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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.
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