by Maggie Craddock
The Lifeboat Process
We all like to think we are prepared for the unexpected. When it comes to our professional self-image, most of us strive to be adaptable, collaborative, and resilient. Yet in my work as an executive coach, I’ve listened to many people describe professional situations where they were caught off guard and discovered that their reactions under pressure surprised them.
Whether it’s a thought leader who gets tongue-tied at a critical moment or a manager who loses his or her temper during a staff meeting, many people are bewildered by their own conduct when the stakes are high.
These eye-opening gaps between how people hope they will respond and how they actually react are symptomatic of a breakdown in trust. This may start as a breakdown in trust between organizations and their employees, but it can gradually evolve into a breakdown in trust within individuals themselves.
Here are just a few of the professional challenges people have shared with me and the questions these situations have prompted. Circumstances such as these leave many hardworking people feeling emotionally paralyzed, tempted to make impulsive decisions, and striving to please external authority figures at precisely the moment they should be listening to their authentic inner voice:
My boss just resigned unexpectedly: Who can I trust to help keep my career on track?
Power struggles keep erupting at my firm: How do I handle my emotional reactions to dysfunctional behavior and protect my professional reputation?
Earnings are down and our firm needs to run leaner: How do I convince my top talent to do hands-on work they had previously been delegating?
Everyone in my department is under constant pressure: How do I find the inner strength to stay patient and present with my family while keeping up at work?
What do you do when unexpected problems arise that threaten to overwhelm you, undermine your ability to trust others, or even compromise your ability to align your personal and professional values? In this book, I offer a method for survival that I call the Lifeboat Process. This process will help you trust yourself under pressure, adapt as necessary, and take effective action to keep your job, life, relationships, and career afloat.
Stories help us unlock personal truths that we can’t access when our minds are focused on routine responsibilities. The Lifeboat Process stems from lessons I have gathered from the Titanic and formalized into a process of exploration, discussion, and awareness. I have used this process to help clients leverage their resources in all kinds of unpredictable and even potentially catastrophic professional environments, whether they are entering the workforce, contemplating a job transition, seeking to become a more effective leader, or navigating a corporate or professional disaster.
This method uses the events of the Titanic’s sinking — and most particularly, how a group of strangers managed to survive together in Lifeboat #6 — to draw profound lessons for navigating the upheaval and difficult challenges in today’s workplace. Using the real-life experiences of these maritime survivors, I have created a practical guide for spotting trouble, managing fear, trusting oneself, fostering cooperative and supportive teams, and taking simple yet effective action in any crisis. By mastering the skills in this book, you will adopt a transformative mindset that can serve you throughout your life.
Whether you are trying to figure out what you genuinely want to do professionally, what kind of culture will compliment your strengths, or even how to be a better parent and partner — this process can help. It will improve how you see yourself, clarify your expectations of others, and help you foster a sense of trust that’s vital to making sound decisions at critical turning points in your life and career.
To thrive in changing times, you will have to reinvent yourself more than once in the course of your career. In fact, job change happens more frequently today than perhaps in any previous generation. And every time you change jobs, your professional agility will be tested, along with your emotional resilience and even physical stamina. The pragmatic demands of the workplace challenge all of us to succeed in ways that reflect our authentic selves.
Thankfully, the story of the Titanic contains vital lessons for anyone who feels stuck in a dead-end job or a professional role that stunts their potential and damages their self-esteem. This is because, when the Titanic sank, everything that had defined these passengers sank with it — and they were left with nothing but their innate capacity to relate to themselves and others if they wanted to survive.
They did survive, and this book shows you how to learn from their experiences and thrive.
The Titanic Story: From Big Ship to Lifeboat
The Titanic was considered unsinkable, and so it came as something of a shock when the ship unexpectedly struck an iceberg and became fatally damaged. The crew was unprepared to abandon ship, and there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone aboard.
For those Titanic passengers and crew who made it into one of the lifeboats, there were new challenges. They suddenly found themselves in tiny vessels adrift in the treacherous, freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean. In the span of a few hours, those who were still alive went from enjoying themselves aboard the largest, most extravagant luxury liner in history to facing imminent death if they didn’t overcome their terror and pull together as a group.
Perhaps the most famous and well-known story concerns Lifeboat #6 and how these brave men and women managed to face their deepest fears, overcome a leadership challenge, trust one another when their lives were on the line, and take effective group action until help arrived. For today’s readers, I believe many of the most relevant lessons from this part of the Titanic story involve how some of the individuals on this lifeboat overcame their personal fears and united as a group to beat the odds.
