The Skills That Turn Crisis Into Better Outcomes

A guide for leaders who choose to lead well when it matters most
Mar 25
2026

Leadership & Crisis

Crisis

In my last post, I talked about how the best leaders show up in chaos. And I meant it – showing up is everything. It’s the foundation that makes everything else possible.

But once you’re in the room? What you do next is what changes things.

Here’s what I want you to know: leading through chaos is a skill set. Not a personality type. Not something you’re either born with or you’re not. It’s something you can learn, practice, and grow – and I’ve seen leaders do exactly that.

These are the capabilities I come back to again and again with the leaders I have the privilege of working with.

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Emotional Intelligence Under Pressure

This is your ability to stay connected to the people around you when everything inside you wants to react. The leader who can read a room in the middle of a storm holds a quiet, powerful advantage. Don’t let anyone tell you this is soft. It is one of the sharpest performance edges you can develop.

Decisive Action with Incomplete Information

You will rarely have the full picture. That’s okay. A good decision made now will almost always serve you better than a perfect decision made too late. When you feel stuck, try asking yourself: what costs more – being wrong, or being slow? Paralysis is almost never the right answer.

Radical Clarity in Communication

When pressure builds, strip everything back. People need to know exactly what you mean and exactly what you need from them. The leader who communicates most clearly in a crisis becomes the leader people trust most. It really is that simple.

Systems Thinking

Learn to see how the pieces connect without losing track of what’s most urgent. Leaders who stay locked on the immediate fire often solve one problem while quietly creating three more. Practice zooming out – and then zooming back in.

Psychological Safety as a Strategy

If your people are softening the truth before it reaches you, you are already leading with less than you need. Creating an environment where people feel safe telling you what’s real isn’t a culture initiative – it’s how you stay informed enough to actually lead well.

Adaptive Leadership

Some moments call for you to lead from the front. Others call for you to step back and let someone else shine. The leaders who struggle most are often those who default to one style no matter what the moment requires. Stay curious about what each situation actually needs from you.

Narrative Leadership

People don’t just need a plan. They need a story that makes their work feel meaningful – even when things are hard, especially when things are hard. You are the author of that story. Own it with intention and steadiness.

Recovery and Resilience

Please don’t treat rest as a reward you haven’t earned yet. Build recovery into your rhythm as the infrastructure of everything else. How you replenish yourself determines how long you can show up fully for the people counting on you.

The leaders I’ve watched come out of chaos stronger were never the ones who had it easy. They were the ones who decided to lead well precisely when leading well was the hardest thing to do.

That is always a choice. And you can make it on purpose.

The Best Leaders Don’t Manage Chaos: They Lead Through It

What separates leaders who emerge from hard moments stronger has very little to do with intelligence or experience. It has everything to do with how they show up.
Mar 18
2026

Leadership & Culture

The Best Leaders

By Susan

I’ve spent years working with executives across industries, and the pattern is consistent: chaos does not create character. It reveals it.

The first instinct in most organizations when things fall apart is to go quiet and wait. The leaders who create better outcomes resist that entirely.

Silence – fills with fear.

Words – even imperfect ones – fill with trust.

Get Visible, Fast.

Your team doesn’t need you to have all the answers. They need to see that you’re present – that someone is oriented toward the path forward. Visibility in a crisis is stability made tangible.

Communicate Before You’re Ready.

Waiting for perfect information is a luxury chaos never grants. Say it plainly: “Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t, and here’s how we’re thinking about it.” That’s not weakness – that’s leadership.

Separate Signal from Noise.

There is always a flood of information in a crisis – much of it urgent, very little of it important. The best leaders ask one question: what is the single variable that matters most right now? Focus becomes their competitive advantage.

Hold the Emotional Center.

Your internal state becomes the organization’s external weather. Acknowledge the weight of the moment without being consumed by it. Your nervous system is contagious – regulate it deliberately.

For C-suite leaders specifically: your platform amplifies everything. People watch how you carry yourself in the hallway, in town halls, in the pauses between your words. Calm clarity at the top creates calm clarity everywhere beneath it.

“When this moment passes, what will your people say about who you were when it was hard?”

