When Urgency Takes Over: Why How We Lead in Hard Moments Matters Most

I’ve heard leaders say things like this, usually in moments of real stress:

“I’m in a crisis. I don’t have time to ask how people are doing. This is all business right now.”

“I don’t have time to be strengths-based. I’m just going to give it to them straight.”

These comments rarely come from bad intentions. They come from urgency. Pressure. That familiar feeling that things are slipping out of control.

When urgency hits, many leaders tighten their grip. They increase control, monitor more closely, and step in more often. In the moment, this can feel stabilizing and even responsible. But what helps the leader feel regulated often has the opposite effect on everyone else.

Teams on the receiving end of “all business” leadership frequently experience fear, confusion, and disengagement. Psychological safety erodes. People stop speaking up, creativity drops, and mistakes increase rather than decrease. Over time, burnout accelerates and trust thins.

This is where strengths-based and trauma-informed approaches are often misunderstood. They are treated as optional, as something nice to do when things are calm and stable. In reality, these approaches are most critical when things are hard.

A trauma-informed, strengths-based approach does not mean avoiding accountability or lowering expectations. It means understanding how stress, fear, and power dynamics affect performance, decision-making, and trust.

Being trauma-informed is about:

• Speaking the truth without humiliation

• Holding accountability without threats or shame

• Providing clarity without creating fear

• Leading with firmness and humanity at the same time

These are not soft skills. They are stabilizing skills.

In Silver Linings International’s Trauma-Informed Supervisors course, leaders learn to recognize a key insight: urgency is often less about the situation itself and more about what is happening inside the leader’s own nervous system. When leaders become dysregulated, their teams feel it immediately. The course supports supervisors in slowing themselves down enough to respond instead of react, to notice when fear or loss of control is driving behavior, and to choose actions that stabilize the entire team rather than just themselves. This is especially important in high-stakes environments where pressure is constant and the margin for error feels small.

A strengths-based approach in moments of crisis is often misunderstood as naïve or impractical. In practice, it is deeply strategic. Rather than ignoring problems, it focuses attention on capacity, resilience, and what is already working, even under strain. Leaders trained in strengths-based supervision are better able to address performance issues while preserving dignity, engage their teams as problem-solvers, and avoid the trap of assuming incompetence when people are simply under stress.

Too often, harmful leadership behaviors are excused as “necessary” in a crisis. Yelling, public criticism, emotional withdrawal, or excessive control get reframed as strong leadership. We also tend to promote people based on how confident or in control they appear, without paying close attention to the impact they have on those around them.

The truth is that results achieved through fear are fragile. Teams led through trust, clarity, and accountability are far more resilient.

Leaders always have a choice in how they respond, even in a crisis. Always.

How we lead in hard moments leaves a lasting imprint. Long after the urgency has passed, people remember how it felt to work under pressure and whether their leaders created safety or caused harm.