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When we think of a crisis, most of us think about preparation. Most books that talk about having a toolkit for crises assume you have time to prepare. It assumes a relatively stable baseline from which a disruption occurs is managed and resolved. What it rarely accounts for is that reality that many of us are living right now extended ongoing uncertainty from the disruption that is not just an event, but a condition in this age of AI. It can feel that we’re in this constant state of flux and change, and with that flux change, a feeling of uncertainty comes a constant increased number of crises. And I’m seeing this firsthand. Well, you’re not managing a crisis, you are leading through one continuously, while your team, your peers, your board, and your organization all need something different from you all at the same time. Imagine this: you are in a meeting, maybe with your leadership team, maybe with the board, maybe it’s a town hall with your whole organization watching. The situation is not good. There are genuine uncertainties you cannot resolve today sound familiar. The people in that room are scared, frustrated, or looking to you with the kind of expectation that makes the inside of your chest feel tight, very tight. And you have to say something. It’s your job to lead through this crisis. You have to lead right now in this moment, with everything that is unresolved hanging in the air, for many of us, this is far more familiar than we’d like it to be. But what you do in that moment, how you hold yourself, what you say, how you communicate will matter more than almost anything else you do in your leadership this year, not because it will fix the situation, but because it will determine whether your team can function through it, whether trust holds, whether people can keep doing what needs to be done rather than being consumed by fear. That is what crisis leadership actually is about, not the absence of fear or uncertainty in yourself, but the ability to stay grounded enough in yourself, clear enough in your communication, and strategic enough in your decisions. That one’s the hard bit that you can lead effectively, even when you are not entirely sure how this ends. Today, I’m giving you the honest practical toolkit that I teach for just this situation, and I want to be honest, from the outset, this is not simple material. Often think leadership is not rocket science, and it is one of those things that need to be learned, but it’s not as hard as some of our day jobs. This is hard stuff intellectually. It’s not too difficult, but to actually do it well, knowing is not the same as having it available under pressure, but understanding, which is what we’re going to cover in this podcast, is the starting point. So, let’s dive on in. Welcome to the Leading Women in Tech Podcast, the show that celebrates women in technology leadership. I’m your host, Tony Collis, and this podcast is the result of my passion for building better tech by diversifying the leadership of the technology sector. Join me on this journey as I discuss all things leadership, what it takes to be innovative, breaking through the glass ceiling, be a great leader, and how to navigate the unique experiences we face as women in tech. So, sit back, grab your headphones, and get ready to be inspired to become a better leader. Before I give you the tools, let’s talk about the mindset you need most in a crisis, because the way most of us think about crisis leadership is subtly wrong, and that misunderstanding makes the work harder than it needs to be. The image most people carry of a great crisis leader is someone who appears unruffled, calm under fire, and don’t get me wrong, there is a place for that, but this person seems somehow to not be feeling what everyone else is feeling. They project composure in a way that looks almost effortless, you know, that whole gliding thing. Can I just say upfront that image is fiction, and it’s a damaging fiction. Every leader I know who has navigated a genuine crisis, a major reorg, a product failure, a ball crisis, a sudden loss of a contract, or a key person has felt the pressure physically, the tight chest, the tension in the head. How it manifests for you, the accelerated thinking that sometimes produces clarity and sometimes produces noise happens for all of us. The moments of genuine uncertainty about what the right call is, the weight of knowing that other people’s livelihoods, careers, and well-being are partly in your hands, that is all real. But what distinguishes the leaders who navigate those moments, well, it’s not that they do not feel any of that, they do. It is that they have developed the capacity to feel it without being consumed by it. I talk about holding two things simultaneously. You can hold a feeling and not allow it to control you, to stay grounded enough in ourselves that we have our best thinking. And our clearest communication and our most considered judgment remaining accessible even when the pressure is at the highest, that is true crisis leadership, and it’s hard, it’s really hard, but here’s the good thing, this is trainable capability, it is absolutely not something that people just have, it is not a personality trait, and I really want to, I really want you to know this one. No one is born with the ability to stay calm and focused in a crisis, that is completely ass. That, if you, if you’ve been told that it is just not true. Some people seem to behave calmer than others under pressure, but in my experience, from what I’ve seen, the people who appear calmer are often responding differently. They aren’t actually solving the crisis any better than you are. What we want is somebody who understands what they’re experiencing, that feels the tension but is not consumed by it. Somebody who just shuts down isn’t feeling the tension, they’re dealing with it by shutting down. They might appear calm, but they’re not necessarily doing the right thing. We’ve all seen people that are calm in a crisis, but unless they’ve had the training, they often don’t do the right thing. Feeling the notes of stress, but using them to think about the best solutions instead of just acting impulsively, that is not innate. It is learned, it is built, it is taught, but more importantly, is learned through experience. That’s the tough one, right? And it is made up of four distinct dimensions, which is what we’re going to mainly focus on today. Four areas where the work of high-performance leadership under pressure actually happens: your internal state, your team leadership, your decision making, and the specific challenge of carrying this largely alone, the loneliness aspect, those are the four dimensions, and those are the four pieces of the puzzle that we need to be working on. And I mentioned high-performance leadership just then, deliberately, because these are things you should be doing all the time anyway, looking