Self, People, and Purpose
As I reflect on how the events of September 11, 2001, shaped my leadership I’m struck by the fact that the instinct to lead in that moment of unprecedented crisis followed the essential advice that I often offer leaders today: take care of yourself, take care of your people, and hold on to the purpose.
On September 11, 2001, I was a new executive officer wrangling decisions with my colleagues during the Tuesday morning meeting with the Chief of Staff. When the front office assistant interrupted our meeting the look on her face stopped us all in our tracks. As a leadership team we had no context for what we were about to be thrust into. It all became too clear as we watched the smoke rise from the Pentagon moments after the plane struck the building. Grasping the reality that we were under attack was the most surreal moment of that morning. We scrambled to determine what protocol might guide what happens next.
I watched the Pentagon burn from our offices. I watched a city that runs on order and procedure unravel, and I watched something in myself and in the people around me that no training had ever prepared me to face. Twenty-five years later, what stays with me is how fast instinct took over where training left off. Crisis doesn't wait for you to consult a manual. It wakes you up.
Take Care of Self
The first thing I did was call my husband.
I didn't deliberate about it. I didn't weigh it against the dozen other things that needed my attention. My hand was already dialing before my mind had finished processing what I was looking at. I was lucky to be able to reach him on the digital flip phones we carried back then. I was grateful to learn that he was already headed to get our children from school. That call lasted maybe thirty seconds. It accomplished almost nothing operationally. And it was, without question, the most important thing I did all morning.
I think about that instinct a lot now. We're taught, especially as leaders, that the crisis comes first and the personal comes second. That stepping away, even for a moment, to check on the people you love is somehow a distraction from the job. My experience that day taught me the opposite. That call didn't take anything away from my ability to lead. It gave me the ground to stand on so I could lead.
Later that morning, I found a moment to call my mother in California and tell her I was okay. We still didn't have complete information about the fourth plane. I remember how strange it felt to make that call in the middle of everything else going on. Taking thirty seconds to steady the people who loved me steadied me. A leader who is silently unraveling from unaddressed fear for their own family has nothing left to offer anyone else. Self-preservation, in this narrow sense, isn't selfish. It's the first load-bearing wall.
Take Care of Your People
Shortly after 9:30 am I returned to my office to check on my team. What I found was a group of people beginning to panic. Fear had taken control of the team. My Chief of External Relations was sitting silently, watching it all unfold on the television in her office. My Deputy Director was visibly panicking, moving too fast, amplifying the fear. Up and down the hallway, people who normally showed me how to hold the line were trying to reach loved ones or huddling together their offices.
I did the only thing that made sense: I went door to door. Not to issue directives from behind a desk, but to physically be present with each person — to look them in the eye, ask what they knew, and help them figure out their own next move. Some needed information. Some needed permission to leave. Some just needed someone to acknowledge, out loud, that this was as frightening as it felt. A new father on my team couldn’t reach his wife. When I got to his office, he looked up terror stricken, “I’ve got to get home.” Another employee didn’t have a car and walked with a cane. We had no idea what the state of metro was and there was no way he was walking anywhere. Together we put the word out that he needed help getting home.
By late morning, my instinct had sharpened into something more concrete: I made sure every single person on my team had an actual plan to get home — not a vague intention, but a plan. Where are you going? How are you getting there? Do your people know where you are? In a city that was, at that exact moment, gridlocked and evacuating itself with no one really in charge, a plan was the one thing I could help them with. It was small. It was also everything. Calming a room down, I learned, is not one conversation. It's fifteen individual ones, each a little different, each requiring you to read what that particular person actually needed in that particular moment.
Reinforce the Purpose
Even as all of this was happening, the senior officers were meeting, not once, but several times that morning, reconvening as new information came in, revising what we thought we knew, deciding what came next. We scrambled to determine what protocol might guide what happens next.
What strikes me now is how much of that repeated meeting wasn't really about the decisions themselves. It was about reminding each other why we were still standing there instead of running for our own cars. We were part of the system that keeps the banking sector functioning, that keeps money moving, that keeps a country's confidence intact even when its capital is a smoking, gridlocked mess. Nobody said that out loud in so many words. But every time we reconvened, it was implicit in our actions. It was up to us to create the calm for the system to function.
That, I think, is the third instinct — the one that only shows up after the first two are handled. You can't ask people to hold onto purpose while they're still worried about their kids or their own safety. But once those things are tended to, purpose is what keeps a room from dissolving into individual panic. It's what turns a hallway of frightened people back into a team.
What I'm Still Thinking About
As a newly minted executive, I didn’t have the playbook for navigating the magnitude of the crisis we faced. My actions that day felt small: a phone call, reassurance, a plan, a reconvened meeting. But maybe that's the actual shape of instinct in a crisis. Not grand decisions, but a sequence: secure yourself, secure your people, then - and only then - hold the line on why any of it matters. I didn't learn that from a manual. I learned it in a hallway, on a Tuesday morning, when all I had was instinct.
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About Anna & Executive Horizons
Anna Alvarez Boyd, is the founder of Executive Horizons LLC, a consulting and leadership coaching business. Anna brings over 30 years of experience as a trusted senior leader to her clients. Her coaching starts with the belief that every individual is talented, creative, and whole. She supports clients to deeper self-discovery, through a unique, tailored approach for each person that includes skill building, reflective practices and leadership development.
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