ACT for Leadership: Using Acceptance and Commitment Training to Develop Crisis-Resilient Change Managers.

On March 6, 2010, during a stress reduction symposium at the American Psychological Association's Psychologically Healthy Workplace Conference in Washington DC, an audience member from the Federal Consulting Agency asked an invited presenter: "How do you help a government leader work effectively in a stressful situation? These leaders have a lot to deal with and there is a lot of pressure. They are change managers who also do crisis management. The citizens want them to be crisis- resilient change managers." The invited presenter said, "There are two things for leaders in this situation to understand: they need a better understanding of how to lead change and how to manage the stress of change. Next question." The non-answer from a renowned expert not only took one question and made it two, but missed the spirit of the original question: Government leaders need to be assisted in how to lead others publicly during crisis and manage their own private struggles while producing change in the community. So the question is "Given the difficulty of many leadership challenges, how can behavioral science help leaders commit to principled action in the face of inevitable emotional strain?" "Crisis-resiliency" is defined as an ability to recover from adversity and respond effectively during a stressful situation, especially when beleaguered by private events, such as fatigue, frustration, and self-doubt. "Change management" is conceptualized as executing an articulated action plan aimed at moving from a current situation to a desired future state, even in the face of minimal feedback. Executive coaching can aim at accelerating a leader's abilities in both of these domains. There are myriad approaches to executive coaching (Peltier, 2001), and the evidence-based executive coaching movement posits that translating empirical research into practice will lead to the most favorable outcomes (Wampold & Bhati, 2004). Stober & Grant (2006) suggest that "an evidence-based foundation for professional coaching that moves ... toward contextually relevant coaching methodologies that incorporate both rigor and the lived experience of practitioners and client, will result in a comprehensive, flexible, and strong model of coaching" (p. 6). Acceptance and Commitment Training has an evidence-based foundation, is explicitly built from the philosophy of contextualism, stems from the staunchly rigorous science of behavior analysis, explicitly incorporates experiential exercises for the client, and has an aim of enhancing the leader's behavioral flexibility. As such, ACTraining is up to the challenge of creating an evidence-based framework for executive coaching. WHY ACT IS UP TO THE CHALLENGE Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT; pronounced "act"), an evidence-based modern cognitive-behavior therapy approach, has been and applied to organizational settings (Hayes, Bond, Barnes-Holmes, & Austin, 2007). ACT has shown promise in clinical research for over two decades (Zettle & Hayes, 1986), and has since been shown to influence many important behavioral health measures (Hayes, Luoma, Bond, Masuda, & Lillis, 2006). When utilized as an organizational training model, it is typically called Acceptance and Commitment Training ("ACTraining") because it is not a therapeutic endeavor. ACTraining has demonstrated effectiveness in increasing work performance (Bond & Flaxman, 2006), reducing work stress (Bond & Bunce, 2003; Flaxman & Bond, 2010), increasing innovation (Bond & Bunce, 2000), improving acceptance of new training at work (Luoma et al., 2007) and reducing work errors (Bond & Bunce, 2003). Managers trained with the ACT model can have a measureable influence on the performance of their supervisees (Bond, F., personal communication). With these accomplishments in organizational settings, the ACT model seems reasonably applicable to answer the question posed by the Federal Consulting Agency consultant. …