at your internal state, your team leadership, your decision making, and the loneliness piece of it, and how to handle that, we’re going to work on the specific tools for these dimensions as we go through this episode, but those are things that come in high performance leadership at all times. What they’re doing when in a crisis situation is leveling that up under a pressure situation. So, if you can work at these things all the time, and I would say this is what I teach as high performance leadership. You will do well in a crisis as long as you then can control the emotional reaction you’re going to have as well, which is the biggest and hardest piece. But there are tools we’re going to use to work through this. Before I dive into all that, I want you to understand one thing. One of the most under discussed dimensions of crisis leadership is the gap between where you are emotionally and where the people around you are. You may have had longer to process this situation, you may have had access to information that your team does not yet have, or you may simply be someone who moves through uncertainty faster than others, who reaches acceptance of an ambiguous situation before the people around you ever have fully registered what is happening. Often the fact you’re in the position you’re in as a leader means you are likely going to be moving through the crisis faster than your team and others around you. If you’re good in a crisis, you’ll emotionally move through a roller coaster faster than others, but to solve the crisis, you likely need your team with you, understanding that not everyone moves through the crisis at the same speed, and that your job as leader is not to just solve the crisis, but is to meet people where they are rather than where you are. Is one of the most important things I can tell you. We’ll come back to this later in the episode, but it’s the most important aspect of crisis handling that I personally don’t think gets enough attention. So, remember this: crisis leadership is not the absence of pressure, it’s the capacity to remain grounded within it. So, your best thinking, clearest communication, our most considered judgment stays accessible when everyone needs the most. So, let’s work on that first dimension of crisis leadership. This first dimension is our internal workings. Often, this thought is the one that feels like it conflicts with the urgency of the situation you’re in, but you cannot lead others through a crisis from a dysregulated internal state, not sustainably, not well, and not in a way that produces the clarity and presence the genuine crisis leadership requires. I know that sounds obvious when we say it simply like this. It’s the calm morning, listen to this podcast in the car on your way to work, or you’re on the treadmill and you’re just like, you know, I just.. it’s what it is. Of course, you know it’s about clarity and depression, but the culture of senior leadership, particularly for us women, who often feel additional pressure to perform composure, it makes this very easy to ignore and belittle, we push through, we white knuckle it, we keep going on adrenaline and willpower long past the point where that is serving either us or the people we. Leading, and we tell ourselves that it is what the situation requires. Sometimes it is for a short period, but in a sustained crisis, the kind that lasts weeks or months, not hours, that extracts a physiological cost that does not go away because you decide to ignore it, and the specific capabilities that crisis leadership most requires clear judgment, the ability to regulate your emotional responses, the capacity to hold complexity without collapsing into that false certainty state that we often hold on to for comfort. Those qualities are precisely the capabilities that degrade first under sustained pressure, sustained pressure, aka mild burnout. Okay, so if you are not in a physiologically great state when you go into a crisis, let me just be honest with you, this is going to be harder. But when there is that urgent right here, right now crisis, if you aren’t able to settle your nerves in some way, you are not going to make good decisions, and you certainly won’t be sharing that air of composure that brings trust into a murky situation. And just to add salt into the wound, here the irony is you are more likely to experience a crisis if you’re operating from burnout, because you are making less good decisions. That sounds like victim blaming, and I really wish it wasn’t true, but it is true, which is why actually, if you’re listening to this and thinking, yeah, I have burnout kind of system on burnout episodes, you need to do well your burnout first, because you are never going to be the leader who responds really, really well in a crisis. You might think you’re okay, but you’re more likely to have crises of your own making, and you’re less likely to notice them when they do approach, which is, I think, one of the reasons we get more crises when we have burnout, is actually we don’t see things coming as quickly, because we’re less engaged, and then you’re less good at responding to it in the first place, because you have that physiological burnout, and you are less rational, you’re less capable, you’re less logical, you don’t know that that is true, after all, How many of us don’t realize we have reduced capabilities when we have had a drink. Humans are terrible at recognizing our reduced capabilities, but believe me, when you have had sustained long-term stress, aka mild burnout or not so mild burnout, you are going to be less good in a crisis, my love. So, the first thing, if you’re listening to this, is work on your own. Have a conversation with me if you need to. Okay, so the internal work.. I really want to nail this for you. It is not about self-indulgence. It is a structural need as the foundation on which everything else in this episode rests. If you don’t do the internal work, you cannot do the rest of this work. So, where do we start? The starting point is self-awareness. One of my favorite things about leadership is your awareness. Then we work on external awareness, situational awareness. You have to have self-awareness in leadership first, in the most practical, basic sense, knowing your own pressure signals, not in the abstract but specifics. What happens in your body when you’re operating at the edge of capacity? Where do you feel it? What does your thinking do? Does it speed up or slow down? Does that depend on the situation? That is for me. Sometimes I speed up, sometimes I slow down, depending on what it is actually causing the stress. Do you become more decisive or more hesitant? Again, for me, really depends on the situation, but I know I do one of the other. I never say just neutral. Interestingly, do you withdraw, or do you like me over function? Most people cannot answer those questions with any precision until you have sat with them for some time, and I tell you, this has been a decade of self-discovery for me. Right, the problem with not knowing your signals is that by the time you notice you’re in a compromised state, you’re usually already several consequential decisions and several important conversations knee deep into the situation. So, the first tool in your toolkit is this: build the habit of checking in with your state before high stakes moments. I do this all day, every day. It’s now just a habit. This is not 10 minutes of meditation, though. If that works for you, do it, go for it, girl. But this is a genuine momentary pause. 