Adversity and leadership got married a long time ago, and from the looks of it they are still in love. No leader has reached the top of their field, stayed there, and retired without significant setbacks. The bond is unbreakable — get used to it.
So the question was never whether adversity arrives. It is what you do in the two weeks after it does.
Most leaders look in the wrong place first
Revenue drops, so they check the competitor’s pricing. Morale sags, so they schedule a happy hour. Numbers miss, so they run another training on the basics. All reasonable. All aimed outward — and outward is rarely where the answer is.
Meanwhile the team is watching which direction their leader faces. Your best people want resolute leadership when things get hard. Not cheerfulness, which they can smell from across the building. What they want is someone still looking for the play. Nobody wants to follow a leader in retreat.
Name the category out loud
Adversity arrives in recognizable categories — external pressures, internal changes, cultural strain, and the personal weight your people carry through the door. Real adversity is usually several at once.
The reason to name it is not filing. It is communication. A team that hears “we are facing an economic shift” understands something very different from a team left to privately wonder whether the tension in the building is their fault. Silence gets filled with the worst available story, every time.
Inspect in the right order
Here is the part that changes outcomes: when you go looking for the cause, start with leadership. Then process and culture. Then the team.
Most leaders reverse it, because the team is the visible variable and the numbers have their names on them. But if leadership is out of sync, no process and no team will overcome it in time. If leadership is strong and process is broken, the team is set up to fail. Working the order honestly — rather than skipping to whichever answer is most comfortable to blame — is what actually locates the problem.
One example of what that turns up. A regional HVAC company lost two quarters to a competitor’s aggressive pricing and nearly cut prices to match. Working the order instead, they found leadership had never pulled their own close rate on estimates given. When they did, it had fallen independently of the competitor. The pricing problem was wearing someone else’s clothes. Revenue recovered in two quarters, without a single price cut.
Where to start this week
Say the category out loud. If something is genuinely hard right now, name it plainly to your team this week: this is a market shift, this is a process we broke, this is what happens after losing someone good. The naming is not a solution. It stops people writing a worse story in the silence.
Ask the leadership questions before the team questions. Do the people running things still want the roles? Are they in the right seats for this challenge, which may not be the one they were hired for? And are they inspecting their own inputs, or only reporting on outputs? Most leaders skip to the team because that is where the numbers have names attached.
Pull the number you have been explaining away. There is usually one metric everyone has a ready reason for. Look at it properly, isolated from the convenient external cause. That is where ownable problems tend to hide, and finding one is a better week than confirming the excuse.
Adversity is coming regardless. What you control is whether the first two weeks go to defending or diagnosing — and your team can tell which one you chose long before the results show it.
More on this topic is in Chapter 7 — Confronting Adversity With Leadership of Firm Foundations.
Working on this with a real team and want a second set of eyes? Start a conversation, or book a 30-minute call. No pitch — just a look at what you are actually dealing with.