From Corrections to Cohesion: Dr. Al Philip-Neri on Leadership Under Pressure

What causes execution to break down inside organizations under pressure?

According to performance psychologist Dr. Al Philip-Neri, founder of Cohesion HQ, it’s usually not strategy.

It’s behavior.
It’s communication.
It’s emotional regulation.
It’s leadership under pressure.

In this episode of The Water Trough, Dr. Al shares insights from high-stakes environments including corrections, athletics, entrepreneurship, and executive leadership to explain why execution becomes unpredictable when leaders lack clarity and cohesion.

Topics include:
 • Leadership under pressure
 • Emotional regulation
 • Team cohesion
 • Communication breakdowns
 • Predictable execution
 • Behavioral psychology in business

#Leadership #Execution #PerformancePsychology #TeamCohesion #BusinessLeadership

Transcript

Ed Drozda 0:10

Welcome to The Water Trough, where we can't make you drink, but we will make you think. My name is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and I'm really excited you chose to join me here as we discuss topics that are important for small business folks just like you. If you're looking for ideas, inspiration, and possibility, you've come to the right place. Join us as we take steps to help you create the healthy business that you've always wanted. Welcome back to The Water Trough, folks. This is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and today I'm joined by Dr. Al Philip-Neri. He's a performance psychologist whose background includes corrections leadership, athletics, and entrepreneurship. He helps leaders and teams perform under pressure by focusing on emotional regulation, discipline standards, and clear communication when the stakes are high. Al, welcome.

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 1:14

Hey, how you doing, Ed?

Ed Drozda 1:15

I'm doing great. It's nice to see you here. A performance psychologist, please elaborate a little bit.

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 1:21

It's PhD program at certain institutions. It derived from sports psychology. There's many sports psychology, both master's and doctoral programs. It's all about... well, I shouldn't say it's all about, but one of the biggest pillars is performance. The athletes performing at their greatest level. So performance psychology has that same emphasis and obviously can adapt very well in the sports arena and athletic arenas, but I think it gives a broader landscape to performance of your life, your business, your family. It's just performance psychology. How do you perform at the greatest you that you can be? And so little bit more broad spread, lot of similar concepts, techniques, tactics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it is a newer term in the industry, being a performance psychologist. The best example that's ever been given to me, and I think it's good, the show "Billions" that was on Showtime. I think his name was Alex or Axel. He's the crazy trader, moving billions and billions of dollars. But he had that lady, and for the life of me I cannot remember her name, but she was the performance coach for all his traders and for himself. That's performance psychology. That's the greatest TV example that I could give you, Ed.

Ed Drozda 2:39

I imagine Al, that the idea of performance psychology is something that psychologists in other capacities utilize, because performance in its bare essence is really our ability to succeed, no?

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 2:55

Yeah, in psychology you got clinical and you got applied. I fall in the applied and not in the clinical. But do clinical psychologists use certain frameworks out of performance psychology? Of course they do. A basic one is overcoming somebody's limiting beliefs of themself. We can talk about self-efficacy, the belief in yourself to do XYZ. We can talk about collective efficacy, your ability to believe in your teammates or coworkers or family members to do XYZ. So sure, there's a lot of overlap. I think the biggest difference is clinically they go back... Historically, clinicians will work deep into the root of what's causing XYZ. Trauma or whatever the case is, they diagnose. They don't prescribe but a psychiatrist or a physician does if that's needed. Where applied, it's more of how do we use this every day to move the needle forward? That's what I tell people. Moving the needle forward is a definition that you need to define. If you're a high performer, you're a top producer, you're a Navy SEAL, you're a great athlete, moving the needle forward might be one millimeter, because you're already operating at such a high standard, such a high level. And then for somebody, moving the needle forward the journey is actually gonna be a marathon. Because we've gotta create so many little habits to move you along the way because of where you're at today and where you wanna go is a pretty long reach. So we've gotta get you there incrementally. Think back to the Navy SEAL route. The average 18-year-old kid that joins the Navy may or may not know about the SEALs and what they go through. They go through a lot of pre-indoctrination training before they report to BUD/S, and then BUD/S is in three phases, six months long. Think about it. They're creating habits. They're running further, they're running faster, they're swimming further, they're swimming faster. Obstacle course times are going down, and down, and down. They're shooting better, et cetera, et cetera. The end product is a United States Navy SEAL, who is a very high standard tier one operator. What's no different for the regular person, it's just in real life you don't conceptualize that journey of somebody that maybe has taken a year to become a SEAL. If they made it through Hell Week, they're already operating at a pretty high standard mentally, and physically because they've gotten through that grueling week three of phase one of Hell Week already. It all lines into success, and I think at the end of the day it's creating the pathway so that you can create positive results so people keep working hard towards XYZ goal.

