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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Most leaders think they know themselves, but 95% of behavior is unconscious. Learn the one question that reveals your hidden Ego and transforms your impact.

Today’s post is by Christie Garcia, author of Your Ego Is Showing: How Ego Management Unlocks Authentic Confidence and Meaningful Success.

I fell three stories off a fire escape on a Friday morning in San Francisco. When the paramedics arrived, my first concern was whether I could still throw my holiday party that evening.

That moment was a perfect portrait of my Ego running completely unchecked. I have what I call a Controller Ego. Controllers are driven by achievement, push hard, move fast, and pride themselves on handling anything and everything. The downside is that we also tend to be emotionally unavailable, hyper-rational in moments that call for real emotions, and completely blind to the “real” impact we have on the people around us.

That blindness is what I want to talk about, because it is not just a Controller problem. It is a human problem, and it may be the single most expensive leadership habit you have right now.

In my work as an executive coach, I have found that 95 percent of the time, leaders are operating on autopilot. Their Ego, the unconscious brain, is driving every decision, every reaction, every conversation. The unsettling truth is that everyone around them can see it. They are usually the only ones who cannot.

I call this the self-awareness gap.

There are three Ego types I work with: the Complier, the Protector, and the Controller. Each has real gifts which are often our biggest weaknesses when overused. I like to call these overused gifts our liabilities or our Ego tactics. These tactics quietly sabotage our relationships, happiness, and success in both work and life. With almost two decades of coaching, I have yet to meet a leader who has not identified with at least one of them.

The Complier is warm, easy to work with, and deeply people-oriented. The liabilities of the Complier Ego is that they forfeit their power to keep the peace. I worked with a leader I will call Diane. She was a beloved director at a mid-size nonprofit, the kind of person everyone wanted on their team. But in every senior leadership meeting, she would agree with whoever spoke last, even when she privately disagreed. She told herself she was being collaborative. What she was actually doing was accumulating resentment quietly, until one day she sent an email to her executive director that was so out of character it blindsided everyone, including Diane herself. When we unpacked it, she realized she had been swallowing her truth for nearly two years. Her Complier Ego had convinced her that speaking up was a threat to being liked. What it actually cost her was her credibility.

The Protector leads with integrity and logic. They are often the most principled person in the room, and the most guarded. I think of a client I will call Marcus, a COO who was brilliant at strategy and notoriously hard to read. His team respected him but never felt close to him. When a high performer resigned, she told HR that she never felt like Marcus believed in her. Marcus was floored. He had been her biggest internal advocate for two years. The problem was that his Protector Ego had built walls so effectively that his support was never communicated to the employee. He assumed she knew how proud of her he was. One of the Protector’s liabilities is their black-and-white thinking. They struggle to see the gray, which prevents them from sharing details, giving praise, or telling people how they really feel (both good and bad). Most often, the Ego’s beliefs are that people should know how he feels, they should just do their job, and results speak for themselves. Unfortunately, in this situation, they did not. His team needed to hear it from him directly, and he had no idea that was missing.

The Controller, my own dominant Ego, is ambitious, decisive, and gets things done. The liabilities of the Ego are that we tend to define success through accomplishments and unintentionally make the people around us feel like tools rather than partners. A client I will call Tom was a sales director who consistently hit his numbers and consistently lost his top performers. The exit interviews always pointed to the same theme; he was inspiring to be around but exhausting to work for. Nothing was ever quite good enough and they can always accomplish more. Tom’s first instinct when I shared this was to defend his high-quality work and standards. His second, once he got quiet, was to admit he had no idea how to celebrate a win before moving to the next one. His Controller Ego had convinced him that satisfaction was the enemy of improvement. What it was actually doing was burning out the very people he needed most.

Here is what all three of these leaders had in common. They were not trying to create these problems. Their Egos were running the show unconsciously, and nobody brought these liabilities to their awareness without triggering their Ego. Once they heard the feedback in a productive way, they were able to look in the mirror and truly find the value in the feedback.

This is where Ego Management begins. Not with fixing yourself, but with seeing yourself clearly and taking ownership of your unintended impact.

Once you choose to acknowledge the perception of your impact and start owning this truth you can get curious. What is my part in this? Not what went wrong, not who dropped the ball, but where did I contribute to this outcome? It is a question the Ego prevents you from asking yourself. It doesn’t want you to know the truth. It wants you to stay stuck, disappointed, unsatisfied, and in the drama of life and relationships. Diane started asking it before every difficult meeting. Marcus started asking it when a relationship felt distant. Tom started asking it every time someone on his team went quiet.

The Ego never fully goes away. It grows with you and gets smarter as you learn about it. The goal is not to eliminate it but to recognize it early enough to choose differently. One percent better today. And then again tomorrow.

That is how leaders stop letting their Ego show and start letting their best self lead.

Christie Garcia is an executive coach and the founder of Mindful Choice, a leadership development company. Her book Your Ego Is Showing: How Ego Management Unlocks Authentic Confidence and Meaningful Success is available wherever books are sold. Learn more at mindfulchoiceacademy.com/book.

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