After 20 years at MSF, Jean-Baptiste summarizes what he has learned in 10 words: to be normal, stable, calm, in abnormal contexts. That’s already a lot.
The last sentence of the interview caught my full attention.
“Being normal, stable, calm, in difficult and abnormal contexts is already a lot.”
Jean-Baptiste is head of mission at Médecins Sans Frontières. He has worked in conflict zones, epidemic contexts, areas where the unpredictable is the rule. And after more than twenty years, it is this sentence that he chooses to summarize what he has learned.
I have read it several times. And I realized that it contained something that few management training courses dare to name.
Normality as performance. Stability as a skill. Calm as a result of work.
What “normal” means under pressure
We must understand the context in which John the Baptist uses this word.
He is not talking about normality in the sense of mediocrity or lack of ambition. He speaks of normality in the sense of behavioral consistency under pressure. Be the same person, more or less, whether conditions are favorable or not. React with sufficient stability so that the teams can rely on you without wondering what state you will be in tomorrow.
In the humanitarian areas where MSF intervenes, this stability is not guaranteed. It is built, maintained, worked on. The stimulations are permanent, the stakes are high, the uncertainties are structural. Remaining “normal” under these conditions requires active effort, even if this effort is not visible.
This is precisely what makes it difficult to evaluate, and therefore, difficult to value.
The Tyranny of Visible Emotional Reactivity
Contemporary professional environments value, often despite themselves, visible emotional reactivity.
The manager who shows enthusiasm in the launch phases, who expresses indignation in the face of obstacles, who celebrates victories with intensity: he is present, committed, human. It attracts attention. It generates energy.
The stable manager, who reacts more or less the same way whatever the situation, seems less salient. Less memorable. Sometimes even less involved.
This is a misreading. And it costs organizations dearly.
Visible emotional reactivity can create enthusiasm in the short term. It also creates instability. Teams that work with emotionally unpredictable managers develop avoidance behaviors: they filter bad news, they postpone difficult decisions, they manage their manager’s mood before managing the work.
In the humanitarian sector, where bad news is a daily occurrence and difficult decisions cannot be postponed, this avoidance behavior can have direct consequences on operations. The emotional stability of the head of mission at MSF is not comfort. This is an operational condition.
What teams really observe
Jean-Baptiste talks about teams that “observe your consistency.” This wording says something important.
Employees don’t just look at what their manager says. They look at whether he acts consistently with what he says, in easy as well as difficult conditions. It’s not what the manager says that builds trust. It’s the gap, or lack of gap, between what he says and what he does when the situation gets complicated.
Emotional stability is one of the conditions for this coherence. A manager who functions well under low pressure and deteriorates under high pressure sends a signal to his teams: the managerial promise has an expiration date. Everything is good until it goes bad.
This signal is destructive for collective trust, even when it is never verbalized.
Building stability: what it takes
Emotional stability is not a fixed personality trait. It is a capacity that develops, which requires work, which requires specific conditions to exercise.
Jean-Baptiste identifies several in his own operations, built over the course of MSF missions. Real and regular rest, not facade rest. Introspection as a practice, that is to say the ability to observe one’s own states without drowning in them. And the ability to name your emotions and talk about them, rather than dealing with them alone in silence.
This last point is counterintuitive in managerial cultures that still associate strength and stoicism. But Jean-Baptiste is precise on this: recognizing weak signals and talking about them is not an admission of weakness. It is a regulatory practice that protects duration.
There is an important distinction between expressing your emotions to your teams in a disorganized way, and recognizing your own states to better regulate them. The first creates instability. The second is the remedy.
What this says about management today
The successive crises of recent years have put managers under unusual pressure for many of them. And they made visible something that stable contexts allowed to hide: the difference between managers who had built real stability and those who had never had to work on it.
The latter are no less capable. They just didn’t have the opportunity to learn.
The humanitarian sector has been training in this skill for a long time. Not by educational choice, but by necessity. When the context is structurally unstable, as in most areas where MSF intervenes, the stability of the manager is not a competitive advantage. It is a condition of operational survival.
Jean-Baptiste summarizes it with an economy of words which is better than many complex definitions.
To be normal, stable, calm, in difficult and abnormal contexts.
That’s already a lot.
And it is probably, for organizations going through turbulence, the most useful skill they can seek to develop.