Ed Drozda 5:31

Thank you for that distinction and clarification. I mentioned emotional regulation in your introduction. Emotional regulation, huge, right?

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 5:42

We can use the word equanimity, emotional regulation. Learning how to control your thoughts and feelings- and how you act upon them, no matter how you're feeling or what's going through your mind is the difference between the one percent, the top tier of people in any arena. Obviously there are other characteristics, character, integrity, sincerity, there's other things that play a factor. We can do a little quick exercise with the audience. If they think of somebody in their head who they admire, respect, trust- I doubt that one of those criteria of that person is that they're absolutely nuts and they fly off the cuff on a regular basis. That's typically not a trait that people admire, it's a trait you deal with. So now the question is, how do you have emotional regulation? How do you have equanimity? How do you do things? And for different people, it's different. Some people are naturally calmer. They don't have that trigger switch kind of thing. They're very laid back, so it takes a lot to sometimes create an emotion, let alone get them really fired up or upset. Others have a very short fuse and a very short switch. You say the wrong thing, you do the wrong thing, whatever, and all of a sudden it sets them off to the point of no return sometimes. So now when you look at leadership, and you're running a company or you're coaching a team, whatever it is, you have to understand that your job is to be a role model. Your job is to have emotional regulation, because if you cannot regulate your emotions how in the world can you create standards for people to adhere to? Your emotions dictate the standards and if you're all over the place yourself, and you're very hard to read, you're very hard to predict, that's not good leadership. People need to know where you stand and what the rules are, and you treat people fairly and things of that nature. If they're having to figure you out, you're not doing a good job as a leader. And it's tough, Ed. I fought in the ring for a long time, so I've got that switch, and I've had to work very, very hard as I've grown in leadership and maturity and mentorship. Sometimes you gotta take a quick step back, and a quick step back might be a millisecond depending on what environment you're in. Or it might be five minutes, it might be a day, it might be a week. I don't know. It depends on the high-stake environments. The higher-stake environment, the quicker you have to learn how to regulate your emotions so you can make an appropriate decision. I would always joke, I used to run a juvenile prison and, you know, anger management. One of the things with anger management back in the day, this is in the early '90s and leading into the 2000s they would be like: "Well, you know, if you get angry, count to 10." And I'd be like: "This is like the dumbest thing I've ever heard." Have you ever tried to tell someone to count to 10 who's gonna flip their switch or they've already gone nuts? You think they're gonna slow down and be like, "One, two- three." Right. Like no- it's not gonna work. Okay. Sure. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So you had to give them something to be able to calm them down immediately and get them on the right track, whether it was a trigger word, whatever the case may be. Emotional regulation in leadership is huge. If you think about the world's greatest leaders, or people that you've worked for and the different qualities of the leaders I promise you when you rank them, that person at the top is somebody who always had emotional regulation. 'Cause they know how to get results from you because of the way they communicate with you.

Ed Drozda 9:14

So emotional regulation is tied to self-awareness, yes?

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 9:20

Absolutely.

Ed Drozda 9:22

You've got that self-awareness part of emotional intelligence down. Because if you don't, you're not going there.