At first, many passengers refused to accept that the Titanic was sinking, and in the lifeboats, some people became overwhelmed by their emotions and unable to do anything. Some couldn’t adapt to the situation and the upending of expected roles and norms. They remained stuck in what I call the “Big Ship mindset.”
What makes this story so valuable for our careers today is that, on that fateful night, the survivors in that tiny vessel needed to make a fundamental mental shift if the group was going to survive. In essence, the Lifeboat Process guides us through this shift and helps us adopt what I refer to as the “Lifeboat mindset.” This involves letting go of unquestioned assumptions, acknowledging danger, facing our fears, putting aside our assigned or expected roles, trusting ourselves and others, and working as a group to help save everyone.
The Titanic is a powerful metaphor for people today struggling to put the unexpected changes they face in their lives and careers into perspective. In this book, I have organized lessons we can all glean from these Titanic survivors into a process for helping clients adopt the Lifeboat mindset to explore and solve workplace dilemmas of all kinds.
For instance, in many cases, when unexpected problems threaten a company or a department, the people involved report experiencing a breakdown of norms and trust. In some organizations there is so little trust that people feel terribly isolated, disconnected from colleagues and friends, and distanced from their authentic selves. Unable to make sense of this isolation, some people make adjustments to keep themselves sane. Often, these adjustments involve striving to act like everything is just fine on the outside. However, a complex range of emotions often simmers on the inside, and if people avoid exploring and managing these emotions, the more likely they are to make a difficult situation worse by reacting ineffectively or unpredictably under stress. In a worst-case scenario, if a situation undermines someone’s trust in themselves, this affects all parts of their lives, including their family and personal relationships.
Using denial to stay sane in an insane situation is understandable, if misguided. It’s terrifying to discover that people entrusted to lead and safeguard our professional futures are being deceptive or are steering a company into disaster. Out of a natural desire to protect themselves, people often stop being emotionally honest, which damages their connection with their own truth. Like the captain and crew on the Titanic who refused to heed warnings of icebergs until it was too late, people in today’s workforce can hide from and deny their own warning signs: cutting themselves off from their feelings, refusing to acknowledge problems, and avoiding taking meaningful risks on their own behalf. Often in the name of job security, people can choose to believe what leaders and others tell them is safe rather than trusting their own judgment.
The irony is that, today, there is little to no job security.
We all know this. How could we not? Companies go through sudden waves of downsizing or reorganization with disturbing regularity. Unexpected management shake-ups result in cultural dysfunction. Companies are acquired or merge. Funding for start-ups dries up. Scandals break out. Senior leaders are disgraced and even go to prison. Seemingly solid companies abruptly go out of business, move, or change direction.
People who cultivate the Lifeboat mindset learn to expect the unexpected, no matter how big or safe their company ship seems to be. They remain aware of potential danger and attempt to take action before it strikes. If they can avoid a problem, why wouldn’t they? When they can’t — and they get caught up in a tumult of change — they ready the lifeboats and prepare to survive, whatever that means specifically in their situation. Perhaps they retool their skills so they can get along in their organization as it changes. Or perhaps they jump to a new company or even a different business before it’s too late.
That said, the truth is, at some point everyone will be surprised by unexpected workplace problems. We will be caught unprepared. When this happens, will we panic and deny the problem, then flounder and make things worse? Or will we recognize this situation, pause to handle our emotions and assess what’s happening, then take action to foster the group effort that helps rescue everyone — before the situation becomes fatal to our job or career? Helping you manage the unexpected and survive is what this book is all about.
The Day My Big Ship Hit an Iceberg
I, too, was once a crew member working on a “Big Ship.” In the 1990s, I was the lead portfolio manager of a flagship fund for a Wall Street investment firm. I sat in a glass-walled office overlooking the trading floor, where I could observe the people on my team who were responsible for executing the positions as we bought and sold securities. I could also observe another team working for a different fund with the firm.
I remember one day in particular, which I now think of as my Titanic day. Things were actually going great. That morning, we chose our positions at our regular trading meeting. The trades were executed smoothly. No errors. No problems. We tracked our positions during the day. International currency markets cooperated, moving roughly in the directions we’d hoped.
High fives all around!