15 seconds is what I do, but I give myself 15 seconds three or four times a day, or when a particular situation is unfolding in my personal world, professional life, and I ask myself, what is my state right now? Am I thinking clearly? Is my heart pounding on my test try? I know I get heart pounding, I get attention headache, or I get a stomach grumble, like a knot in my stomach, if you like. Those are my signs of tension. And then you ask yourself, is my emotional regulation intact? Often you’ll notice the physical sign first. That’s why it’s really worth noticing, what are your physical symptoms of stress? Because you’ll notice that before you think, oh gosh, my emotional regulation, that’s gone right. What is it saying about the way you are sitting in. Situation, is it going to serve you in this situation, or is it going to serve your own discomfort in the uncertainty? That last bit, that’s worth sitting with for just a moment, because one of the most common mistakes in crisis leadership is making a decision or a communication that is driven by the leader’s own need to reduce our anxiety, rather than by what the situation actually requires of us. Believe me, I see this one a lot. I used to do this all the time. We do what we need to feel better. How many times have you said something to somebody else to make them make yourself feel better? You’re telling yourself you’re doing a nice thing, you’re doing a good thing, but ultimately you were looking to feel better rather than serving the person in front of you, crisis leadership is this like amplified 1000 fold, moving too fast for resolution that closes off uncertainty, which makes you feel more in control, but is actually not the right answer. Bad move, communicating with false certainty, because the authentic version, I don’t have all the answers yet, feels too exposed and vulnerable. Those are not failures of intelligence, they’re failures of self-awareness and depression, that you are not aware that you’re doing something to make yourself feel better in this stressed state. Now, I’m the first one to say you got to communicate in some ways, we’ll come to all this later on, but think about why you’re doing the thing you’re doing, is it you’re doing it genuinely because it’s the right thing to do, or because it feels just a little bit like sense of control, sense of closure, sense of something that’s going to make you feel better in that moment. Now, there’s a second internal tool that I talk about a fair amount, and this is about in the moment regulation, but in the structure condition sense that makes it possible over the course of an extended crisis to think clearly long term, so this is not I’m going to notice pause reframe, which I talk about a lot with executive presence. This is the basics that allow you to do notice pause reframe. This is sleep, movement, and nutrition, the absolute basics. I’m not going to spend five minutes on these, because you know it. We all know it. Sleep, movement, nutrition – you need those things. If you’re burnt out, we definitely need those things, but often they’re harder to do when you’re burnt out. I know that, my one, my love. These are not luxuries you deprioritize when the situation gets serious. These are the inputs to the cognitive and emotional functioning that the situation requires. Burnout proof lesion, which I talk about a lot in this podcast, during a crisis, is not about eliminating the pressure, it’s protecting the human infrastructure that’s you that your leisure depends on. Your brain can only do amazing things if it’s nourished, if it’s had sleep, nutrition, and exercise, right? You need those three things for your brain to work. The specific practice I would recommend, which is more targeted than general wellness advice, is identifying one practice, one recovery practice that reliably restores your clearest thinking, protecting it. This has to become non-negotiable through the crisis period. For some people, that’s physical exercise. You might struggle to sleep in a crisis, totally understand that one, but maybe you love a bit of exercise to just like get rid of the adrenaline and the cortisol. For others, it’s an unstructured time when no one needs anything from them. I can pretty much guarantee scrolling on Instagram is not going to be doing this for you, though. For others, it’s a specific conversation with a trusted person or outside the situation, whatever it is for you, protect it, not when the crisis is over, during the crisis, and all the time, for that matter. One of the best pieces of advice I received from my first executive coach, many, many years ago, before I started coaching myself, was to double down on your self-care and basic needs before the hardest times, they are not the moments to let your self-care slip. The times when you need it the most are the hardest times. So, you have to practice self-care, sleep, movement, nutrition, the basics at all times, but double down on them in a crisis when you need them the most. This is also where the relationship with a thinking partner, a coach, trusted advisor, someone who sits completely outside your organization, but is not your spouse. My experience, that one doesn’t work. They need to be outside your organization, outside your situation. That becomes not a luxury, but a real functional benefit, even necessity. I’d go as far as saying not because you need to process your feelings, because you need access to your own best thinking, and sometimes you need a thinking partner to do that. You need thinking at its most accessible when you can externalize it to someone who can reflect it back clearly to you. Okay, let’s move on from internal to the second dimension, external – how you show up for the people you are leading, that is genuinely difficult, and this is where high performance age of under pressure is most visible and most consequential. It’s where most crisis management dives in, is people’s side of it, which is great, but you have to do the internal work first. Let’s start with where I started this episode, you. Team is not where you are. You may have had days or weeks with this information. You may have moved through shock, through denial, through the various stages of processing a really difficult reality, and arrived imperfectly but genuinely at a place of acceptance and forward focus. Your team, when they