I ask every leader I work with that question, regardless of title or tenure. The habits you build before the chaos arrives are the ones that carry you through it.

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Kick Conventional Wisdom to the Curb

A guide for figuring out - what’s next for ourselves, our team and the organization we work for
Feb 23
2022

The disruption and chaos of the past two years challenged leaders and organizations, rendering them more reactive than proactive. If you’re like the leaders I work with, you’ve asked yourself hundreds of times: When will we get back to normal?

I’ll share with you what I share with them.

Returning to normal, whatever that was, isn’t possible. Thinking about how to do that isn’t the right strategy. Acknowledging the world fundamentally changed and figuring out how to defy conventional wisdom and create better ways of doing things is.

Thinking differently in times of uncertainty means learning fast, analyzing problems you’ve never encountered before and seizing opportunities you haven’t thought about before.

Here are some suggestions to help you do just that:

Don’t Rush Back
Rushing back to what was simply because of an artificial timeline isn’t a recipe for success. Resist the pressure to run quickly toward what is safe and predictable. Give yourself and those around you time to really get ready for the new world that awaits you.

Kick Conventional Wisdom to the Curb
Encourage yourself and others to ask the hard questions about what was and wasn’t working for you as a person, a team and an organization. Learn from experts outside your industry to generate better and more innovative ideas as you design what the future will look like for you professionally and the organization as a whole.

Value Steady Progress
Don’t become frustrated when things aren’t moving as quickly as you think they should. Celebrate small wins and steadily build on success. You and those around you will meet your long-term goals more quickly if you view progress incrementally.

Encourage Patience and Perseverance
Remember, everyone is still struggling to come out on the other side of this. Not everyone will emerge at the same pace. Encourage everyone to have patience and compassion for themselves and others. Perseverance and patience are the keys to coming back together stronger and motivated to achieve new things together.

As we return to what one day we’ll all consider normal, we have a rare opportunity to find out who we are now and what works and doesn’t in this world, we now find ourselves in. We are forever changed as a result of this experience, and if we seize the moment, we’ll return more inspired and ready for whatever lies ahead.

Running on Empty, Feeling Burnout

Strategies to Beat Back Burnout
Jul 27
2021

Burnout isn’t a new phenomenon – it’s a raging wildfire that engulfs more of us in its burn circle every day. The relentless pace at which the world around us demands we push ourselves is unsustainable. You know that as well as I do.

One glance at your calendar tells you it’s another day crammed full of an endless stream of virtual meetings, emails to answer and deadlines to meet. At the end of a long day, you walk away not feeling a sense of accomplishment but worn out, cynical and running on empty.

What you might not know is that mitigating burnout isn’t an individual responsibility alone.

Research shows that situational factors are the biggest contributors to burnout; therefore, the organizations we work for and the people we work with have a substantial role to play in helping restore the purpose, joy and harmony in our professional and personal life.

Beating back burnout demands we all think differently about how and what we do each and every day. Here are some things that people, leaders and organizations can do:

Find Harmony, not Balance
Balance isn’t what people need – people need harmony. Limit exposure to tasks, people and situations that impede one’s ability to create harmony. Look for ways that create contentment in the key areas of their lives, including work.

Know Where the Burnout Edge Is
High levels of stress not only come from doing something we don’t like – it also comes from doing something we value. Notice where the edge is for yourself and others: that line between high-energy engagement and pre-burnout. Use strategic pauses and opportunities to reset expectations and leverage flexible working styles to keep everyone from falling into the abyss.

Mindfulness = Culture
The advantages of being mindful are well-known. Make mindfulness a constant in your culture. Learn, share and consistently practice the behaviors that support detaching from stressful moments to reinvigorate and re-center for what lies ahead. Resolve to respect each others’ time, don’t book into open spaces on calendars automatically, don’t email in the evening or early morning hours and take time away and ensure others do too.

Mentor, Coach, and Befriend Others
Hire and promote the best people – make building rich interpersonal relationships part of their non-negotiable skill set. When mutual support and advocacy are the norms, people seek out opportunities to mentor, coach and befriend others. They share the highs and the lows, limiting any individual’s march toward burnout.

