Mental Readiness is the Key to Successful Management of Crises

Want to become a trusted advisor to leaders in crisis? Learn how to help leaders make smart choices under stress.

Today’s post is by Helio Fred Garcia, co-author with James E. Lukaszewski of Influencing Leaders: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, to be published in August 2026.

Leaders are judged by how they deal with their greatest challenges. Some rise to the occasion and are rewarded for their thoughtfulness, courage, and leadership; many do not and suffer meaningful harm as a result.

I’ve been a crisis management advisor and professor for decades. I’ve advised hundreds of senior leaders in companies, governments, the military, and not-for-profits. And I have concluded that the single most-common cause of failed crisis response is lack of mental readiness on the part of leaders.

The most common cause of a crisis response failure is that leaders made choices based on personal preference. The landscape is littered with senior leaders who improvised and failed when the stakes were high: they panicked, prevaricated, or otherwise failed to behave like responsible leaders when it mattered most. This never works. That’s because under stress humans experience a fear response, which shuts down critical thinking and leads to self-protective decision-making. Leaders who make choices based on personal preference will predictably make choices that protect their comfort, but likely fail to live up to the standards stakeholders hold leaders accountable to.

Like other forms of management, crisis management is a rigorous business discipline. It is the management of choices leaders make when trust is on the line – and with it, all other measures of competitive position that trust makes possible: stock price, employee morale and productivity, customer demand for products and services, and the like. As with any other business discipline, there is a method to making smart choices in a crisis. It requires having clear decision criteria for every foreseeable decision in a crisis: what to do, what to say, when to do and say it, how to do and say it, etc. But just having those clear criteria is not enough: In a crisis, leaders need to actually follow those criteria.

Mental Readiness

Mental readiness has three distinct components:

1. Emotional discipline. This, in turn, has three elements:
   • Contain panic: This is a learned capacity. Firefighters learn to walk calmly into a burning building; military are trained to move toward the people shooting at them, etc. This goes against every human instinct. And yet, we can train ourselves to stay calm amidst the noise and do the uncomfortable things necessary to accomplish our goal.
   • Self-regulate: One of the most common leadership failures is the inability to regulate moods, impulses, drives, and to re-direct them to a more productive place.
   • Exhibit humility: The key to getting through a crisis is to demonstrate empathy toward those negatively affected by the crisis. Humility is what that makes empathy possible. Fail to show humility, and stakeholders – both internal and external – will lose trust in the leader.
2. Deep knowledge. This has two parts:
   • Pattern recognition: Crises follow predictable patterns. And patterns have two kinds of power: explanatory power, helping make sense of the past; and predictive power, helping anticipate what will happen next. One pattern: Some things never work in a crisis: denial, diminishing the significance of the harm, blaming others, lying, shooting the messenger. Another pattern: Most harm in a crisis is self-inflicted, the result of leaders doing the things that never work in a crisis.
   • Study multiple crises: Often leaders need to see an example of another leader making a scary choice that leads to success. In my work with leaders, I help them recognize that they can get through a crisis well by showing them what leaders did in similar crises.
3. Intellectual rigor: One way to understand strategy is to think of it as ordered thinking: of deferring certain topics until you’ve considered certain prior topics. The sequence of consideration matters. If we jump into how we might respond to a crisis before considering prior issues, we will likely respond poorly. We need to ask other questions before prescribing options — questions that analyze the nature of the crisis, the risks the crisis represents, how we might mitigate those risks, who is affected by the crisis, and what those stakeholders will expect from us.

The key decision criterion for what to do or say in a crisis is driven by the elements of trust. Trust can be understood as the natural consequence of promises fulfilled, expectations met, and stated values being the lived experience of stakeholders. Fulfill a promise; meet an appropriate expectation, live your declared values – trust is locked in. Break a promise; miss on an expectation; behave contrary to stated values – trust falls.

The decision criterion for what to do and say is simple: Imagine those who matter to the organization, and ask: What would reasonable people appropriately expect a responsible organization to do in this kind of situation? The answer often provides a roadmap to a productive resolution of the crisis. It allows us to respond in ways that align with the appropriate expectations of our stakeholders, and thereby maintain trust as we address the underlying issue.

Of all the expectations stakeholders may have, there is one that applies for every stakeholder of every organization in every form of crisis. In a crisis, every stakeholder expects the organization to care: That some system or process or judgment failed and needs to be remedied. That people are hurt or hurting as a result. And that the leader cares about – and sometimes needs to care for – those directly affected.

In short, effective crisis response is never about how the leader feels; it’s what our stakeholders need to experience in order believe that we care.

I have the privilege of being in the room with leaders when they face their biggest challenges. I serve as a kind of CEO-whisperer, helping the leader make productive choices even when all the choices still lead to an undesirable outcome. I help the leader choose the less bad outcome – the one most likely to demonstrate that they care. This, too, is a learned capacity.

Want to become a trusted advisor to leaders in crisis? Learn how to help leaders make smart choices under stress.

Helio Fred Garcia is executive director of the Logos Institute for Crisis Management and Executive Leadership. He teaches crisis, ethics, leadership, and communication in a number of universities and professional schools, including Columbia University and New York University. He is co-author with James E. Lukaszewski of Influencing Leaders: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, to be published in August 2026.

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