Leading a team through crisis: trust, communication, and preparedness

Executive overview

Inheriting a team already in crisis is one of leadership's hardest assignments. The instinct is to act fast and solo — but crisis demands collective leadership, swift trust, and constant communication across multiple stakeholders.

Lynn Perry Wooten, who became president of Simmons University on July 1, 2020, draws on her own experience and her co-authored framework — the Trust Will — to show how new leaders can build credibility and move an organisation forward when entering mid-crisis.

Leaders who treat crises as isolated events fail to prepare for the next one — and the next one is always forming.

The panic-neglect cycle

• Most leaders swing between panic mode and neglect — they resolve the crisis, then stop thinking about the next one.
• The antidote is building a "memory muscle": learning from after-action reviews, studying history, and drawing on diverse experts.
• Constant scenario planning is the companion skill — asking what's coming, not just what's happening now.
• Crises are ambiguous: they carry both threat and opportunity at the individual, team, organisational, and community level.
• Telemed adoption and hybrid work both emerged as forced opportunities from the pandemic crisis.

Building swift trust as a new leader

• Walking into an inherited crisis is like "coming into the movies in the middle of the movie."
• Swift trust requires demonstrating the three Cs: Communication, Competence, and Contract.
• Admit openly that you don't have all the answers — vulnerability signals trustworthiness, not weakness.
• Match your communication channel to your audience: younger stakeholders don't read email; use video and social media.
• Step into the other person's frame — Wooten put on her "parent hat" when addressing parents, not her president hat.

Communication in a crisis

• Communicate constantly and consistently — not just on day one, then again when you have answers.
• Use cascading communication: everyone in the room must own a piece of the outgoing message to their own audiences.
• Show both the data and the story: current situation, recovery trajectory, and the pathway between them.
• Don't downplay risk. Present worst-case, medium, and best-case scenarios with a pathway to action for each.
• Communication demonstrates competence — what you say and how you say it signals whether you can lead.

Competence is collective, not solo

• Crisis leadership is not a solo journey — bring the CFO, CMO, chief diversity officer, public health experts to the table.
• If you or your team lack the competence, someone in the wider ecosystem does. Find and partner with them.
• The pandemic vaccine required nonprofit, government, and corporate sectors to combine knowledge — no single organisation had all the answers.
• Western leadership culture overvalues the "sole hero" — crisis requires abandoning that model.

The contract dimension of trust

• The contract — both explicit and implicit — defines what each person owes the organisation and what the leader owes them.
• Every team member is hired for expertise, experience, and execution; holding them to that contract is part of trust.
• The leader also holds a contract for individual well-being, not just organisational outcomes.
• The three Ps frame the prepared leader's obligations: people, planet, and some form of profit (even in nonprofits).

High-performance meetings in a crisis

• Crises are the ultimate call for collective learning — meetings are the mechanism.
• At peak crisis, meeting three times a week is appropriate; use structured agendas with focus areas, learning time, discussion, and cascading actions.
• Large meetings are not always wrong — sometimes all the experts need to be in the room.
• A key move: the leader steps back from operational crisis management to do parallel strategic planning for the future.
• Meetings build connection, alignment on communication, and the shared problem-solving that email cannot replicate.

Smoldering crises and strategic HR

• Sudden crises (earthquakes, fires) are urgent and visible — the response pathway is relatively clear.
• Smoldering crises build slowly and are easy to ignore until they explode: the Great Resignation, demographic workforce shifts, and the "she-cession" are examples.
• Generation X is the smallest generation in American history; when baby boomers retire, the talent gap will widen.
• Leaders need to build women-friendly, caring-friendly workplaces and invest in succession planning for younger workers now — not after the crisis hits.