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Key Takeaways
- Pressure-test your values before a crisis by walking leadership through realistic scenarios and asking what you actually believe, not what you would say.
- Silence is a message too, so before staying quiet ask whether the issue affects your people, touches a value you’ve publicly claimed, or leaves someone else to define your position.
The media requests started arriving before we had answers.
Employees wanted to know where we stood. Reporters wanted a statement. Advocacy groups demanded clarity. Every hour that passed without a response seemed to create another headline waiting to be written.
This was 2017, and the country was reeling from the violence surrounding the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. As attention turned to the president’s response, pressure quickly spread beyond Washington. Companies whose CEOs served on the president’s business advisory councils suddenly found themselves under intense scrutiny.
At the time, I was leading communications for a CEO who sat on one of those councils. Almost overnight, our company became part of a national conversation we hadn’t anticipated.
Inside the company, every draft seemed to answer one question while creating another. If we spoke, what would it mean for our relationship with an administration that played an enormous role in our business? If we stayed silent, what would our employees conclude? Every revision tried to satisfy one more audience, account for one more risk and anticipate one more reaction. With every edit, the language became more polished and somehow less certain.
That’s when I realized something that has shaped the way I think about leadership ever since. The hardest part of a crisis isn’t finding the right words. It’s discovering whether you’ve already decided what you believe.
The organizations that moved decisively weren’t necessarily facing easier circumstances than we were. They had simply wrestled with those questions before the cameras showed up. Their values had already been translated into decisions. Conviction isn’t built in the spotlight. The spotlight reveals what’s already there.
Conviction starts before the crisis
One of the biggest misconceptions in leadership is that trust comes from getting everyone to agree with you. Stakeholders disagree with leaders every day. They disagree with strategy, hiring decisions, political positions, acquisitions and product launches. Yet many of those same leaders retain credibility because people understand what they stand for.
The organizations that struggle are usually the ones trying to decide what they believe while the world is waiting for an answer.
That’s why I encourage leadership teams to pressure-test their values before they’re forced to defend them. During an executive offsite or strategy session, identify a handful of realistic scenarios that could put your organization under public pressure. Then resist the temptation to begin with messaging.
Instead, ask a more fundamental question: What do we actually believe? If the answers around the table aren’t consistent, you’ve identified work that needs to happen long before a crisis arrives.
Silence is still a decision
Many leaders assume that saying nothing allows them to avoid risk.
Sometimes that’s true. But when an issue directly affects your employees, your customers or your business, silence becomes a message in itself. In the absence of a clear position, people will interpret your silence through the lens of what they already believe about your organization, or they’ll allow someone else to define your position for you.
Before deciding not to engage, ask yourself three questions:
- Does this issue affect our people?
- Does it touch one of the values we’ve publicly claimed?
- If someone else defines our position for us, are we comfortable living with that version?
If the answer to any of those questions gives you pause, silence deserves just as much scrutiny as a public statement.
Consistency matters more than agreement
I’ve watched organizations navigate remarkably similar controversies with dramatically different outcomes. In many cases, the deciding factor wasn’t the position they took. It was the consistency with which they took it.
Stakeholders are quick to spot patterns. When leaders communicate one set of values internally and another externally, people notice. When values appear in recruiting materials but disappear during difficult moments, people notice that too. If decisions seem to shift based on the audience or the news cycle, credibility begins to erode.
One exercise I recommend is looking backward instead of forward. Pull together the last five or 10 significant decisions your organization has made and read them as if you were seeing them for the first time. Do they tell a coherent story about what your organization stands for?
Your stakeholders have already answered that question. This exercise gives leadership the opportunity to compare its answer with theirs.
Help people understand how you think
One lesson I’ve learned over the years is that leaders spend tremendous energy communicating decisions and far less explaining how they reached them.
When people understand the principles that guide your decisions in ordinary moments, they’re much more likely to trust your judgment in extraordinary ones. They may disagree with your conclusion, but they’ll have confidence that it came from careful thought rather than convenience.
Don’t wait until a crisis to explain how your organization makes decisions. Build that habit into your everyday leadership. When employees understand the reasoning behind promotions, strategic shifts, difficult tradeoffs and even disappointing news, they’re learning something much bigger than the outcome. They’re learning how you think.
Trust is built one decision at a time. Every difficult conversation, every promotion, every public statement and every moment where your values are tested becomes another data point people use to decide who you are as a leader.
Every leader hopes they won’t be defined by a single difficult moment. In my experience, those moments don’t define us nearly as much as they reveal us. Long before the headlines appear, before the media calls begin and before the pressure mounts, we’ve already been deciding what kind of leaders we’re going to be. The crisis gives everyone else the chance to see it.
Key Takeaways
- Pressure-test your values before a crisis by walking leadership through realistic scenarios and asking what you actually believe, not what you would say.
- Silence is a message too, so before staying quiet ask whether the issue affects your people, touches a value you’ve publicly claimed, or leaves someone else to define your position.
The media requests started arriving before we had answers.
Employees wanted to know where we stood. Reporters wanted a statement. Advocacy groups demanded clarity. Every hour that passed without a response seemed to create another headline waiting to be written.
This was 2017, and the country was reeling from the violence surrounding the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. As attention turned to the president’s response, pressure quickly spread beyond Washington. Companies whose CEOs served on the president’s business advisory councils suddenly found themselves under intense scrutiny.