At the end of the day, I trudged the half mile or so back to my apartment. I walked down the hall to my apartment door, shoved the key in the lock, and turned it. At that moment, I realized something was wrong. I was feeling anxious and depressed. In spite of the smile I’d kept plastered on my face all day long as things went our way financially, I was emotionally drained.
I went inside, collapsed on the sofa, and lay there trying to understand why I felt the way I did.
Running a portfolio requires making high-stakes decisions on a daily basis. As the fund manager, the final decision was always mine. While I always did my homework, I also relied on the skills of my team. Some of the men and women in our department had more experience with the specialized securities we traded than I did, and I had learned to rely on them for opinions and advice. Still, there were many times when the decision came down to gut feeling.
I had to learn how to listen to my gut, interpret what it was saying, and trust it enough to take action based on its signals. Often an emotion, an instinct, would alert me to something that was a little off or needed further attention; a danger had to be avoided or an opportunity leaped on.
That evening, as I lay on my couch feeling miserable, I pushed myself to examine my feelings. Why, after such a successful day, was I feeling so down and drained?
As I reviewed the day’s events, the reason became clear. While my team had been whooping it up and celebrating our wins, the team on the trading desk right next to ours had run into trouble. A new hire on this team had made a significant mistake when he entered the information on a trading ticket. The error created an unintended position that went terribly wrong. It ended up being a costly financial error for our firm, and it clearly shook up this new guy and the team he supported.
As I got to the root of my feelings, I felt some relief that our team had avoided a disaster. But over the course of the evening, it dawned on me that I had still absorbed a lot of the emotional stress from this situation. Basically, I’d worn home other people’s feelings like a dress that didn’t fit!
The next morning I dragged myself into work, not feeling much better. I knew I was the sensitive sort, so I figured maybe my reaction was “just me.” More of “my stuff.” Even so, I decided to check in with my team members to see how they felt as each person dropped by my office to discuss that day’s positions. To my surprise, everyone confessed to feeling exhausted and emotionally drained, too. Roger, the most macho trader on the floor, even brought up his feelings before I asked him.
“For some reason I was really depressed on the way home last night,” Roger told me as he plopped into a chair in my office. “I called an old friend and we went out and got hammered. I’ve got a monster headache this morning.”
I told him my theory that we were reacting to the pain and suffering of the other team.
“That’s it!” Roger agreed in amazement. “I’d totally forgotten about that. Freaky that we’d both react to it so strongly, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” I said. “What’s freaky is that we just assumed that a dramatic emotional situation like that wouldn’t have an emotional impact on us.”
Yet that’s how many workplaces operate. People go through all kinds of emotional trials and fail to realize how profoundly they are affected by the group’s energy. Instead, you’re supposed to act like everything’s fine, business as usual, stick to your job, and never mind that crunching sound as the Big Ship hits some unexpected object and water starts flooding in.
Making the Lifeboat Shift
That day on the trading floor and that evening of reflection on the couch eventually led me to leave my job on Wall Street. I didn’t leave in response to one incident. I left in response to a dangerous mindset that permeated our culture.
You see, on a live trading floor, you never have perfect information. You assess what you can know and rely on your instincts and experience to help you make strategic decisions before the market moves away from you. However, our corporate culture was inadvertently conditioning us to suppress our feelings. This was stunting an important strength necessary for making strategic decisions under pressure. This strength is vital for making the most important investment of our lives — what to do with our careers.
I departed the Big Ship of the established company — where I had been a Lipper Award–winning fund manager and had a bright future — to start my own executive coaching firm. I made what I now call a “Lifeboat shift”: I realized I needed to change my mindset, and my job, in order to align my career with my values. I recognized that I wasn’t living according to my authentic self, and I wanted to change my attitude and my approach to life and work.
During the transitional period that followed, I also sat down to write my first book, The Authentic Career. Its purpose is to help readers transcend the self-imposed limits that may have led them to narrow their professional options. As a coach and author, my goal is to help people dig deep within themselves to build careers that bring meaning to their lives.
Over the course of the ensuing decade, my clients thrived and so did my firm. In addition to coaching, I was working in executive education and doing public speaking. It was a time when many talented professionals felt they could creatively balance their personal goals and professional responsibilities in a reasonably healthy way.