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 9:27

Correct. You gotta be self-aware to have emotional regulation. At the end of the day, in any sort of leadership, the best trait you can have is to be self-aware, to know what you need to work on. We're real quick as leaders to point the fingers on what everybody else needs to work on, but you've gotta own what you need to work on and then be vulnerable enough to show "Hey, I'm working on this. You're working on this. You're working on this. You're working on this, and collaboratively this is what the end result is gonna look like if we all do our part." One of the frameworks I use on building a cohesive system is collective efficacy theory, which is Dr. Albert Bandura. I did not create the theory, I just enhanced the theory in my research. But one of the things we talk about is that ability to trust one another. Where does that come from? Believe it or not, there's a five principle, five pillar framework that works synergistically to help develop that. So if you as a leader can embrace that, and you're vulnerable with it, and your team or your business, whatever the case is, everybody's on board and we're talking the same language. Think about what that end result looks like, because nobody's perfect. We're all striving for excellence.

Ed Drozda 10:36

Absolutely. I think it's particularly exacerbated in high pressure situations. You mentioned that you had run a juvenile corrections facility. I'd say that is surely high pressure.

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 10:52

For sure. In corrections you have to understand everybody's watching. So if you got a cell house full of inmates, actually not if, you do, right? And, it might be a hundred inmates, might be thirty inmates depending on the size of your facility, what's going on. Might be a thousand inmates total in the whole prison, et cetera, et cetera. The thing is, when something happens or when something is about to happen, it's all eyes on that incident. And you're not only dealing with that incident at hand, you're dealing with everybody that's watching, or this could be a distraction for the real issue that's gonna pop up. I just filmed a video about an inmate that was on tier three. This is probably fifty, sixty foot high, concrete floors, and he climbed on the railing of the third tier and threatened to jump We had a pod full of inmates, so you not only got the inmate threatening to jump, but you're trying to lock down the rest of the inmates so you can deal with the guy that's gonna jump. And think about if he just slipped, for example. You don't know if that's a distraction so that something else more brutal and violent can occur, because all eyes are gonna go to that while something else goes on over here. That's the epitomy of a high stakes environment. Being able to lead under pressure, make decisions under pressure, and control something that could turn into absolute chaos in a millisecond. So, when people are like, "That's crazy." Yeah. So what do you do? We have to think fast, we have to pivot fast, and we have to execute fast, right? So if we just take those things and say, "Hey, you know what? Dr. Al, can you come into my company and help us just be faster and make more effective decisions, be more efficient?" Of course I can, 'cause I've lived it in real life where human life was at stake. Not a ROI at stake, right? I'm not demeaning ROI, but I think when we put it on the scale of the top of the Richter scale, human life is up there, and again whether this inmate jumped, slipped, et cetera, you got problems, and you got problems really quickly. And then you got a domino effect of what could trickle down. You know, how did that inmate even get up on the third tier? Now you got systematic breakdowns, maybe lack of supervision. You can see how it whirls Ed, if you can't just combat things really quickly and get to the desired result as fast as humanly possible.

Ed Drozda 13:19

Right. I think it's important to note that people should not misconstrue that the level of acuity in a situation like this is not unlike the importance of what goes on in a business. It may not be a life and death situation, but the premise is the same, regardless of the level of acuity. Yes? It still matters.

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 13:40

Yep, and actually where it matters is emotionally. I think that's a very great insight on your part of what you extracted from what I said. It's absolutely important in business because that CEO that wants to win, we'll just use that term loosely, he wants to win. He wants his company to win. He wants his company to succeed. The pressure he has inside, in his heart, his soul, and his mind, especially if he's the founder and it's his life savings, he mortgaged his house. I mean, he did all kinds of stuff, he's on the verge of bankruptcy if they don't make it happen. Yeah, that's serious stuff And at that point, yes, the feelings, the pressure are no different, even though the stakes are different. But what you're feeling inside, if that inmate would've jumped that day, and he didn't because I got him off, that pressure that I felt as a senior leader that day- oh yeah. I had to perform. I had to get this guy off that third tier rail while we controlled the rest of the unit. That pressure is no different than a CEO or leadership team that's facing a huge negotiation, let's just say of a huge client that they've been working a year to obtain. Huge contract, whatever the case is. No different on the emotional and mental pressure that you're facing at that point.

