What is the best leadership style in a crisis?

What do you do first? Some leaders make a call straight away. Some lower the temperature in the room. Some start writing the update to the wider team. Some think first about the person who made the error. And some open the logs and start digging.

None of those is wrong. Each is a different crisis leadership style, and each helps in some hours of a crisis and gets in the way in others. This post is about which style is best, why the honest answer is “it depends on the hour”, and how to find your own.

What is the best leadership style in a crisis?

There isn’t a single best style. A crisis needs different things at different moments: a fast decision in the first hour, calm and clear updates through the first day, care for people as it drags on, and careful work on the cause underneath it all. The best crisis leaders know their own default and borrow the rest.

A crisis compresses time. In 48 hours you may need to be decisive, reassuring, transparent, protective and forensic, sometimes all at once. Very few people are equally good at all five.

What tends to happen instead is that pressure makes us more like ourselves. The leader who likes to decide decides faster. The one who likes detail goes deeper. That instinct is often your greatest strength in a crisis, and it is also the thing most likely to leave a gap.

What are the main crisis leadership styles?

In our experience, leaders under pressure tend to fall back on one of five styles. In our Leading Through a Crisis self-test we call them the Commander, the Steadier, the Communicator, the Protector and the Problem-solver. Each has a real strength, a real trade-off and one move that balances it.

These are our own working names, not a recognised academic model. They are a way of noticing what you do, not a box to put yourself in.

• The Commander decides fast. Strength: in the first confused hour, a clear call gives everyone something to do. Trade-off: decisions made too fast, too often, can shut the team out and miss what they know. One move: after each big call, ask one person what you might have missed.
• The Steadier keeps people calm. Strength: your tone sets the tone, and a calm leader stops panic spreading. Trade-off: calm can slide into downplaying, and people notice when the words don’t match the facts. One move: say plainly how serious it is before you say why you are confident.
• The Communicator keeps everyone informed. Strength: regular, honest updates stop rumours before they start. Trade-off: you can spend the crisis writing about it while nobody is deciding. One move: fix an update rhythm, then guard the time in between for the actual work.
• The Protector looks after people and shields the team. Strength: you notice who is struggling, and you take the pressure from above so the team can work. Trade-off: shielding people too well can leave them without information they need, and leave you carrying it all. One move: share the hard facts with the team, and keep shielding them only from the noise.
• The Problem-solver goes into the detail. Strength: you find the real cause instead of the first plausible one. Trade-off: while you are deep in the logs, nobody is talking to the client or the team. One move: hand the outside world to someone else before you dive in, and come up at set times.

Most people recognise a main style and a strong second one. The pair matters more than the label, because the second style often covers some of the first one’s gap.

What does research say good crisis leaders do?

Two things stand out: helping people make sense of what is happening, and being honest about what you don’t yet know. Neither depends on personality. Any style can do both on purpose.

Writing early in the coronavirus pandemic, Gianpiero Petriglieri of INSEAD argued in Harvard Business Review that what people need from leaders in a crisis is less a vision and more what psychologists call holding. He describes holding as the way an authority figure “contains and interprets what’s happening in times of uncertainty.” Containing means calming distress. Interpreting means helping people make sense of a confusing situation.

His practical advice is plain. Tell people what will happen to their pay and their working conditions, what the priorities are now, and who needs to do what. Even if you can’t predict the outcome, explain why you are taking the steps you are. He also warns that “it is tempting to resort to command and control in a crisis,” and argues that it is the leaders who hold people, rather than command them, who help a group work through it.

Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School makes the companion point in another HBR piece. She writes that “transparency is ‘job one’ for leaders in a crisis,” and advises leaders to “be clear what you know, what you don’t know” and what they are doing to learn more.

Every style can use this. The Commander can hold people by explaining the call, not just making it. The Problem-solver can share what the detail is showing. The Steadier and the Protector are strong at calming people, and need honesty to come with it.

Which style is most effective at each stage of a crisis?

Each style tends to be most useful at a different point. Deciding and steadying matter most in the first hours, informing matters throughout, protecting matters more as the strain builds, and solving matters most once the immediate damage is contained. Knowing this helps you hand over the lead when the moment changes.