Then came the 2007 downturn triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis. Most of my clients weathered the storm without losing their jobs, but there was a tremendous emotional and physical toll. I got phone calls at all hours from clients saying, “I’m okay, but the relationships between people at my firm are deteriorating due to the financial pressure we are all facing.” Clients described the interpersonal dynamics with their professional peers as “crazier than a holiday dinner with dysfunctional in-laws.” Clients who had reclaimed the personal power to identify what they genuinely wanted to pursue professionally felt powerless all over again.
In response, I wrote my second book, Power Genes, which is based on a startlingly simple premise — that power is about relationships. It’s about your relationship with yourself, with other people, and with organizations. This definition of power helped my clients grasp how developing an understanding of power styles could advance their careers. It also helped them understand how their power style, and that of others, morphed under pressure — and why.
Then the winds of change shifted again.
I noticed that an increasing number of my colleagues and clients were beginning to describe different kinds of workplace challenges. These originated more from organizational dysfunctions than from interpersonal style issues. For example, colleagues I was working with at universities were reporting a values gap. Full-time faculty members described situations where there appeared to be a lack of alignment between the explicit values of their academic institutions and the behavior that was implicitly rewarded by their dean when people were being considered for tenure. My corporate clients, who had learned to navigate interpersonal relationships with agility, described a similar values gap. People in a wide variety of industries reported a crisis in corporate values. They described scenes of dysfunction and fear:
“Our best people are getting fired…”
“Former friends are stabbing each other in the back just to survive…”
“It’s not about what you do anymore, it’s all about how you look…”
“Forget culture and values, we have no clear direction for where our firm is heading…”
“Peers have told me privately that they feel like they have to choose between professional survival and personal integrity to keep working here…”
Comments like these prompted me to write this book.
How I Rediscovered the Titanic
In 2015, my father passed away, and my mother was living in an assisted-care facility. She needed support. To help, my husband, Charles, traveled with me to Fort Worth, Texas. The job we tackled as a team involved cleaning out the home my parents had shared for over forty years — which was also the house where I had grown up.
I felt like I faced a Mount Everest of tasks, and I had a sea of emotions to work through. Charles knew that the memories I was sifting through were heavier than any of the objects we were hauling away, so he offered to tackle the rooms on the ground floor and left me to climb the stairs to my childhood bedroom.
Still there, unchanged, were the shag carpet, beanbag chair, and LP record player of my teen years. On the bedside table — right next to where I used to lay my head — was a pile of reading material. Nestled between an old copy of Seventeen magazine and a science-fiction novel, I saw something that had been part of my private landscape as a girl — a crumbling old book, its spine held together by disintegrating duct tape. I found myself gently opening the volume, The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters — firstpublished in 1912, just months after the great ship sank.
I remembered that, as a little girl, I had picked the book out of my dad’s collection of naval histories. I would beg my mom or any rookie babysitter to read it to me. The book grabbed my imagination and pulled me into another world. I wondered what it would have felt like to be one of the passengers aboard the lifeboats, shivering in the dark, surrounded by people facing their demise and contemplating what their lives had meant. I imagined the small acts of courage, which aren’t small at all, in life-and-death situations. I thought about how these lifeboat passengers, faced with sheer terror, must have pulled together to maintain a hopeful spirit.
There are moments when the timeline of life seems circular —when something from your past aligns with your present in a way that seems preordained. That’s what happened in that old room of mine. Suddenly, my fascination with the Titanic story connected with the stories my coaching clients were sharing with me. They felt alone, powerless, and adrift. They were struggling with how to work together to survive.
A couple of months prior to clearing out my childhood home, I had finished a large coaching assignment for a New York–based law firm. Due to a combination of circumstances, the law firm had abruptly announced that it would close its doors for good. There had been no warnings. No hints. Not even office scuttlebutt. The announcement came as a bombshell, and the associates and staff were stunned, unable to accept the reality, and barely able to function, let alone think about their next moves. My job was to help them deal with the shock, come to terms with the situation, and work out a strategy to move forward.
The partner who hired me told me, “Maggie, look, this is not about helping our people get their resumés together. It’s not about giving them advice on networking. This is like trying to get everybody off the Titanic before we all go down.”
An important realization took shape in my mind as I gently turned the pages of my cherished book about the Titanic and reflected on this client’s comment. It struck me that many of the lifelong lessons that had helped me navigate my own career under pressure — and helped me guide clients through daunting times — stemmed from my early musings about those Titanic lifeboat survivors and how they had managed to tap into their inner strength in a crisis.
