Thirteen days in October 1962 came closer to ending the world than any before or since. The cuban missile crisis leadership lessons most people cite are about staying calm. The one your team needs is stranger: at the most dangerous moment of the twentieth century, the most powerful man alive kept walking out of the room on purpose.

The moment

On the morning of October 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy learned that a U-2 spy plane had photographed Soviet nuclear missile sites under construction in Cuba. He convened a secret group of about fourteen advisors, later known as ExComm, and for thirteen days they weighed responses while the world sat at the edge of nuclear war. The early consensus favored an airstrike. What emerged instead was a naval quarantine, announced October 22. On October 28, Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles. Not one shot was fired. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

The most dangerous room is an agreeable one

Here is the detail history classes skip. Kennedy deliberately stayed away from a number of ExComm’s deliberations. He kept his public schedule, left the room, and sent his advisors off to argue without him.

He did it because he understood what his presence did to the answer. His brother Robert wrote about it afterward: even strong, experienced men shade their recommendations in front of the President, toward what they believe he wants to hear. Nobody decides to do this. It happens under the surface, one deferential sentence at a time, until the room agrees with the most powerful person in it and calls that agreement analysis.

Without the President watching, the group split, built competing cases for the airstrike and the blockade, and tore both apart. The airstrike consensus did not survive the scrutiny. The blockade did. The room that felt free to disagree produced a different answer than the room that was performing for its leader, and the different answer is why the thirteen days ended quietly.

Cuban missile crisis leadership lessons for your team

This is the third element of the process I teach, Guidelines for Behavior, and specifically the research I build teams on: the Psychological Safe Zone. Great teams are made by how they function, not who is on them, and the first behavior is that everyone speaks up in roughly equal proportion, without fear of retribution or insult. The numbers on how rare that is should bother you. In a typical four-person meeting, two people do 62 percent of the talking. In a six-person meeting, three people do 70 percent.

I learned my version of Kennedy’s move in the SEAL Teams. The leader gives the Situation and the Mission and then goes quiet, because the moment I said what I thought the plan should be, every plan that came back to me looked suspiciously like mine. Hear the plan first. Speak last. Hope and assumptions have no place in the leadership equation, and the most dangerous assumption a leader makes is that the agreement in the room is real.

Apply it this week

1. Count the room. In your next meeting, log who talks and roughly how much. No judging, no correcting yet. Just observe, the way you would watch any other behavior. Compare your count to the 62 percent number.
2. Speak last. One decision this week, state the problem and nothing else. No preferred option, no leading tone. Watch how long the silence lasts before someone offers a real opinion. That silence is the deference you have been mistaking for alignment.
3. Leave once. Pick a decision your team can own, give them the Situation and the Mission, and physically leave. Ask for two competing options with the case for each. You are not delegating the decision. You are removing your gravity from it.
4. Name the guideline. Tell the team the behavior out loud: everyone speaks, in roughly equal share, and disagreement in this room is work, not disloyalty. Then enforce it, starting with the person who talks the most. That person is usually you.

Take it to your team

Read these out loud in your Monday meeting:

• Where do you wait to hear what I think before you say what you think, and what has that habit cost us so far?
• Think about our last big meeting. Who did most of the talking, and whose view never made it into the room at all?
• If I left the room for our next major decision, what would you argue for that you have not been saying in front of me?

Kennedy had fourteen of the most credentialed people in America at his table, and the table still almost gave him the wrong answer, because a table performs for its most powerful seat. That is the sharpest of the cuban missile crisis leadership lessons: your team’s honesty is a behavior you have to build, and some days building it means walking out. This is Moment 02 of Leadership Moments in History. Last week: Shackleton and the Endurance.

Keep your eyes on the target. — Errol