A rough guide:

1. The first hour. People need direction and a calm signal. Commander and Steadier strengths carry the most weight here.
2. The first day. People need to know what is true and when they will hear more. This is where the Communicator earns their keep.
3. The second day and beyond. Tiredness and worry build. The Protector notices who is running on empty and makes sure people rest.
4. Once things are stable. The Problem-solver’s patience matters most, because a fix that addresses the wrong cause will bring the crisis back.

You don’t need to be all five. You need to know which stage you are in and who on your team has the style it calls for.

What do the first 48 hours of a crisis look like in practice?

Here is a hypothetical example. A leader runs a team of about 30 people at a software company. On a Tuesday afternoon, a release goes out with an error that sends some customers the wrong invoices. Her main style is Problem-solver and her second is Protector.

Hour one. Her instinct is to open the code and find the bug, and she starts to. Then she remembers the move for her style. She asks her most senior engineer to lead the technical investigation, and asks a team lead with a calm manner to run a short call with everyone involved. She makes two decisions herself: roll back the release, and pause invoices until further notice.

Hour two. She sends a short note to the wider team, using the pattern from Edmondson’s advice: what we know, what we don’t know yet, what we are doing, and when the next update will be. She promises an update at 7pm and another at 9am.

Evening. She takes the call with the client herself. She doesn’t yet know the cause, so she says so, explains what has been done and when they will hear more. Her Protector instinct is to keep the client’s anger away from the engineer whose change caused the error. She does that, but she also tells him privately how serious the client is, so he isn’t working in the dark.

7pm. The update goes out on time, even though there is little new to say. Two people message her to say it helped just to hear something.

Day two, morning. The engineers have found the cause. Now her Problem-solver strength is what is needed, so she spends two hours checking with them whether anything else was affected, while her team lead keeps the updates going.

Day two, afternoon. She notices that three people worked past midnight. She tells them to log off early and covers what can wait. She checks in with the engineer behind the error, who is clearly shaken, and asks whether he has someone to talk to outside work.

Hour 48. Invoices are corrected and the client has accepted the explanation. She books a review for the following week, focused on what the process missed rather than who made the mistake.

She didn’t become a different leader. She used her strengths where they fitted and handed over the parts where her default would have left a gap.

How do you look after yourself and your team when a crisis drags on?

Pace yourselves on purpose. A crisis that lasts more than a day or two runs on people’s energy, and leaders often spend their own first. Rest, shared shifts and honest check-ins matter as much as the plan.

Some practical habits help:

• Rotate who is on point. If the same two people carry every evening, the response weakens just as it needs to hold.
• Ask how people are, then listen. Petriglieri describes the value of a leader who can bear witness to what people are going through, even when they can’t fix it.
• Notice your own default getting louder. If you are the Commander, are you deciding things the team could decide? If you are the Protector, are you carrying more than you have said out loud?
• Close it properly. When it is over, say so, and thank people specifically.

If you or someone on your team is finding the strain hard to shake, or it is spilling into sleep and life outside work, please encourage them, and yourself, to talk to someone you trust or a professional. That is a sensible step, not a sign that anyone has failed.

It is also worth being clear about what this post is. It is about leading a team through a work crisis, such as an outage, a lost client or a public mistake. It is not guidance for emergencies involving anyone’s safety. In those situations, follow your organisation’s procedures and contact the emergency services.

What is your crisis leadership style?

You can probably guess your main style from what you would do in the first ten minutes. A short self-test can show your second style too, and the one move worth practising before the next crisis.

Leading Through a Crisis is a free self-test built for that. It takes about 5 minutes, needs no sign-up, and your answers stay in your browser. You answer 14 questions about how you tend to act under pressure, and you get your main and second crisis style out of five: Commander, Steadier, Communicator, Protector and Problem-solver. Each comes with its strength, its trade-off and one move to try. You can read more about it on the test page.

Please read your result for what it is. Leading Through a Crisis is a reflection tool, not a psychological assessment. It can’t tell how you are coping, and it can’t tell anyone whether they are in difficulty. It gives you something to think with, and perhaps something to talk through with your team before you need it.

If you notice your crisis style is really a stronger version of your everyday habits, The 42 Test shows those habits across a normal week, ending with your Leader Code. For why the urge to jump in is so strong, read why new managers give answers too fast, and for how your mood travels through a team under pressure, see how far emotional contagion at work spreads. You’ll find more tools for turning points like this on Moments that matter.

The best leadership style in a crisis is the one the next hour needs. Learn your default now, while things are calm, and you will notice sooner when it is time to hand the lead to someone else.