Stillness—pausing to avoid reactivity and gain a clear perspective—is one of the most underrated leadership skills.
getty
Years ago, high in the mountains at around 5,000 meters, I took a fall that nearly killed me. For hours, I lay broken on the mountainside, drifting in and out of consciousness, before help finally reached me. The person who eventually walked back into his old life was not the same one who had left it. People assume the lesson of an experience like that is about courage. It is not. It is about what remains when control disappears — which, it turns out, is the truest test of leading through a crisis.
Leading Through a Crisis When Control is Gone
Most of us build our working lives on the illusion of control: the plan, the forecast, the contingency for the contingency. We mistake the constant motion of managing for the steadiness of leading. On that mountain, I had none of it. No plan survived contact with reality. And in losing control, I learned something I now carry into every room: control doesn’t hold anything together. It’s alignment—the quiet match between what you say, what you do, and what you actually value—that creates cohesion.
A team feels that alignment, or its absence, long before anyone names it.
When a real crisis hits, the leaders who hold up aren’t usually the ones with the most detailed plan. They are the ones whose people already trust the alignment underneath the plan. That trust is built in ordinary weeks, not emergencies.
Rebuild From What is Real, not What is Familiar
Recovery taught me a second lesson, slower and more challenging. When you have lost the structure you were standing on, the instinct is to rebuild exactly what you had. I had to resist that. The faster path starts with a tougher question: Which parts of this were ever load-bearing, and which were just familiar?
In business, we keep failing strategies alive long after they’ve stopped working, simply because dismantling them feels like a loss. But a crisis is also a clearance. It shows you, with unusual honesty, what was only there out of habit. When I returned to my work advising on large, complex systems, I stopped trying to restore the old version of anything. I rebuilt around what actually carried weight: clear decisions, trusted relationships, and a handful of principles that would not bend under pressure.
Stillness is a Leadership Skill
The last lesson surprised me most. In the middle of the fall, the noise stopped. There was nothing to do but wait. I have since come to believe that stillness—the capacity to stop reacting long enough to clear our perspective at the exact moment we need it widest—is one of the most underrated leadership skills there is. It’s a pattern researchers have repeatedly documented. Acute stress narrows our ability to think clearly. Leading through a crisis well often means slowing down for a moment before you respond, so the decision comes from judgment instead of fear. Composure, not speed, is what your team remembers afterward.
I do not recommend the way I learned these things. But you do not need to fall off a mountain to apply them. The next time something in your work collapses—a deal, a plan, a role you were attached to—resist the urge to rebuild the illusion. Identify what was real. Then lead from that.