Consistent practice of the above strategies is essential to quelling the wildfire of burnout. Do them regularly – including when you don’t think you have the time, energy or patience to do it – not running away from the challenge will bring great rewards in the long run.

Let me know your thoughts and best ideas for stopping or recovering from burnout in the comments below.

4 Steps to Better Decisions

What Leaders at the Top Know
Mar 30
2021

This year, you’ll make hundreds of great decisions and what if I told you that making significant decisions all the time isn’t good enough to make you highly successful?

Yes, you heard me correctly: making great decisions always won’t take you to the top, nor will it help you thrive once you get there.

What leaders at the top know that you don’t?
They know that making decisions earlier, quicker and with greater conviction, even amid ambiguity and incomplete information, is the key to their success.

Here’s how to become a leader who decides with speed and conviction and fuels your rise to the top.

Stay in Your Lane
Don’t feel compelled to make every decision that comes your way. Only make those where you can most impact the outcome. Delegate the rest to others and trust their judgment. Staying in your lane frees you up to make fewer and more critical decisions.

Know When It’s Reversible and Not
Ask yourself two pivotal questions: What’s the impact if I get this wrong? and how much will it hold up if I don’t decide quickly on this? Knowing which decisions are reversible and which ones aren’t helping you push those that are reversible lower down in the organization so that important information emerges without causing irreparable harm.

Your Judgement is Definitive
Build a group of trusted advisers and go to them for unvarnished opinions and sound judgment. Tell others from the outset that you plan to weigh all perspectives, and ultimately, you’ll decide what, in your judgment, is the best way forward. Let others know that when you decide, you expect them to be on board, even if it isn’t what they’d have chosen.

A Wrong Decision is Better Than No Decision
Don’t pursue the perfect answer; it takes too long and creates a bottleneck that frustrates those around you. Understand that most decisions can be undone, so making a wrong decision is often better than pursuing a perfect solution or not deciding. Just be sure to course-correct it quickly.

Let go of the expectation that you have to make great decisions all the time and trust in your ability to be decisive and agile enough to learn from your mistakes.

6 Changes to Crush Your Next Virtual Meeting

Jan 12
2021

You’re a powerful, confident and influential leader able to impact strategy and build strong relationships – that is, until the past few months.

Now you struggle to have the same level of impact you did in person in a virtual meeting (environment). You know you need to turn things around but don’t know where to start.

You’re not alone. Many of the leaders I work with, as executive coaches are trying to figure out precisely what they need to change to have the level of impact and influence in a virtual environment that they had in person.

The good news – it isn’t challenging to get your mojo back. Here are six simple changes you can make today to crush your next virtual meeting.

Read the Room (or Virtual Meeting) Differently
Virtual platforms help us connect with others but make reading nonverbal cues difficult. Reading the room differently starts well before the meeting begins and ends after it is over. Learn as much as you possibly can about peoples’ concerns, patterns and what motivates them to take action so that you craft your presentation to take advantage of what connects with them.

Use Your Tech to Connect in the Moment
Select a video platform that allows a high degree of engagement with the audience and know how to use those tools. Tools like polls, whiteboards, emojis, and thumbs up or down keep people interested and give you in-the-moment feedback about the resonance of the material you’re presenting.

Give Them a Heads Up About Their Role
You can’t expect people to fully engage when they can’t clearly identify their role or what you expect of them. A heads-up from you before the meeting sets a common focus, ensures people won’t sit on the sidelines and helps them recognize they have a role to play in the meeting’s success.

Keep it Strategic and Simple
The distractions are endless in virtual environments, so it is important to keep your presentation strategic and simple and then be silent while you wait for answers to your questions. It takes longer for people in a virtual environment to digest and respond, so active listening and asking follow-up questions are critical to the success of your meeting in a virtual setting.

Nonverbals Still Matter
Instead of attempting to read everyone’s nonverbal signals, which is impossible, choose a couple of key participants and focus your attention on them. This narrower focus exposes you to real-time feedback about how things are going, so you adapt as you need to.

What you do After Is Important

As important as it is to give people a heads-up before the meeting, it is equally important to ask for feedback from a few trusted people after the meeting. Recording the meeting and watching it back from a participant’s perspective gives you insight into what worked and could work better the next time.

