Experienced leaders set the tone for a team in a difficult situation, and they do it mainly by keeping their own reaction under control before dealing with anything else. Staff watch the boss’s face far more closely than any report. There is a line in a published profile of Arif Bhalwani Third Eye Capital that most readers probably skim past. Stoicism was Bhalwani’s favourite university course. As someone who lends to companies that banks turn down, the choice is not that surprising. Stoicism is a blunt practice when taken as a philosophy course. Decide what you can influence. Don’t worry about the rest. Spend less time on the second group and don’t pretend it doesn’t exist.
Which problems come first?
Two or three, and no more than that. Everything else is made to wait. Bhalwani once described the ideal business partnership as one plus one equalling four. The point, as far as it can be read, is that two sides working properly should produce roughly double what either could manage alone. There is no chance of that if the team is throwing the same amount of energy at every alarm that goes off.
Therefore, sorting must happen quickly and on a cold day. A few things need to be answered in the next hour, and the leader handles those personally. A larger batch of things feel urgent and are not. Each one goes to a specific person with a date beside it, because without a date it will drift and turn into a real problem later. Then there is a third category that tends to surprise newer managers. Some problems get left alone on purpose. Touching them now would eat attention that the two or three big decisions need. Teams that watch this done a handful of times start doing it themselves, usually without anybody telling them to.
Why does honesty break down?
Staff are least inclined to provide an unvarnished version of events when leaders need it most. Nobody wants to make a bad week worse. One sentence sums up the whole problem. Plain talk during a crisis must be established beforehand, when the stakes are low, and the habit is easy to establish.
Leaders of that kind generally want to be argued with. The reasoning is that a plan nobody challenged probably has a weak spot nobody found. In practice, the habit is not dramatic. Bad news is expected the same hour it turns up, not after someone has spent two days quietly trying to repair it. The person who got it wrong walks the group through what happened, in full, and then the subject is dropped. Nobody is made an example. Pushback in a meeting gets treated as information rather than as a problem with somebody’s attitude. It is not a comfortable way to run a room. It is still a lot cheaper than hearing the truth late.
Staying when others leave
Bhalwani’s favourite quotation is Churchill’s remark about never giving up. There is a lot of fear associated with regret. These two answers describe someone who settled the quitting question well before a crisis. That matters more than it sounds, because the heaviest question in a struggling team is almost never said out loud. People want to know whether the boss is about to go.
The only answer that works is one the team can see. It is not glamorous. The leader is at the desk early during the worst week, not the junior staff. The awkward phone call gets made by the leader rather than passed down. Nobody outside the room is blamed for bad things. Persistence spreads faster than any pep talk through a group.
