Key Takeaways
- The quality of leadership decisions in a crisis is determined mostly by the decisions made before the crisis.
- People follow leaders who are honest about uncertainty, not leaders who pretend certainty they do not have.
- Speed matters in a crisis, but the speed of the right decision beats the speed of any decision.
The leadership books all describe what good leadership looks like under pressure. Calm. Decisive. Communicative. These are accurate descriptions of the output. They say almost nothing about how to actually produce that output when the company is losing a major customer, a key person just resigned, and the board is asking for a meeting.
Saim Abbasi has been in those rooms multiple times. The specific things that determined whether those situations were handled well were mostly not things that could be improvised in the moment.
Pre-Crisis Preparation
The leader who handles a crisis well in week one almost always did specific preparation in the preceding months. Not preparation for the specific crisis, which cannot be predicted, but preparation for the class of situation. What are the three or four most plausible existential threats to this business? What would we do if each of them materialized? Who would make the decisions? How would we communicate with the team?
Pre-crisis tabletop thinking is not pessimism. It is the kind of preparation that allows calm under actual pressure because the category of problem is not entirely novel.
Communicating With Uncertainty
The instinct most leaders have in a crisis is to delay communication until they have answers. This instinct is wrong in almost every case. Teams that are experiencing something clearly wrong and receiving no communication from leadership do not assume the best. They assume the worst and add speculation to uncertainty.
The leaders who handle crises best communicate early and honestly about what they know and what they do not. "Here is what we know. Here is what we do not know. Here is how we are getting answers. Here is when we will have more to share." That message does not require certainty. It requires honesty.
Speed Versus Precision
The tension in a crisis between moving quickly and moving correctly is real. The answer Saim Abbasi has reached after multiple high-pressure situations is this: a good decision made within 24 hours is almost always better than a perfect decision made in 72. The opportunity cost of delay in a crisis is real. The residual damage from a slightly imperfect decision made quickly is usually manageable. The damage from a perfect decision made after the window for acting has passed is much harder to recover from.
"Crises do not reveal character. They amplify what was already there."