hear the news, are at day one on that journey, and in addition, they will likely move slower. One of the facets of great leadership is that you’re able to process crises, change, adaptions are much more far faster than the average employee. You also know more than the average employee, which helps you process things. The re-yog you have been sitting on for three weeks is brand new to them. You’ve been emotionally getting rid of it by the time you decided to do the reorg, or got on board with it, or decided who you’re going to be cutting. The contract loss you have been strategizing around for them is a shock and a fear, and a what comes next. And then, in addition, you’re moving equipped with the leadership material that makes you who you are to deal with those crises faster, but in practice, the situation that feels obvious and manageable to you, because you’ve had time with it and able to sit with this and deal with it and move through it, that’s not going to feel obvious or manageable to the people you are leading. Your job, however, is not to pull them or push them or grab them and say you must do this to where you are. It is to meet them where they are and genuinely dial down on your leadership and lead them forward from there, not pushing or pulling, but leading. This requires a specific and sometimes really uncomfortable capability, the ability to hold space for fear, anger, grief, and uncertainty to people around you. It’s, it’s one of the reasons why I love leaders who train as coaches. Why I train coaches primarily is to help all of you become better leaders, because a lot of coaching is holding space for fear, anger, grief, uncertainty with a person you’re coaching, and a leadership that is going to make you handle this situation better. You have to deal that without either dismissing those responses or being destabilized by them, without rushing to false reassurance, because their discomfort is activating your own. How many times have you reassured to make yourself feel comfortable, because this person in front of you is uncomfortable, and without skipping the emotional reality of the situation, in your urgency to get to the plan, you have got to hold space for your team to be in a state of discomfort, and you are going to be uncomfortable as a result. Now, crisis communication comes next. Once you’ve held space for the discomfort, we need to lead with communication, crisis communication is not, however, just a PR function that gets activated when things are serious enough to involve external stakeholders. That’s what we think of as crisis communication. We think PR firm, right? Okay. No, this is something every leader needs to know how to do, from the most senior person in the organization to the team lead, managing a broken sprint or a failed product launch, those are all crises, big and small, that need crisis communication. The scale of the crisis can vary enormously, however, what does not vary is the need to communicate in a specific and intentional way when people are operating in that uncertainty space. Here is what effective crisis communication actually looks like at the leadership level. First of all, it is calm, factual, not minimizing or catastrophizing, all things that we all like to do. The language you use when your team is in crisis mode needs to be steady, factual, not artificially upbeat, that reads as dismissive and erodes trust, not dramatic, that amplifies their anxiety, and they see factual, steady, and oriented towards what is known and what is not known, and what is being done. Here is what we know. Here’s what we do not yet know. Here’s what we’re going to do right now. That structure repeated consistently, repetition is so underrated, that is more stabilizing than any amount of reassurance. Hold space, as we just talked about, and then repeat. Here’s what we know, here’s what we do not yet know, here’s what we’re doing about it. Crisis communication is repeated far more than you think necessary. This is one of the most important things I can tell you about leading through a crisis, as a thing that most leaders underestimate. We know marketing it takes between something like seven and 11 times for somebody to buy something. I think it’s that. Marketers reach out to me, correct me, but it’s a ridiculously large number of times somebody needs to see something. Human beings need repetition. You might be like, “I’ve just said this 10 million times, why are we still here? They’re there because they’re not you, and that’s okay, when people are in crisis mode, when their nervous systems are activated and their cognitive resources are partly occupied by anxiety, they do not hear things clearly the first time or the second time, you will say something once and feel it’s been heard and understood, it has not, not fully. Me, not by everyone, the communication that feels repetitive to you, the message you said three times this week, and are tired of saying is arriving clearly for the first time for some people on the third delivery, even the fourth. Say it again, say it consistently, say it in different formats. Assume that you need to communicate more than that feels needed, more than feels comfortable more often than them feels necessary, and more simply than you think the situation warrants. That is possibly the most important thing about crisis communication. The third thing you need in crisis communication is aligning and orienting, not blaming. We talk about the blame dimension separately later on, but in your crisis communication, every message should be doing one of two things: bringing people together around a shared understanding of the situation, or orienting them towards what needs to happen next. It should not be talking about who’s responsible, blame messages that assign responsibility for what went wrong, even the mildest formats, even implicitly, even apparently reasonably, do neither of those things during a crisis. People start responding with fear. There’s already some fear. Some people might be like, “Oh my god, am I to blame? It’s splitting attention, activating defensiveness, and it takes energy away from the work of recovery. Save the post mortem for after. During the crisis, the communications are alignment and forward momentum. Crisis communication also is authentic without being unfiltered. I always talk about authentic, authentic communication being filtered authenticity, and it’s even more important in a crisis, but it does not mean sharing every concern, every uncertainty, or every moment of your own doubt, filtered authenticity, it means you don’t pretend to a certainty or a composure you do not have. It means being honest about what is hard without making your team responsible for managing your emotional state, and that’s where I think authenticity goes wrong in an in and outside a crisis, right? Whether it’s a crisis or otherwise, we think being authentic is bringing everything to the table and allowing other people to hold our emotional state. That is not what it is. It is saying I’m responsible for my emotional state, and here is the information and the uncertainty that we’re dealing with. This is a genuinely difficult situation. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. It’s a great line, right? You can say, here’s what I know, here’s what we’re doing, and here’s what I need from you. That is all authentic. That is legally it is not the same thing as performing in a way that doesn’t feel like you. You can share that this is a difficult situation. You can, you can say we don’t know all the information, those are authentic, but saying I’m feeling out of my depth, I’m terrified as well. That is saying I’m fearful and asking somebody else to hold that with you. Your job as a leader is to hold your team, not the other way around. Find somebody outside your organization to hold your fear with. It’s a very important thing to do, by the way. But your team, in that moment. You are the leader. You are the one holding their fear, not the other way around. Let me just finish this piece on communication with a specific note for us women leaders. Executive presence in a crisis is not appearing unaffected. It is about being genuinely oriented, knowing where you are, where the team is, that awareness thing, where you are going, even in conditions of genuine uncertainty. The executive presence that holds teams through a crisis is grounded, human, not polished and distant. People do not need you to be perfectly composed, but they need to believe you know where you are taking them, even if it’s a little bit unclear, now we’ve covered how to lead with crisis communication. I want to spend a moment from this dimension on the specific situation that is particularly common and particularly under addressed, leading your team with stability and groundedness when the instabilities come from the leadership above you. So this is still external dimension to external, and this is where above you is a mess. You are steady, your team is steady, but the decisions, the communication, or the behavior from senior leadership is creating the very uncertainty your team is trying to navigate. I’m dealing with a client going through this right now, lots of contradictory messages from above, there’s an absence of direction from the top. Senior leadership response is indeed very much part of the problem for this particular lady I’m working with. This is genuinely hard, and the temptation, which I understand completely, is either to be honest with your team about how poor the leadership above you is, or to pass the instability down explicitly or implicitly by communicating in ways that reflect your own frustration rather than the grounded direction your team needs, so you’ve got to start with what does your team need. Remember that neither of those two things serves your team, neither being totally honest about your frustration or passing it down. They don’t work. The first undermines their confidence in the organization in a moment when they need something to hold onto. I’ve seen so many companies fall apart a few months after a crisis, because that was the moment when the team stopped believing. It’s the beginning of a downward spiral of lack of engagement, lack of commitment, low productivity, and a talent exit. The result is one thing, an organization like begins operating in its final taste, and the second temptation, pushing the instability down, transmits that instability rather than containing it. What does serve them is something harder. What does serve your team being the stable layer in the middle, and that’s what I can, what I’m doing with my client right now, translating what is coming from above into a language that’s clear-oriented, at least as oriented as you can make it, being honest about what you do not know without amplifying the uncertainty, providing the direction you provide within the sphere, given when the wider direction is unclear. It is exhausting to do this, it requires you to absorb a great deal that you do not pass on down, and it’s one of the most important things you can do for the people in your care. It doesn’t mean that what’s going on is right, and as I said, leave that for the post mortem in the crisis, absorb and hold, but don’t pass down, don’t communicate the mess that’s going on, absorb and hold, and provide direction and strategy if you’re struggling to be heard by your leadership. Above that is a different conversation. If the instability is partly because your perspective and your team’s needs are not reaching the people who need to hear them, sometimes that does contribute to a crisis, and that’s a separate and significant challenge that deserves some attention. I discussed that in episode 278 on how to be heard by those around you, and it covers this ground in far more depth than I can do in this episode. So, go check out the show notes for the episode link to episode 278 to find about how to communicate upwards more effectively to avoid the crises that come because your team isn’t being seen or heard. So, now we’ve dealt with dimensions one and two, the internal and external dimensions of crisis literature. Let’s talk about the third dimension, decision making. This is the area where the gap between crisis leadership done well and crisis leadership done poorly is most consequential and most costly to you, your team, and your organization. Here’s the fundamental problem with leadership decision making under pressure, the conditions that make decisions most important – high stakes, real uncertainty, time pressure, significant downstream consequences – are precisely the conditions that most degrade the quality of human decision making. Sustained stress narrows attention, it amplifies loss aversion, it creates cognitive load that reduces the capacity for the kind of complex multifactor thinking that genuinely difficult decisions require. It makes the reactive option the one that feels like it’s doing something far more appealing than the considered option. What this means in practice, the decisions you make when you are most in the grip of a crisis, are systematically the most likely ones to be compromised, and they’re the ones with the highest stakes. The most important work in executive decision making under pressure happens before the decision, not during it. The first question to ask, or any decision in a crisis, is, Does this actually need to be made right now? Not, does it feel urgent, because everything feels urgent in a crisis, but genuinely, what are the concrete consequences of making this decision tomorrow versus today, or waiting till I have slept, or spoken to one more person, or had an hour to think more clearly? Now that’s not an excuse to keep seeking additional opinions or more information in the hopes of a miracle answer. There is no miracle answer coming your way, but it is permission to get some space, some calm, or the one opinion