Calm is Contagious: Leadership During Crisis

Calm is Contagious: Leadership During Crisis

by Aayush Pathak

The global geopolitical situation has stopped offering leaders the luxury of a quiet period. For decades, the assumption was simple, a crisis was a temporary interruption, a storm to be weathered until things returned to normal, and there was a global order with a few red lines that should not be breached. But the mid-2020s have completely dismantled that assumption. From the supply chain paralysis of the pandemic to the energy shock of the Ukraine war, AI disruptions in the services sector, US tariff wars, and finally the 2026 blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the recovery time between disruptions has effectively vanished. It is no longer a series of isolated shocks. It is more like one thing ends, and the next one has already started. There is no gap in between, no moment where you can take stock and recalibrate before the next disruption arrives. The global order that had existed since the 1990s has been upended, and no situation is a red line anymore.

The shift this new normal demands is not just about strategy or a new framework; it is behavioral. In a high-pressure environment, an organization becomes a mirror of its leadership. What employees watch is how leadership adapts to a crisis or how quickly someone responds to bad news. They watch the way a CEO walks into a room when the quarterly numbers look bad, not just employees, but also stakeholders and markets do the same. They observe how leadership reassures suppliers and customers after a new black swan event that threatens supply chains. These signals carry a weight that no polished firmwide communication can match.

Anyone who has worked inside an organization during a genuine crisis or part of the late-night marathon calls will recognize that when leadership loses its footing publicly, it creates a second internal crisis that is often more expensive than the external event itself. You start seeing reactive decisions and strategy reversals that wipe out months of work in a single afternoon. These symptoms move downward with terrifying speed, and in a crisis that becomes a serious problem, the anxiety doesn’t stay contained at the top, but it travels down to the people who actually need to solve the problem, and by the time it reaches them the panic has already curtailed the kind of creative, lateral thinking the situation requires.

At the same time, it must be kept in mind that there is a version of staying calm that breeds into a crisis; it is not acting in a situation or expecting the storm to pass. The organizations that came through strongest were not necessarily the ones with the best risk matrices or the most sophisticated contingency planning. They were the ones led by people who accepted instability as an exception and started treating it as the baseline. That shift in framing sounds small, but in practice, it changes a lot in how teams deal with crises. Staying calm under the weight of crisis is not easy to do, and it does not happen through a single board meeting but it happens through how a leader shows up, repeatedly, over a sustained period, when things are difficult. And it is worth saying that staying composed is not the same as being passive. Not giving the crisis the urgency it warrants is a recipe for a larger disaster. In a world of permanent disruption, the most valuable thing a leader communicates is not a short-term plan but a signal that leadership gives, even though the situation is not ideal, the organization has a plan to deal with it. Leaders who can send that signal consistently tend to find that their teams find a way through things that other teams don’t. Turns out that when everything is uncertain, a steady presence is one of the few things that actually holds.

Thanks and Regards,

Aayush Pathak

Aayush Pathak is a PGDM (GM) student at XLRI Jamshedpur.