Virtual meetings aren’t going away anytime soon, so if you want to crush your next virtual meeting, tap into the strategies above. I look forward to hearing from you about what happens.

Best,
Susan

A 4-Step Guide to Time Management

Help You Spend it Wisely
Oct 16
2020

Are you one of the many people on the road of endless busyness? If the answer is yes, I want you to listen carefully to what I’m going to say next – only you control your time, and you don’t have to live like that anymore!

Here’s a 4-step guide to paring down where and how you spend your time so you get the most bang for the buck.

1) Think About Time Management Differently

Time is a limited resource. Take an inventory of how you spend it each day. Then look at the allocation and see if it reflects the tasks that have the most impact on achieving your goals.

2) ReAlign Your To-Do List

Use the information you learn from step one to realign and organize your to-do list. Prioritize each item by the amount of effort required and the impact that completing that task has on your ultimate goal. Outsource to others anything that takes up a lot of time and has little impact on your goal.

3) Make Sure Your Tech Helps Not Hurts

Technology is great when it helps you to do things more efficiently. It can also be a major source of distraction and stress. Do an inventory of your tech – make some conscious decisions about whether it improves your efficiency or really saves you time. Kick to the curb anything that is a time waster.

4) Don’t Blindly Add Tasks to the List

Monitor how you’re spending your time on the items on the list. Adapt in real-time to emerging situations. Clarify what is expected of you, decide if what is being asked has an impact on you and re-prioritize activities as your needs and the impact of a task dictate.

Here’s to taking back your life and enjoying how you spend your time. I’d love to hear how these steps work for you and any tips you have in the comments below.

Best,
Susan

5 Strategies to Living with Discomfort in Uncertain Times

Get Comfortable
Mar 19
2020

You can’t turn on the TV or talk with someone that the topic of coronavirus doesn’t come up, and that’s to be expected – it’s on all of our minds.

The intensity of the uncertainty we share about our health, livelihood, and future kicked our brain’s state of emotional arousal up a few hundred notches. Our collective brain is screaming at us to narrow our focus and engage in short-term fixes and safety-seeking behaviors like locking down cities and emptying grocery stores.

Intuitively and experientially, we know the human brain is automatically drawn to the worst-case scenarios, often inaccurately. The constant updates don’t calm our collective anxiety and fear. They prime the pump for the cycle to intensify.

What will work to get comfortable with discomfort in uncertain times?

Learning how to be comfortable with the discomfort that uncertainty brings.
There are five things you can do today that will put you in a better position to refocus your mind and build your emotional resilience.

Get Comfortable with Discomfort
Getting comfortable with discomfort helps break your fear response cycle and frees your mind up to see other things that are equally or more important to your survival. Acknowledge you’re having an automatic emotional response to unfamiliar, scary and life-altering situations. Lean into the discomfort you’re feeling rather than expending energy and avoiding it. You can do this by first thinking about what you fear will happen. Then quickly force yourself to think about what you want to happen and then shift to what is most likely to happen. Once you’ve arrived at what most likely will happen, develop a plan for what most likely will happen.

Tune Down the Intensity
Too much information can gunk up our thinking. Seeing beyond the noise means immersing yourself in pursuits that aren’t related to solving the current challenge 24/7. Choose how long you’ll spend each day watching the news, talking about it with others, or just thinking about it. Set that limit and stick to it. Stepping back from all the noise means you won’t seize and freeze in these changing times.

Don’t Blindly Trust Your Gut
Trusting your gut instincts works well when time is of the essence, when the challenge is both complex and not clearly defined, or when there is too little or too much information. But your intuition isn’t infallible – intuitions aren’t truths. Test your intuitions and rule out bias, fear-driven action and thinking too fast. Solve what is likely to happen by taking some practical steps that are completely under your control.

Break the Spell of Conformity
Respectfully raise relevant objections or scenarios that uncover and improve the strategy under consideration. You’re not the enemy when you do this rather you help yourself and others avoid magnifying the problem beyond what it is, and rushing to conclusions that give undue weight to what may have worked well before.