Ed Drozda 14:55

A lot of times people play the comparison game. They say, "Well, it's not the same." But fundamentally, and as you said, emotionally, at the very least, it is the same. You want to keep your business alive, you want it to thrive. Emotionally what's at stake there is very significant to you.

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 15:15

Absolutely.

Ed Drozda 15:16

So you mentioned the word chaotic. This is a great word. I think a lot of people, particularly those who are in startups, very chaotic environment. So many things have to be done, but there's usually a lesser amount of people to get them done. Every individual is wearing many hats. Chaos rules. It rules in a mature business as well, but it really rules in a startup. Everything that's going on is kind of pulling things apart. But, but without stability... I mean chaos has its place, I think. But it's still necessary to have stability despite all that. What does one do in a situation like that?

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 16:03

Yeah, great question. Chaos to me is like, frantic, right? You see a little toddler at a grocery store with a frantic parent. That's chaotic. Chaotic for the parent, chaotic for the kid, chaotic for everybody in the same aisle. It's just chaos and then you're like "Well, why?" Why? It's the frantic reaction that's creating the chaos. If we think through that, a parent knows how to calm their child down, set rules. More grounded, right? There's expectations of when this child goes to the store, what their behavior's gonna be like. And kids are kids. As we go into this store, there's a framework of how you're gonna behave and what we're here to get, and yes I'm gonna let you get a bag of chips or whatever it is, right? You're the parent. So if we take that to business, chaos is usually because nobody knows what's going on, what the left hand is doing, how it affects the right hand, how that affects the right foot. Chaos is just basically lack of clarity. It's a lack of expectations. It's a lack of a framework. It's a lack of clear-cut communications. It's a lack of everything that's creating chaos. It's a lack of. It's not necessarily all the moving parts, because some people are very talented at juggling all the moving parts. For me, I can juggle a lot of moving parts. I don't lose my place bouncing in between stuff. Other people are very singular or task driven. I'm not better than anybody else. I just work a little differently. Somebody else doesn't want 63 things to do. They only want five, and they wanna prioritize them in the order that they wanna prioritize them, as long as that meets the goals of the company. But think about how much can be accomplished if there's just role clarity and clear communication on the expectations of why this part is important. So even for the single task person, "hey, I know I've given you three things to do, but this is the most important thing I want you to do." "Al, get these six things done today." Okay, cool. Now, where you derail in leadership is that single task person where you go and dump something else to take a priority. "No, you need to give that to me." When you start thinking about chaos, chaos can be controlled very easily with effective communication and role clarity and knowing exactly what you wanna expect out of the minute, the hour, the day. The more frantic the environment, the more chaotic the environment, you gotta huddle up. You gotta do more frequent check-ins because if not, it's gonna domino in the wrong effect, and now you've created a more chaotic environment. If there's a lot of moving parts, you gotta interject quickly so that you fix something just like that so you can keep growing, if that makes sense. So when leaders are like, "Hey, Dr. Al, I don't know man, my company is just chaotic," well, usually it's a very simple fix, but it takes effort. It takes effort and it takes intention, and you as the leader have to drive that effort and intention. If you've got a chaotic environment and you're golfing or you're hanging out on your luxury yacht, guess what brother? It ain't gonna fix itself. You gotta bootstrap and get in your company, be the first one there and the last one to leave, and take ownership of getting out of a chaotic environment. Lead from the front, and people will respond. They will. People inherently wanna do a good job, I promise you that. Yes, there's a small percentage, but inherently, most people are good people that wanna do a good job for you. They're just confused because you're not providing enough direction. You're not giving them the clarity, the tools, the support, the systems, the whatever, right? But if you do that and understand that people operate differently, sometimes you gotta tweak. You can't cookie cutter stuff. You gotta tweak for that person's trait patterns, how they operate innately. You will get the best out of people, but it takes effort.

