episodes this month, each touching on what helps us navigate complexity and change.
🎙️ Still Curious: 100 Episodes of the Two Piers Podcast
We marked our 100th episode with a look back at how the podcast and Two Piers have evolved over the past several years, including plenty of experiments, unexpected pivots, and lessons about building work that remains meaningful and sustainable.
Megan joins Erica to talk about personal and professional pivots, identity, risk, and what can remain constant even when our roles and circumstances change dramatically.
⚓ Lessons About High-Stakes Leadership with Alisa Tijerina
Erica and Alisa have spent decades working in high-stakes operating environments around the world. In this conversation, they compare notes on steady-state leadership, crisis management, decision-making under pressure, and what experience has taught them about leading when the consequences are real.
The timing is fitting: they’ll both be at the Women Offshore Conference this week.
This week, Erica has been at Brown University with an esteemed cohort from around the country (and abroad), sharpening their team coaching skills.
From there, she heads directly to Houston for the Women Offshore Conference, where she’ll facilitate an interactive workshop Friday morning on effective communication in high-stakes environments.
Later in October, we’ll be closer to home, where both Erica and Kathy will be at The Maine Women’s Conference on October 21, followed by ICF Converge in Washington, D.C., October 28–30.
It’s a busy stretch of learning, facilitating, reconnecting with longtime colleagues, and meeting new ones. If our paths are crossing at any of these events, please say hello!
High-stakes leadership is not only about how we perform when something goes wrong. It is also about what we build, practice, and pay attention to before the pressure arrives.
Here’s to fewer fire alarms, fewer self-inflicted emergencies, and a bit more composure than Michael Scott.
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Erica and the Two Piers Team
PO Box 554 Woolwich, Maine 04579-9998, United States
