Leadership in crisis reveals character in a way that ordinary performance never does. The executive who is excellent in stable conditions — who plans well, communicates clearly, manages effectively — may or may not be excellent when the plan fails, when the communications are not working and when management is not keeping pace with events. The crisis is the test that ordinary governance processes cannot replicate, and the executives who pass it are worth understanding in specific terms.

I have observed a number of significant organisational crises from close range — through the leadership appointments that preceded them, the governance failures that precipitated them and the recovery processes that followed them. The pattern of what distinguishes the leaders who serve their organisations well in these situations is consistent enough to support some definitive observations.

What Boards Should Demand in Crisis

Boards have a specific governance responsibility in a crisis that is different from their responsibility in normal operating conditions, and the executives who serve their boards well in crisis understand this distinction. In normal operations, the board’s role is oversight: challenging strategy, governing risk, holding management accountable for performance. In a crisis, this role intensifies — but it also changes in character. The board must simultaneously maintain its oversight function and provide the stability, legitimacy and resource that management needs to navigate the situation effectively.

The executives who enable their boards to fulfil this dual role in crisis are those who communicate with radical transparency about what is happening and what they don’t know, who bring the board into the decision-making process on choices that are genuinely board-level rather than using the crisis as an excuse to bypass governance, and who are honest about their own limitations and the moments at which they need the board’s support rather than just its approval.

This level of transparency with the board requires a CEO-chair relationship that was already functional before the crisis began. I return to this point because it is not possible to build this relationship during a crisis. The trust that enables a CEO to tell the board chair something embarrassing before it becomes a governance problem — rather than after — is built in hundreds of small interactions before the crisis arrives. Boards that discover during a crisis that their CEO was not transparent in normal conditions are dealing with two problems simultaneously: the crisis itself and the governance failure that prevented early intervention.

The Communication Burden

The external communication dimension of crisis leadership is one that is frequently underestimated in its complexity and its importance. The executive who communicates well in normal conditions — who is articulate, composed and credible — does not automatically communicate well in crisis. Crisis communication is a distinct discipline that requires specific capabilities: the capacity to communicate clearly when the facts are incomplete, to maintain credibility with different stakeholder audiences who have different information needs and different levels of risk anxiety, and to sustain consistent messaging across multiple channels when the temptation to say different things to different audiences is strong.

The executives who handle crisis communication best are those who can separate what they know from what they are assuming, who can acknowledge uncertainty without amplifying anxiety, and who understand that the moment at which an organisation’s credibility is most at risk is not when it discloses bad news but when the disclosure is perceived as incomplete or delayed. The organisation that discloses a problem clearly and early, with a credible plan for addressing it, consistently recovers faster than the organisation that delays disclosure until the problem has grown beyond containment.

Resilience as a Leadership Quality

Resilience — the capacity to maintain effective leadership through extended periods of pressure and uncertainty — is one of the leadership qualities most consistently associated with crisis performance and least reliably assessed in executive selection. The reason is structural: most executive selection processes evaluate candidates in conditions that are designed to be fair and comfortable. The crisis context is neither.

The signals of genuine resilience that I look for in executive assessment are not the candidate’s description of their resilience. They are the evidence from their track record: the specific situations in which they maintained judgment and forward momentum under genuine pressure, the setbacks they have experienced and how they recovered from them, the failures they have had and what they reveal about the quality of their self-awareness and their capacity to learn. These are the conversations that reference processes make possible and that formal interviews rarely reach.

At JOlivier & Partners, the assessment of resilience and crisis leadership capability is part of every senior appointment process we lead. The organisations that invest in understanding this quality before appointing their senior leaders are the ones most likely to discover, when the test comes, that they chose well.