Leading Through Crisis and Uncertainty

By Mats Kallmyr | Kallmyr.com

Most of this series has looked at transformational leadership as something practised over months. Crisis compresses all of it into hours. This article looks at what changes, and what does not, when a leader has to be transformational under real time pressure.

Technical Problems vs Adaptive Challenges

Heifetz and Linsky (2002) draw a distinction that reframes most crisis leadership advice: a technical problem has a known solution that an expert can apply, while an adaptive challenge requires the people affected to change their own beliefs, habits, or priorities, something no amount of expert authority alone can force. A server outage is technical. The organisational trust damaged by how the outage was handled is adaptive, and it is the part transformational leadership actually addresses.

The Iceberg Under the Incident

During a major service outage at a telecom company, the technical fix was found within hours by a strong engineering team; that was never really in doubt. What took far longer, and mattered more, was rebuilding customer and internal confidence, because the visible outage was only the tip of a much larger iceberg of concern about whether it could happen again. The leaders who handled that period well were the ones who kept communicating honestly about what was still unknown, rather than projecting false certainty the moment the technical issue closed.

Holding Steady Under Pressure

My MALIC research (Kallmyr, 2017), though not a crisis study specifically, found that trust and perceived leader consistency mattered most to employees precisely during periods of high uncertainty, when formal information was scarce and people were filling the gaps with assumptions. A leader’s visible steadiness in a crisis is not decoration; it is one of the few genuinely reliable signals people have to go on.

Leading Well Under Pressure

• Separate the technical fix from the trust repair, and resource both, not just the one with a clear deadline.
• Say clearly what you do not yet know, rather than filling silence with false confidence.
• Debrief after the crisis on how it was led, not only on what technically went wrong.

References

• Heifetz, R.A. and Linsky, M. (2002) Leadership on the Line. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
• Heifetz, R.A., Grashow, A. and Linsky, M. (2009) The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.
• Kallmyr, M. (2017) Leading Innovation and Change: How Transactional and Transformational Leaders Influence Organisational Innovation and Change. MA dissertation. York St John University.

Mats Kallmyr is a senior leader and management consultant with a background spanning telecom, e-commerce, and public sector transformation. Read more at Kallmyr.com or connect via LinkedIn.