The more I reflected on the legendary sinking of the great ocean liner, the more I saw similarities between the experiences of the survivors and the experiences of hardworking professionals today.Aboard the Titanic, people from all walks of life were plunged into a crisis they did not imagine in their wildest dreams. Only about a third of the passengers and crew survived. Different sources cite difference statistics, but of the 2,220 or so people who were aboard, more than 1,500 perished and about 705 managed to get aboard lifeboats. Most of those in lifeboats were saved, but the experience was terrifying and transformative. The story of Lifeboat #6 is the most famous, and over the years, it’s been chronicled in books, movies, and a Broadway musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown. I tell that story again in this book, but with a new purpose: to apply their lessons of survival at sea to survival in the workplace.
From my perspective, the most timeless lessons we can glean from the Titanic story relate to how crisis affects people — how they see themselves, how they interact with one another, and how they respond as a group when faced with abrupt and potentially catastrophic change. We all wonder, as I did as a kid: How will I act? Will I survive? Will I behave heroically?
The Lifeboat Process: How to Use This Book
This book starts by retelling the story of the Titanic, from its launch in Southampton to the rescue of the last survivors by the Carpathia, and then each of the eight chapters that follow takes a closer look at certain key events and gleans important lessons for the workplace. In total, these lessons make up the Lifeboat Process. Each chapter is framed by a “lifeboat question”; these are questions we might have asked had we been on the Titanic, and they are definitely questions we should ask when workplace challenges arise today. These questions highlight what we need to focus on during the Lifeboat Process, and the rest of each chapter is, in essence, an answer to that question. Overall, these questions proceed in sequence and match the Titanic events, so that the story and the Lifeboat Process are aligned.
In addition, each chapter includes real-life examples, or “case studies,” of my actual clients as they grappled with work-related disasters and used the Lifeboat Process to succeed. These stories illustrate the process in action and show how to apply the metaphor. For confidentiality purposes, the case studies use pseudonyms and are sometimes composites of several people. That said, the situations are real, as is the dialogue.
What is the Lifeboat Process? At its most basic, it’s a shift in mindset, from the “Big Ship mindset” to the “Lifeboat mindset.” This shift in thinking can be made anytime. It can be helpful in every aspect of our lives. But it is essential in a workplace crisis when we must act effectively with others under pressure. Metaphorically, when we hit an iceberg in our lives, we must shift our thinking from minding our own business on the “big ship” to working strategically with others to survive in a “lifeboat.”
This “Lifeboat shift” in thinking changes how we relate in three ways, which will be explored in depth. First, it involves how we relate to ourselves and how we navigate our own emotions and inner challenges. When things go wrong, fear, anxiety, panic, anger, and many other difficult and unwanted emotions can emerge — which I call our “inner iceberg.” Being able to act effectively in a crisis depends first on coping with this emotional and mental challenge inside ourselves; otherwise, we risk acting in self-defeating ways. If we have been conditioned by the Big Ship mindset to play our role, to do what others tell us, to not cause trouble, and to suppress our true feelings, this makes it even more important to restore our connection to our authentic selves before workplace drama undermines our professional lives.
The second area is interpersonal awareness and how we interact with others under pressure. Once the Titanic slipped beneath the ocean, the power structure or hierarchy of command was less important than interpersonal influence. Rank didn’t matter. Personal authority won out over sanctioned authority, and informal leadership was respected over official titles. Informal leadership means trusting oneself, supporting others to overcome their fear and trust themselves, and promoting an attitude of joint effort to solve common problems, no matter what your expertise. To do this, we have to be aware of others and pay attention to all aspects of verbal and nonverbal communication.
The third area involves working with the group itself, which means leveraging the group’s diverse strengths and pulling together. In a lifeboat situation, people competing with one another to call the shots can leave everyone dead in the water. Collaboration becomes a survival skill. What this means in real life depends on the circumstances, but the actions we take make a difference. The passengers on Lifeboat #6 had few resources, but they used what they had to stay warm, stay afloat, and stay determined to live long enough to be rescued. In the end, they were in the water for seven hours, which was plenty of time to despair and give up. They didn’t, and the stories of how they survived through trusting one another and using their resources effectively provide timeless inspiration for us all.
Here is a brief overview of the eight questions that make up the Lifeboat Process, which proceeds step-by-step to help you operate authentically when the stakes are high:
1. Is this ship safe? Generations of people have been fascinated with the simple question: If the Titanic had been better prepared, could this tragedy have been prevented? Probably. Is your company prepared? The first step in the Lifeboat Process is assessing the environment where you work. Does it align with your values? Does it embody the Big Ship mindset? If it’s an option, should you leave now or perhaps not board at all?