that you know you should have, but feel pressured to just crack on anyway. A significant proportion of decisions that feel time critical in a crisis are actually being rushed by anxiety rather than genuine constraint, the situation feels urgent. The pressure to act is real, but the actual decision could wait 12 or even 24 hours without material consequences, and the decision made in 12 or 24 hours with a clearer head is likely to be meaningfully better. The second question is, what do I actually need to know to make this decision, well, not what I ideally like to know, that’s a different question. But specifically, is there information that is both available and decision relevant that I do not yet have? If yes, get it before you make the decision, even if it costs some time. If the information is not available, not decision relevant, decide with what you have and move forward, you’ll never feel like you have enough information, but sometimes clarity comes from making a decision. And then the third question, Who else should be part of this? Not because decisions or committees are better decision makers, they often aren’t, but because the perspective of one other person who is slightly less emotionally inside the situation than. You can surface things you were not thinking, cannot reach for when you are in the hot, messy middle. I want to spend a specific minute, moment, maybe on the distinction between genuine urgency and anxiety-driven urgency, because conflating them is one of the most common and most costly decision-making areas in crisis leadership. Genuine urgency is external. There is a real deadline, a real constraint, a real consequence that makes the timing of this decision materially important. Anxiety-driven urgency is internal. The situation is uncomfortable. This uncertainty is intolerable. And making a decision, any decision, offers temporarily from the discomfort of not knowing. The problem is that they feel identical from the inside, both feel like I need to decide this now. The way to distinguish them is to ask who is actually imposing the deadline. If you trace it back and find that the deadline is primarily your own discomfort with the unresolved situation, you probably have more time than your the pressure is telling you. This matters enormously because the decision making that you are trying to do to relieve your anxiety is very often the wrong decision is the one that closes off uncertainty at the cost of the best outcome. The leader who can sit with genuine uncertainty long enough to make the best available decision rather than the fastest available decision is the one whose judgment the organization can trust through a genuinely difficult period. Now, what I would say is I’m the first person to say just make a decision, but I’m also saying to you slow down and make a slower decision, and those two things feel like they’re in conflict, but they’re not. Don’t rush a decision, but equally make a decision when there’s no more data to be gotten, you’re just seeking clarification that’s never going to come. For more on how to stop overthinking, because this is again a really big topic. You see how so much comes into crisis leadership. I’m hoping here, how to make clear confidence decisions under pressure. Do check out episode 274 of the podcast again, link in the show notes. As always, this will help you deal with overthinking and decision making dimensions, specifically. And, as I said at the beginning, a really great crisis leadership comes from being a really great leader overall. So, all of these elements, you need to bring your A game on every single one to a crisis. Okay, there’s a specific dynamic that plays out in almost every crisis, at every level, from the most senior leadership in the individual team managing a broken process, and it costs organizations enormous amounts of time, energy, and trust, and it is the blame game. And in a crisis, it is never the time to play it. Let me tell you a story from very early on in my own career, very minor crisis story, tiny crisis story. You might laugh at the end of this, but it taught me something really important. Long before I was a coach or a leadership specialist, but back when I was a student, yeah, once upon a time I was that young, I was working a summer job at a law firm, I was one of more than 20 summer staff, and the firm had a filing system for important legal documents that, in hindsight, was very clearly broken. Documents went missing regularly, the processes were poor. Nobody had addressed it, because nobody had been held accountable for it. But there was so much blame that flew around the office whenever something went missing. One day, it was my turn. A document I’d been the last to handle went missing. It delayed completing a case for client by two hours. A small crisis, a very small crisis in the grand scheme of things, but a genuine upset client and a firm with reputation protect, and it wasn’t doing the best job at that, because this kept happening, right? You can see where this goes, and there was a moment where I could have defended myself, like every other person I saw experienced this doing, they all got defensive, point to the broken system, point to the 20 other people who’ve had similar documents, maybe they handled it, not me. Made the case that the blame was diffuse, processes were the real problem. It’s not my fault. All of that was true, but it, I did none of that. Instead, I said, okay, got that. Let me go fix this. I focus entirely on solving the problem. A quick search did not find the document. This, it’s so many years ago, I’m kind of surprised I remember it so vividly, but it was such a turning point in my ownership of issues. I immediately started working on getting duplicates, contacting the right people, expediating the process. I had permission to spend extra money to get that done, making it my absolute priority to fix what had gone wrong as fast as possible. The document was in place. The client was served. The delay was two hours. Seriously, simple, that I was really surprised by what happened next. And I remember this to this day, and it.. I guess it started my leadership journey. My manager was surprised, not that I had done nothing wrong. I had done something wrong. The filing system was broken, and I had fallen for a trap because of that. Right, that was not my fault, but ultimately I’d misplaced a document. I still believe that. I don’t know, you know, we never found it. Who knows where that was? But what I had done, I owned the problem and prioritized fixing it over defending myself, and that was exactly right. And that’s what my manager flagged up, because it surprised her. It was rarer than it should be. Everyone else that this happened to, and by all accounts, it was a daily problem, would get defensive, and two hours would be spent blaming everybody and everything. The energy, the precious time that would be spent on that process of defense