Ed Drozda 19:55

Right. Right. I'm hearing that clarity can help to control the response to a chaotic situation. Can clarity also prevent a chaotic situation from occurring, at least in some cases?

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 20:16

Yeah, and it doesn't mean that you're gonna have a perfect day. Just providing clarity to people so that there's a sense of direction, a sense of expectation, a sense of standard, a sense of deliverability, whatever the case is, and what's the pivot when something does happen? You need plan B, and that needs to be as clear as daylight as well. When I did special operations we had plan A, plan B, sometimes plan C, and then we kinda had a when everything goes to kit and kaboodle man, and we had a different term for that, right?

Ed Drozda 20:48

I know. I was waiting for it, but go ahead anyway.

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 20:51

And then we had that plan, and here's the reality. We drilled and practiced all of those. We repped out plan A. We repped out plan B. If there was a C we repped it out, and if there was the, "Ah, what's happening?" we repped that out so that when in a situation that we responded to and A didn't work and we reverted to B, and B didn't work and we reverted to C, C didn't work and we reverted to the final one, guess what? We had drilled it a million times over so this was not new territory. This was trained response. We had somewhat of a lived experience. We knew where people's strengths were at, things of that nature. So if you take that to business Ed, again take the environment out of it and just take it to business, leaders sometimes expect their employees to come up with solutions. Sometimes that's appropriate, and at this level it's expected. But you can't get mad at somebody for creating a solution that they think is right if you haven't given them any rules, if you haven't given them the framework that they have to operate in. You can't be the leader that says, "Hey man, no it's okay. If it doesn't work just come up with a solution," and then you ream them because they came up with a solution that didn't work in your framework or how your brain thinks. That's not fair.

Ed Drozda 22:10

Not at all.

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 22:11

Because I'm doing my best with the resources that I personally have.

Ed Drozda 22:15

I'm not you, and if you're not clear what you're looking for I'll never achieve what you're looking for. The clarity thing is really important. I use the term clarity to some degree interchangeably with communication, because I think communication requires clarity. I don't think they're one and the same, but I see a melding here. Think about these situations. You mentioned practice, practice, practice. Going through all the possible scenarios so as to at least have some form of lived experience. Guaranteed it won't be the same as in the moment, no matter what you do. But it is lived experience, and there's something there in your capacity to recall, to say, "Okay, I know what I did then," and so when you get to that moment, when you're in the middle of an exercise, when you're in the middle of a issue at work, whatever the case might be, you are perhaps motivated, okay? You're motivated to achieve. But what I'm hearing you say is you really have to have the behavioral instinct to direct that motivation. It's not enough to be motivated. It has to be really focused.

