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Self-Awareness, Purpose and Growth in Leadership
Some time ago, I was coaching an executive who had to communicate a restructuring to his team that would affect half of the people reporting to him. He had not slept for two nights. When we sat down, he told me something I have never forgotten: “I know exactly what I have to say. What I don’t know is how I’m going to say it without them noticing that I’m falling apart inside.”
That sentence sums up what happens in many organisational crises. The content of the message does not fail. The person delivering it does.
Communication in times of crisis is not a public-speaking skill. It is an emotional skill exercised under pressure, with the clock ticking and a team watching every gesture to decide whether they can continue to trust their leader. And here lies the paradox: it is precisely when we most need to communicate well that we sometimes do it worst.
In this article, I want to share what I see in some executive coaching processes: what distinguishes a leader who communicates from a place of calm from one who communicates from a place of loss of control, and what can be trained to make sure we are on the right side of that line.
When a crisis hits, communication is the first thing to break
When an organisation goes through a period of high pressure (a restructuring, bad business news, a sudden change of direction, a reputational crisis) there is something I see repeatedly in almost every case I support: communication contracts precisely when it needs to expand.
Some leaders remain silent about what they should be saying. They postpone conversations that can no longer be postponed. Others go to the opposite extreme, communicating hastily, trying to “get it off their chest” without considering the impact of what they are saying.
Neither reaction comes from bad intentions. They come from the same place: the person who has to communicate is themselves in survival mode. And from that place, it is impossible to convey the calm the team needs in order not to panic as well.
This brings us to the central idea behind everything that follows: serenity does not mean the absence of emotion. It means being able to feel the emotion without allowing it to write the message.
The team doesn’t need certainty; it needs presence
One of the most common mistakes I see in executives during a crisis is believing that their job is to have all the answers before they speak. And very often, they simply don’t. Nobody does.
I remember an executive in a sales division who had to communicate a strategic change to her team without yet knowing how it would affect each person’s individual objectives. Her first instinct was to wait until the plan was fully worked out before saying anything. We explored another option together: communicating what she did know, openly acknowledging what was still to be defined, and honestly explaining when she would have more information.
The team was not destabilised by the uncertainty surrounding the plan. It would have been destabilised by the silence.
This is something emotional intelligence applied to leadership consistently demonstrates: what sustains a team’s trust in a crisis is not absolute certainty, but the genuine presence of the person leading them. Someone who is there, who does not disappear, who does not disguise reality, and who does not collapse in front of them either.
Serenity is not about not feeling; it is about not reacting from a place of loss of control
It is worth clearing up a very common misconception here. Serenity is not synonymous with coldness, nor does it mean suppressing what you feel in order to appear “strong” in front of the team. A leader who systematically represses their emotions does not convey calm: they convey distance, and the team perceives that distance too.
Emotional regulation does not mean not feeling the tension of the moment. It means not communicating from that tension without having processed it first.
In coaching, we work a great deal on that space in between: the time between something happening that emotionally activates us and the moment when we communicate about it. The shorter that space, the more likely it is that the communication will be loaded with unfiltered emotion. The more we train that space—with a pause, a prior conversation, a simple moment of conscious breathing before entering the room, and by keeping the purpose in mind—the more likely we are to communicate from clarity rather than impulse.
It is not a matter of personality. It is a trainable skill. And that is perhaps the best news in this entire article.
Three questions that support communication in a crisis
When I work with executives facing a difficult communication, I usually suggest that they ask themselves three questions before saying a single word to their team:
- What do I know for certain, and what do I still not know? Separating the two helps avoid both making excessive promises and remaining silent out of fear of getting something wrong.
- From what emotional state am I going to communicate this? Not to eliminate the emotion, but to acknowledge it and consciously decide how I am going to manage it while speaking.
- What does my team need to hear, beyond the information itself? The answer almost always has something to do with feeling supported, not simply informed.
These three questions do not eliminate the difficulty of the moment. But they can radically change the way that moment is experienced, both by the person communicating and by those listening.
What you communicate in silence is also communication
There is a component that is too often forgotten when we talk about communication in a crisis: everything that is not words.
Tone of voice, speaking pace, posture, eye contact, even how long we take to respond to an uncomfortable question. The team reads all of this before, during and after hearing the message. And in moments of high tension, this non-verbal language can carry as much—or even more—weight than the literal content of what is being said.
An executive can have the message perfectly prepared and still convey nervousness by speaking too quickly, avoiding eye contact or giving evasive answers to difficult questions. And the opposite is also true: bad news communicated with genuine calm and without rushing can generate more trust than a “positive” message delivered from a place of nervousness.
That is why preparing to communicate in a crisis is not just about preparing the script. It is also about preparing your body and the emotional state from which you are going to communicate.
Regaining your calm is not weakness; it is leadership
The idea is still deeply embedded in many organisational cultures that a “strong” leader is someone who shows no cracks. Experience—and much of the literature on conscious leadership—suggests quite the opposite: teams trust someone who acknowledges the difficulty of the moment without allowing themselves to be swept away by it more than someone who pretends everything is under control when it is obvious that it is not.
Serenity in communication cannot be improvised on the day of the crisis. It is trained beforehand, through the everyday relationship a leader has with their own emotional management. And it becomes especially visible in the moments when it truly matters.
I am sure you have experienced a moment like this too: difficult news to communicate, a team waiting for your words, a storm that had to be weathered without losing your composure. How did you face that moment? From what place did you speak, and what would you have liked to do differently?
Sometimes, simply asking yourself that question honestly is enough to discover where there is room for improvement. And sometimes, that room for improvement is best explored with support: if you feel this is an area you would like to develop more deeply, this is exactly the kind of work we do together through coaching. You can write to me at obiols@coachingbcn.com, and we can talk about it.
coaching ejecutivocomunicación de equiposcomunicación efectivacomunicación en tiempos de crisiscomunicación internadesarrollo directivogestión de conflictosgestión de la incertidumbregestion emocionalinteligencia emocionalliderazgo conscienteliderazgo de equiposliderazgo emocionalliderazgo en crisisserenidad
Coach, Author and Trainer in
Coaching, Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
Coaching, Emotional Intelligence and Leadership