Thermostats

Tuning team temperature

Bob blew up Slack before the standup even started. Notifications bounced and pinged. Channels filled with five-alarm emoji. “Urgent” flags multiplied like bad stickers across Outlook. Meetings popped up like mushrooms, each with the same headline: “EMERGENCY” and each with no agenda, but many demands. Bleary-eyed people scrambled to screens, paged teammates still asleep, spun up war rooms, and talked over one another as they fought today’s fire.

Except there was no fire, only heat. It was just normal hiccups, and a very capable product manager had things completely under control. Nothing got fixed faster; it just got louder.

That was Bob’s way: Every question became a problem, every problem was a five-alarm blaze. We need an emergency meeting right now. Chaos first. Facts later.

Time, money, and morale burned, burning out people along the way. “On fire” became the normal rhythm of the company. It became the core of the company culture. People panicked, bumped into each other, and they made mistakes.

Bob thrived in it. He loved showing he could extinguish fires — fires he’d created. Bob thought surviving an emergency was a badge of honor, and that a constant state of “crisis mode” means everyone’s committed and “pushing hard.” He mistook adrenaline for progress, urgency for importance. Bob loved having a megaphone, being in the thick of it, and showing he could stand the heat — and that other folks couldn’t.

Working with Bob left scars.

News had broken fast that day, and it was a big, big story. By tomorrow morning the nation would be glued to a whole package of news we still needed to produce, and our website would sustain a more than million visitors an hour for the next 24 hours. The entire newsroom was on high alert, preparing for a long night and a tight deadline. Writers scrambled. Editors shouted. By mid-afternoon, almost everyone looked pretty frazzled.

Except for Sam, my boss. Sam was definitely moving quickly, but he didn’t break a sweat. He was the calm center of the room.

“We’ve done this before,” he said. “We know what to do.”

Then, completely unflapped and unflappable, he’d go on to put out another fire, his third in the last 30 minutes. Minutes counted, and Sam had a lot of fires to put out before morning. That was the job.

Sam didn’t deny the heat, he controlled it. He absorbed it. He lowered the temperature just enough so that everyone near him could think clearly, prioritize, and act. Sam was so cool, he made the whole room cooler. Calm was his weapon.

Sam was a thermostat.

Many years ago, I was a waiter. To be precise, I was a very, very bad waiter. I may have been the worst waiter to ever carry a plate of food, a feat I only occasionally succeeded at.

I ran around thoughtlessly, sloppily, perpetually forgetting things, forever “in the weeds,” as they say in the food and beverage business. Better servers would glide effortlessly from table to table, never missing a beat, while I was a disheveled, sweaty mess, constantly running, constantly behind.

I scrambled like I was on fire, and then I was fired. It was for the best, but I learned: frantic motion is not progress, and chaos doesn’t create results. Cool heads do.

I needed to regulate my own temperature.

Not too long after that, I was trained to be a firefighter in the Navy. This was not unusual: pretty much everyone in the Navy gets firefighting training.

There are approximately a million ways a ship can catch fire, and a fire is pretty much the worst possible thing that could happen on a ship. It’s not like you can all meet up in the parking lot and then go to Starbucks if an alarm goes off. You are trapped on a burning steel box, and your choices are to put out the fire, burn or drown. The threat of fire tends to focus your attention.

The first rule I learned in firefighting? Never lose your head. Adrenaline doesn’t put out fires. Keep cool, remember what you know, and fight the fire. Methodically. Never run around like you are on fire, because it’s a good way to be on fire.

Panic spreads like flames; keeping cool contains it.

Much later in my career, I was asked to step in and fix a flailing program. The ex-program manager departed amid mutual exasperation. The team was frustrated. Team leadership was even more frustrated.

Tensions were high and not much was getting done. A team of nearly 50 people wasn’t even sure what they were supposed to do or how to do it. And they were really frustrated with being forced to react to constant, nonsensical, forever-urgent demands.

We took a deep breath and just… talked. We talked with one another. We talked with our stakeholders. We talked with everyone on the program, at all levels.

And we listened. We trusted.

As we gave people some space to think and talk, we found there were an awful lot of good ideas on how to best move forward. So we did that, one step at a time. Calmly. Cooly.

About two weeks in, you could feel a collective exhale across timezones as the team started to realize, “Hey, we’ve done this before. We know what to do.”

Within 60 days the program was knocking it out of the park.

We had regulated our own temperature.

Chaos is contagious. It spreads. Once a leader broadcasts panic, it infects every meeting, message, and decision. People get wired for overreaction, and every action becomes loud, busy, and brittle.

Calm absorbs chaos, translates it into clarity, and create psychological space for focus. People move with purpose, without flailing, without thrashing, without fear. Calm isn’t passive — it’s an act of design. You can’t just be calm, you have to create calm.

Leaders should know how to regulate temperature: When to turn up the heat, when to vent pressure, and when to open a window. Sometimes the stakes really are high, and people need to see them more clearly — not to panic, but to engage. Even then, it’s not about yelling or throwing deadlines around, it’s about focusing energy. That should be deliberate and measured, not smoke for the sake of smoke. Heat should warm, not incinerate.

But most times people need space and environmental control to do their best work. So the question is simple: When things catch fire, are you adding fuel — or controlling the temperature?

Fires are going to come — real ones. The newsroom kind. The shipboard kind. The program-is-falling-apart kind.

You can’t stop the sparks, but you can decide whether you spread them.

Arsonists set everything on fire. Thermostats build teams that don’t combust.

Note: Every one of these stories is 100% true and I was really there for each of these. If we ever find ourselves sharing a beverage or two I may share the juicier details.