Grace Under Pressure - October 30, 2026

Being In-Charge Means Being An Umbrella

TL;DR - Leaders can't stop the rain, but they can keep their teams from getting soaked by staying calm, being honest about the problems and having a plan.

Businesses are never short on problems. What separates good leaders from bad ones is not the problems they face, but how they react when those problems arise.

As many of you know, I was an entrepreneur and business leader for 35 years. Throughout my career, whenever I led organizations I always thought of myself as an umbrella. When you’re under an umbrella you know it's raining, but you’re not getting wet.  My team knew when it was raining on our business, but they knew I would do my best to keep them protected from the issues our business was facing.  

A good leader will maintain calm and exude confidence during these challenging times. This defines one of my favourite terms in leadership, “Grace Under Pressure”.  When you’re a leader, your team watches everything you do and everything you say, when communicating the challenges facing the organization and when communicating elements of the plan to deal with these challenges to their team.

Every business encounters problems: customers become unhappy; sales fall short of target; development projects get delayed; cash flow becomes tight; staff leave the organization; and markets may change unexpectedly.  How much of this turbulence needs to be fully felt by everyone on the team?  A leader's job is not only to solve problems, but it is also to prevent those problems from becoming sources of anxiety for the people doing the work.   

Imagine a stone being thrown into a pond. The impact creates ripples that spread outward. In a business, a problem at the top can create similar ripples throughout an organization unless someone intervenes. A leader with grace under pressure absorbs some of those ripples.

Consider two leaders facing the same serious problem:

• Leader A walks into the office visibly agitated, criticizes people, demands immediate answers and communicates a sense of impending disaster. Everyone becomes nervous. People become defensive, mistakes are concealed, and productivity suffers.

• Leader B recognizes the seriousness of the situation, gathers the relevant facts, determines what needs to happen and communicates a clear plan. The team understands that there is a problem, but also that someone is taking responsibility for addressing it.

  
  

The business problem is identical. The leadership response is not. A leader cannot always control what happens to a business, but a leader has considerable influence over how the organization experiences what happens.

In a previous article I wrote about Servant Leadership (click here to read).  

With Servant Leadership a good leader is regularly asking their team:

• What issues are preventing you from doing your job?

• What can I do to help?

Grace under pressure extends that philosophy.

The first question helps a leader identify the obstacles that are preventing people from succeeding. The second establishes the leader's responsibility to help remove them.

But what happens when the obstacle is not a broken process or a lack of resources? What happens when the obstacle is the uncertainty or stress created by a difficult business situation?

Serving your team means finding them the resources they need. It could mean making a difficult decision on their behalf. And, sometimes it means giving them the clarity and confidence to do their jobs without having to carry the weight of every problem confronting the organization.

Leadership is not about making sure your people never experience pressure. It's about ensuring that they don't have to carry pressure that isn't theirs to carry.

Grace Under Pressure Is Not The Same As Pretending Everything Is Fine

An organization doesn't want leaders who hide bad news or sugar-coat reality. A good team is perceptive enough to know when things are going wrong. Nor should the leader become a bottleneck by personally absorbing every problem or preventing employees from understanding the challenges facing the business.

A good leader would say:

• "We have a serious challenge. Here is what happened, here is what we're doing about it, and here is what I need from each of you."

This is very different from:

• "We're in trouble. I don't know how this happened. Someone needs to fix this immediately!"

Both communicate a problem. Only one provides direction, perspective and confidence.

The Tone For The Entire Organization Starts At The Top

Leaders sometimes underestimate how closely their employees watch them. A leader's reaction to a setback can influence how an entire team responds to it. If the leader panics, people start worrying. If the leader looks for someone to blame, people start protecting themselves.

But if the leader remains composed, takes responsibility and focuses on solutions, people are more likely to concentrate on the work that needs to be done.

Employees have their own personalities and responsibilities. Leaders don't control everyone's emotional response. But they help establish what is considered normal behaviour in the organization.

The three things that leaders need to demonstrate are:

• Composure: Don't allow the first emotional reaction to dictate the response.

• Perspective: Distinguish between a genuine crisis and a problem that simply requires attention.

• Accountability: Take responsibility for addressing the situation instead of allowing anxiety and blame to spread throughout the organization.

These are the characteristics of Grace Under Pressure.

A Personal Story

A start-up I was previously involved with was a consumer packaged goods company. I was a Founder of that company and the CEO.  Throughout our existence, we were tight on cash.  That’s not unusual with start-ups but it's not particularly good with consumer packaged goods companies, because they always require cash to invest in building their brand, telling their story to consumers and to their sales channel, the retail stores.  My number one job was to raise cash so we could pursue our mandate. 

Every two weeks I’d be worried about making the company payroll; or I was worried about how we would pay for an in-store pop-up effort.  The team knew we were tight on cash, but they also felt confident that the company would have cash when we needed it because I was addressing the cash need, and did so with calm and consistency.  

I may have been worried about running out of cash, but I never allowed that worry to be visible to the team…Grace Under Pressure…

The Final Word

In the usual discussion of leadership qualities, we hear about vision, strategy, accountability, decisiveness and results. We don’t hear that much about a leader's responsibility to manage the emotional consequences of running a business.

A frustrated employee can have a difficult afternoon. A frustrated CEO can create anxiety across an entire organization.  

Stay calm…be an umbrella for your team

Thanks for reading!

Rock N’ Roll Side-Note:  I borrowed the term, “Grace Under Pressure” from the 1984 album of the same name, from the band Rush. The band Rush themselves borrowed the phrase from Ernest Hemingway.   

Do you have a favourite leader you worked with, who exudes Grace Under Pressure?  Share that story in the Comments  below.  

Are you a business leader? How do you keep your own stress from reaching your team? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.