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 23:35

Yeah, for sure. Motivation only gets you so far You can feel motivated when you wake up and then three minutes later you're not motivated. If you don't have the tools, the skills, the expectations, the standards, the clarity, and things of that nature, motivation is just motivation. It's how do you execute. When we talk about pressure, to whatever degree pressure is, motivation doesn't get you through pressure. Actual skills get you through pressure. You wanna have a culture, which by the way is a feeling 'cause it's subjective. You wanna have a culture where people feel motivated to be successful at your company or whatever the case may be, right? That's great, but then how do you motivate? If we use motivation loosely, some people are motivated by money, some people are motivated by the freedom to make a decision, some people are motivated because you actually told them what's expected, and that's motivation for them enough, they know the rules. They're systems workflow kind of people. So you motivate them because you gave them a framework to operate within. It releases a lot of pressure from them. But then, you take a guy who's got a big visionary pattern, he doesn't want the framework. You gotta let him loose a little bit. Don't put him in a box. Let this guy go free a little bit. So again, motivation is different for different people, but at the end of the day everybody's gotta have the skills. And if we drive this to sales real quick Ed, 'cause this just popped in my head you think of Wolf of Wall Street, which is a great movie if you haven't watched it. It's hilarious, but you think about salespeople being motivated and let's take the worst kind of sales known to mankind, door to door. Door to door. If you could go knock 'cause you're doing siding or solar or roofs or whatever the case may be, I mean man it takes guts and glory to be like, "I'm gonna be a door-to-door salesman." So you can have somebody who's motivated to wanna be successful in door-to-door sales, but if you're not giving them the tools and the skill set to be successful when somebody answers the door, well the motivation is gonna dissipate. The greatest tool and skill set that you need to teach this person that goes door to door is to not get demotivated when somebody doesn't answer the door, flips you off, looks through the window, slams the door on you, tells you to get off their property, that you just gotta be like, "Okay, have a nice day." The sales guy can be as motivated as he wants, but if you don't give them the tools that they need to succeed and be consistent in that environment, guess what? He's gonna give up. He's just gonna give up even though he started very motivated, y-y-if that makes sense.

Ed Drozda 26:02

Does make sense. I think much of the takeaway for me from this conversation is that as leaders in business, we have to appreciate the necessity for very clear communication. Structure, standards, guidelines are important for people, for all people. They need to be clear on what they're supposed to do. Give them the tools to get it done, and understanding what they're doing is part of that, one of those tools for sure. The idea that left to our own devices we'll flounder, is something to note. And a certain amount of discipline is necessary. Discipline as in focusing the energy of the people in the business to follow, to seek the vision. A chaotic situation can evolve anywhere. But it seems to be something that is preventable to some degree if the aforementioned communication and clarity are provided. And when it does occur, the chaos needn't have to be a disaster. It can actually be a positive thing. Again, this is what I'm hearing. We have to communicate through that and make sure that everyone is on the same page. Fair?

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 27:17

Fair. Very, very fair.

Ed Drozda 27:19

I've really enjoyed the conversation. But before we go, I wanna ask you is there anything more that you'd like to leave us with?

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 27:27

At the end of the day, if I had to give one takeaway from everything I said, it's actually if you're a leader, is the power of self-awareness. The more honest you can be with yourself about where you're at humanistically, personally, leadership-wise, things of that nature, you then can combat wherever your deficits are and build a plan. And understand as you build that plan, share that plan, and then do the same for everybody who's a direct report for you, is take the time to really help them be self-aware and then build a meaningful plan. Because in somebody's success, let's just say there's eight things that they have to do well to be successful in this role. Some of those things are probably a 9 or a 10 out of 10. A few of those things, they're a seven or an eight, and a few might be a five or a six, and I hope this isn't the case, but somebody might be a three. Okay. So that means you can't talk to them as if they're a cookie cutter type object. You gotta create a personal plan for them that's tailored for them. In the juvenile corrections place we call them special management programs In schools they call them IEPs, right? You've gotta have an individualized plan knowing that somebody's strengths are here, here's where they're above average, here's where they're mediocre, and here's where they're on the struggle bus. And then help them be aware of X, and then build a tangible plan with metrics and clear communication and clarity around that so you can see development. So you reward them for development because you're developing yourself if you do this correctly. The reward becomes development and growth, which then leads to results. So that would be my one takeaway if you had to put it all in a kit and caboodle. It starts with self-awareness, Ed.

Ed Drozda 29:35

Al, thank you very much, it's been a real pleasure for me to talk to you. I've learned a lot as I'm sure others will as well. Again folks, I'm joined by Dr. Al Filip Neary. Dr. Al is the founder of Cohesion HQ.

Dr. Al Philip-Neri 29:51

Thanks for having me on, Ed.

Ed Drozda 29:52

You are very welcome. Folks, this is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and here at The Water Trough, I want to wish you a healthy business, and I want to remind you, as we've discussed about today, take a good look at yourself. Make sure you know who you are. See you soon.