Make it Safe to Think Counterintuitively
We all have a responsibility, especially those in leadership roles, to make it safe for people to think and experiment with counterintuitive solutions, take intelligent risks, report and adapt to failures quickly and ask smart questions. Letting go of needing to be right, to be the one who acted first and blame unleashes the vast potential of our collective mind to solve the challenge together.

Our shared willingness to experiment with these strategies helps us be comfortable with the discomfort that uncertainty brings and helps us to see a wider field of potential solutions.

I’d love your best ideas for leading yourself and others in times of uncertainty.

Stay well, lean in, and we’ll emerge even stronger together,
Susan

Accountability Doesn’t Just Happen

It Starts With You
Mar 04
2020

What’s the best way to hold my team accountable for their commitments?

It’s a question the leaders and executives I work with often ask.

Accountability doesn’t happen just by chance – it has to be something you know how to create.

You define the culture of accountability, and it isn’t a one-time thing. When you demonstrate the strategic follow-through and initiative it takes to achieve tangible success, you help your team understand they’re accountable for an outcome, not just the set of tasks along the way.

Here are five critical behaviors to help you increase accountability levels among your team members:

Don’t Settle for Good Enough
Challenge the people you work with and set their sights higher. Focus on achieving what others think is improbable; it will help you take risks necessary to succeed, come up with creative solutions, and move beyond roadblocks.

Tackle the Tough Stuff
Make difficult decisions and tackle the tough stuff up front. Be the one who clears the obstacles and focuses your team’s attention on accomplishing the tasks at hand rather than putting out fires. Walk the talk if you want others to follow you down the accountability road.

Share How Vital They Are
Communicate how their contributions are vital to the success of the outcome and the organization. Make the task meaningful to them and reward success and failure fast. When you acknowledge these behaviors, you increase the level of buy-in needed for others to hold themselves accountable for the shared outcomes.

Express Optimism
Optimism is contagious. Share your optimism about the future and your team’s ability to fail fast and adapt. If you can’t be optimistic and show it – they’ll never be.

Be Trend Savvy
If you want others to take ownership, you must do it first. Don’t bury your head in the sand. Be trend-savvy about the business climate and how organizational culture impacts success. Proactively identify the threats and risks, alert others and take quick action.

Creating a culture of accountability starts with you; it isn’t a once-and-done activity. Accountability feeds success and helps others own shared outcomes in ways that accelerate success for all.

Leading is Hard, Becoming a Legendary Leader is Even Harder

Here’s what it takes to exert the level of influence that will give legendary status as a leader
Jan 13
2020

Sometimes, an unknown leader comes out of nowhere and captures the world’s interest for a few years, only to disappear and never be heard from again. And then some leaders become legends.

“A one-hit wonder is a legend who stopped early,” according to marketing whiz Seth Godin. A Legendary leader is relentless in pursuing success, even in their not-so-stellar moments. However, they do much more than that: they redefine their leadership role.

Here’s what it takes to exert the level of influence that will give legendary status as a leader:

Face Problems Head-On
Legendary leaders strip fear of their power by confronting all problems directly. In the absence of fear, people see roadblocks as opportunities and as challenges to be solved. This leads to collaboration, creativity, thought-provoking work – and, often, accomplishing the inconceivable.

There’s Always a Way Forward
In challenging times, legendary leaders know that there’s always a way forward. Pushing boundaries and untethering themselves from conventional wisdom is what alters their trajectory and creates the following compelling vision that guides them forward.

The Fastest Route Isn’t Best
Opt not to chart every point from start to finish on the roadmap to becoming a legendary leader. A quick arrival can be a short-term boost to your ego and reputation but can rob you of the texture, learning, and insights that a less direct route offers. Legends don’t settle for the immediate signs that others would notice as success—like a fancy title and a big office at a prestigious company — but instead opt for experiences that serve them better in the long run.

Exude Optimism
Legends know that when tough situations arise, they’re merely blips on the radar. A hopeful but realistic approach gets them over the momentary setback – they exude optimism. Grounded in the real world, they don’t overlook the cost of failure or let it become overwhelming. With newfound knowledge, they end every situation on a high note.