and sending blame everywhere else, that was a problem. My mum just started out angry with me, ready for a bit of a battle, and ended up surprised and delighted because I owned the problem, fixed it fast. I was at the very beginning of my career, and as I say, a tiny minor crisis compared to what all of you are probably thinking about as we’re discussing this topic, but the lesson has stayed with me ever since, and I see it play out at far higher stakes and far greater scale than almost every crisis I’ve ever worked with, through with a client, during a crisis, the sequence that serves your team, your organization, your own needs, is this: own the problem, solve the problem, then understand what caused it. That sequence really matters, because the alternative, trying to establish cause, assign responsibility, protect your own position at the same time as solving the problem splits your resources at exactly the moment you need them focused. It introduces defensiveness into a situation that needs alignment. It delays the repair while you are still working out who is responsible for it. Owning the problem does not mean accepting personal blame for things that were not your fault or were the result of systemic failures. It means taking operational responsibility for the resolution. It means saying whatever contributed to this, I am going to focus every resource I have on fixing it as quickly as possible, and we will understand the causes thoroughly when the immediate situation is stable. Now, that example I gave was not my only mistake I’ve made many in my career, and some of them have been genuinely, really, seriously uncomfortable for me, but every time I owned it. The post mortem, the structured understanding of what went wrong, what the root causes were, what needs to change is genuinely important. Not to assign blame, though, to a person we all mess up. In fact, I think the best eaters have messed up the worst, because what happens is the understanding that comes of as a result to prevent reoccurrence is one of the most important things in crisis leadership. But it has to happen once the crisis is managed. It should be rigorous, but it happens after, during the crisis, it’s a distraction from the only thing that matters, better getting things back on track as quickly as possible, and limiting the damage. But one dimension of the blame conversation that’s really worth naming, especially, is reputational repair, both for you as leader and your team. There’s a reason why we have the instinct to protect ourselves. The instinct, when something has gone wrong in a visible way, is to distance yourself from it to establish quickly and clearly this was not your failure. The instinct is understandable, and it’s almost always the wrong move in the moment. The leaders whose reputations survive a crisis best and sometimes emerge stronger, and that certainly happened to me, are the ones who move toward the problem, not away from it. They are visible, present, action-oriented during the difficulty, rather than strategically positioned at a distance from it. They communicate clearly and frequently, rather than being quiet, while they work out what to say. Reputation in a crisis is built on one thing above all, the degree to which the people who work with you and above you believe that you are fully focused on the right outcome for the right reasons, not on protecting yourself, not on managing perceptions, but on fixing what needs to be fixed. Leader who does that consistently and visibly comes out of the crisis with more trust than they went in with. Okay, we’re nearly there, so let’s talk about the fourth and final dimension of crisis leadership. This is the one that is most rarely discussed and most consistently underestimated in its impact, and it’s one that I think most is most important for the specific women who listen to this podcast. It is the isolation of crisis leadership. Yep, I said it, isolation. I’ve talked about being lonely at the top before. You can find more about that in an episode that’s in the show notes. Something that many of us, as women in a world full of men, know all too well, and why crises in the resulting additional isolation can feel so much worse for us if we don’t tackle this head on. We will experience this worse than men on average, because we have more isolation than men. On average, we start from a more isolated place on average. Massive generalizations, and so when we get the additional isolation that everybody experiences during a crisis of leading, men experience it too. If you are the one leading it, it is isolating. You’re going to end up in a worse place than your male colleagues, just because you’re starting from a worse place. When you are the leader, when you’re the person who’s supposed to have the answers, who the team is looking to for steadiness, who the board is watching for competence, there is a very little space to be fully honest about how hard it is. Your team needs your stability. Your peers may be competitors or insufficiently trusted. Your board wants results. Is not your authentic emotional experience of providing them. Your family needs you present and has their own needs and anxieties that are not the same as yours. And somewhere in all of that hot mess, there is nobody you can say to this is generally one of the hardest things I’ve ever navigated. I’m not entirely sure how it ends. I’m holding it together for everyone around me, and there are moments when I am not sure how much longer I can do that. That isolation is real, and it has a cost to your well-being, to your decision-making quality, and the sustainability of relationship through an extended crisis. The invisible load of leadership does not disappear because the situation requires you to carry it without acknowledgement, and the most important structural response to a little isolation crisis is a thinking partner, not a mentor who gives advice, not a peer who is the same situation, therefore cannot hold a perspective outside your situation. A trusted advisor, a coach, a confidential professional relationship, someone who sits entirely outside your organization situation, has no agenda in the outcome, is not there to tell you what to do, but has an honest version of the conversation with you that you cannot have with anyone else. And this is where I think a mentor, unless they’re very good mentor, who do so awesome coach, is not the right thing to do here, because a mentor will want to solve the problem for you, give their ideas to you. You need somebody who is there to hold space for this, for your space. This matters for decision quality, not just emotional well-being. When you are carrying the full cognitive and emotional weight of crisis largely internally, your thinking has no external check. The assumptions you are making, the framing you’ve applied to this situation, the options you have not considered, because you cannot see them from the outside, none