Verne Harnish's five Cs for leading your team through a crisis

Executive overview

In a crisis, panic spreads fast — but so does leadership. The leader sets the tone for the entire organisation. Verne Harnish distils 38 years of working with founders into five concrete actions leaders must take right now.

The team that leads with calm, facts, and generosity will emerge from any crisis stronger than those who freeze.

Communicate daily

• Send one daily message: email, two-minute video, or voice — match your style, but be consistent.
• Stick to facts. This is not the time to speculate or guess.
• Balance negatives with several positives.
• When sharing bad news, lead with it first, then state what you're doing about it — this builds trust.
• Consider twice-daily updates during the most volatile phase.

Customer and community support

• Suspend all promotions. Do not try to sell during the acute phase.
• Shift the entire team's focus to: what can we give, with no expectation of return?
• Proactive generosity combats internal depression and disengagement.
• Examples: free courses, free coaching, free resources — give first.

Clean up and catch up

• Use the quiet time to strip out waste: unnecessary activities, costs, and internal drag.
• Citibank Ireland (2010 crisis): engaging all 60 staff to find savings cut ~25% of needless activity and made everyone's job easier.
• Identify what is working, what is struggling, and what is occupying space. Keep the former; cut the rest.
• Use a "not doing now" parking lot: capture all stalled projects on a sticky-note wall and stop stressing about them unless they become relevant.
• Fix the internal projects that have been deprioritised: website navigation, documentation, core processes.
• This keeps people actively engaged and positions the company to move fast when demand returns.

Cash

• Treat cash as a dedicated clean-up workstream, not a CFO-only problem.
• Involve the whole team in finding savings — distributed effort surfaces more than a top-down search.
• Make radical requests: negotiate with landlords, suppliers, and partners in ways you would not attempt in normal times. In 2009, one founder secured a year of free rent in exchange for a two-year lease extension.
• In the US (context: 2020): SBA loans offered up to $350k over 10 years at sub-6% with no prepayment penalty — understand and use available government instruments.
• The goal is to backstop payroll and maintain the team commitment.

Calm and considerate

• The leader's emotional state is contagious. Model composure deliberately.
• The single most accessible tool: take a few deep breaths before responding or executing.
• If you have a mindfulness or meditation practice, maintain it — especially now.
• Adopt a personal mantra for the period (Harnish's: "peaceful, playful, passion-full").
• Calm under pressure transmits to the team and improves decision quality.