2. What do I do if I sense trouble? The Titanic ignored warnings about icebergs. Even as Titanic launched, there were issues that led some crew members and passengers to sense trouble. But no one felt authorized to speak up or take action. However, by pausing and assessing when you notice red flags, you can recognize problems both on the horizon and in your emotional reactions to danger.
3. When is it time to get in a lifeboat? People sometimes deny problems or delay their reactions to them, hoping to fix them before they are noticed. Both happened on the Titanic, and this made the inevitable evacuation worse. Making the “Lifeboat shift” in our mindset is critical to addressing problems proactively.
4. What if I freeze in a crisis? The Big Ship mindset conditions us to ignore, minimize, or suppress our feelings. This can create an “inner iceberg” of difficult emotions that erupt in a crisis, causing us to freeze when we need to act. When people aren’t aligned with their authentic selves and personal values, they can break down under pressure. Once a crisis arrives, the first goal is to recognize, acknowledge, and manage our own emotional response.
5. How do I find inner strength under pressure? When the unexpected strikes, the solution isn’t in the employee handbook. Business as usual doesn’t work, and the old norms don’t apply. Thus, we need to cultivate the emotional agility and personal judgment to respond authentically and strategically under pressure. We empower ourselves with the personal authority to become problem solvers in a crisis.
6. Who can I trust in a crisis? The first person we need to trust is ourselves, by summoning the courage necessary to admit our vulnerabilities and limits. This allows us to assess what we need to solve a problem and evaluate who within a group will help. This also cultivates the discernment necessary to clarify who to trust and why to trust them under pressure. We learn to ignore titles and status and seek to align with people who also embody the Lifeboat mindset.
7. How do we survive together? The answer to this question is simple: by adopting the attitude that we must all look out for one another. We need everyone’s help to pull through, and this means everyone needs to be supported and included. We treat everyone equally and don’t dismiss anyone as “expendable.”
8. What will be my story? The Titanic survivors had no idea how long they’d be stuck at sea, and neither do we in our lives. We just have to keep rowing, having faith that taking the next right action in the present moment will ultimately bring success. This approach doesn’t just help us survive — itensures that we thrive. We write our stories of survival andsuccess continually, through our ongoing actions, by adopting the Lifeboat mindset throughout our lives, rather than waiting for a crisis in order to change.
Ultimately, when it comes to our authentic leadership potential, the Lifeboat Process teaches us that, when the emotions of a group shift from fear to trust, the collective mindset shifts from self-help to us-help.
By gleaning lessons from the Titanic story, the Lifeboat Process helps clarify what distinguishes people who respond effectively under pressure from those who stay stuck. This isn’t just related to how people think, although being thoughtful is important. This isn’t just about how people feel, although cultivating the patience to identify and accept feelings is central. This is about navigating the inner challenges that arise when a crisis hits, tapping into our deeper strengths under pressure, and working with others to solve problems in ways that align with our values and authentic selves. This is foundational to charting your own course in the workplace and in your life.
The Titanic offers us timeless lessons about survival in any situation. My hope is that the ideas in this book will give you an even deeper appreciation for why being true to yourself is vital — because sustainable success is an inside job.
Let the voyage begin.
About the Author:
MAGGIE CRADDOCK, President and CEO, Workplace Relationships, is a veteran executive coach known for her work with Fortune 500 CEOs and senior management. She has been featured on CNBC, ABC News, and National Public Radio, and has written a wide range of nationally syndicated articles on emotional agility in the workplace and her methodology has been discussed in publications ranging from the Harvard Business Review to Oprah Magazine. A certified therapist and author of The Authentic Career and Power Genes, Craddock has been a popular keynote speaker at leadership conferences, executive education programs, university and industry networking associations and personal growth seminars. Before founding her executive coaching firm, she worked as a lead portfolio manager working for Scudder, Stevens and Clark, and received two Lipper Awards for top national fund performance: Best Short Term Multi-Market Income and Best World Income Fund over $1 billion in size. Craddock received an M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics, an MSW from New York University and a BA in Economics from Smith College.
Excerpted from the book Lifeboat. Copyright © by Maggie Craddock. Reprinted with permission from New World Library.