of those get surfaced unless you are externalizing your thinker to someone who can reflect it back clearly. The leaders who navigate genuine crises more effectively almost invariably have someone they can think out loud with, who asks the questions that shifts the frame, who gives them access to a slightly different thinking perspective on their own situation, not because you’re not capable of thinking clearly, but because the conditions of Christ’s leadership make it almost impossible to do that thinking fully alone. If the loneliness of senior issue is something you recognize, as I said, there is an episode in my popcorn, episode 170 that goes deeper on what actually costs to be lonely at the top and the structural response it takes to step away from that being lonely at the top, because it doesn’t need to be the second response to isolation, though, is one that’s open to every single one of us, and it’s not an external thinking part, it’s capacity for self coaching. Now, if you’ve been trained as coach, this is easier, but anybody can learn to self coach, the ability to do your own most rigorous, most honest, most useful thinking in the moments when no one is available can be accessible if you do self-coaching. What this looks like in practice, this is a short version. It takes a longer conversation. Is before you act or speak, ask yourself the questions that interrupt a reaction-based default. Am I about to do this because it’s the right call, or because it relieves my discomfort. What am I assuming here that I have not tested? If I knew with certainty that I was going to look back on this moment in six months, what would I wish I had done, and what would I advise a peer who was in exactly the same situation to do? That last question is particularly useful. Sometimes it’s slowing down enough to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, because it’s clearer, more calibrated to have a different person’s perspective on our own. Now that requires a lot of self-awareness to be able to do that, but if you can slow down enough to ask yourself, if I was in somebody else’s shoes, how would I be looking at the situation, you’re deliberately creating a perspective shift. Imagine yourself as the trusted advisor to someone in your situation that unlocks so much potential, relieving the pressure on yourself, making the situation temporarily un about you, and suddenly it becomes a little bit more accessible to understand what’s going on. If you want to learn more about communication strategies, do check out the show notes again. I’ve got so many resources to point to in this episode, so there will be a list in the, in the show notes of like episodes that cover the key things that allow you to lead in the crisis, and this one is episode 243 which is about influential leadership. Again, it’s a lot about learning how to think on your feet in the right way and learning about what that means internally for you. Okay, we’ve covered the big four dimensions. What does that mean, though? Moving forward, well, this is where we take the four dimensions and create a relatively simple, for a complex topic, toolkit. Each dimension has its essential tools: crisis leadership, genuine adaptive high-performance leadership, and conditions of real uncertainty is built on having this internal state, staying grounded in yourself, so that you think best remains accessible to think at your highest level. Your team leadership, you meet your team where they are, communicating with clarity, repetition, authenticity, hold space for them. You’re the stable layer when the instability is coming from. Above, as well, your decision making – how you distinguish genuine urgency from anxiety-driven urgency, protecting the conditions for quality decision making, and moving decisively when the decisions need to be made, and isolation dimension, that fourth dimension, having the structural support, a thinking partner, a trusted advisor, and the self-coaching capacity and skills that allows you to lead sustainably through an extended difficult period, that all of that, that’s your toolkit. There’s a lot there, as I said, there’s loads of resources from other episodes of this podcast. Almost every episode of this podcast, I would say, since job hunting ones, allow you to deal better with a crisis. The thing is, you need all these skills to be polished before the crisis hits to do your best work, so yes, I said at the beginning of this podcast that a lot of crisis management books assume you have preparation time, and they’re right, it would be good if we have preparation time. What I would say instead is assume you’re going to need all these skills, because you will at some point. If you’re currently in a crisis, ask yourself what of these things that I’ve just discussed, can you do right now? Own the problem, focus on repair, not the blame, not the defensive positioning, the repair. None of those are about eliminating the pressure. The pressure is real. The uncertainty is real. The stakes are real. Crisis leisure was not the ability to feel none of that. It’s the ability to stay functional, grounded, clear, and effective within it, and that is a learnable capability. You can build it. The fact that you are listening to this episode, you are investing in understanding how this works before or during a difficult period, rather than just white knuckling through it. That’s already the beginning of that building. A crisis leadership is not the absence of pressure, it is staying grounded, clear and effective, and that is the learnable capacity you can build it. I really, really want you to hear that. If you’re navigating a genuine, difficult period right now, if what we’ve covered today has named something you’re living with rather than something you’re anticipating, which great, if you anticipate, go do the work, but if you need some specific support right now, let’s work through that. Working together on a strategy call is something I love to offer as a gift. Every month I have a limited number of complimentary strategy calls to listen to of this show and reads on my blog. A strategy call is not a sales conversation, it’s a thinking conversation. 45 minutes where we look specifically at your situation, what are you navigating? Where is the pressure highest? What’s the most direct path to more clarity, more groundedness? What does grounded leisure look like for you in the specific context of your organization, your team, the particular crisis? How are you managing it? This is exactly the kind of thinking partner conversation I’ve been talking about in this episode. So, if that sounds like what you need right now, give yourself a gift and have a look at my calendar, go to [email protected] for such let’s dash chat link in the show notes, and as always, remember to keep on leading. Bye for now.

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Bye.

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