Whether leading a nation or managing a company, the lesson is the same: ignore reality and it will come back and smack you in the face. It’s very important to prevent this from happening in your company.

There are a number of things you can do to ensure that you are not protected from reality.

First, surround yourself with people who tell it like it is. Strange as it seems, this is not an easy task. For one thing, most people know that telling the truth can be politically dangerous and many, like the manager mentioned earlier, are terrified of political fallout.

You need at least a few people around you who aren’t afraid of you and who aren’t concerned with politics. This is where detached and objective outsiders (consultants and directors) are invaluable. You also need honest people inside— people who are so honest and direct they are almost uncomfortable to have around. You don’t have to like them. You just need to listen to them.

Churchill, for example, felt so strongly about this that he created a separate department whose sole responsibility was to root out and present the naked truth about pressing issues. Leaders of great companies never hesitate to reward what Thomas J. Watson, Jr. called “those sharp, scratchy, harsh, almost unpleasant individuals who see and tell you about things as they really are.”

Second, personally stay in touch with what’s happening. Don’t rely solely on status reports or quarterly reviews, and other formal reporting methods for information. Use your company’s products. Listen directly to employees at all levels. Talk to customers. Read consumer reports about your products. Personally answer customer complaints. In short, do whatever you can to keep in touch with reality.

Third, never punish people for telling the truth. We all know the story of how Peter the Great responded to the messenger who brought him news of defeat: he executed him.

This wasn’t a moment to stand back and let the team figure out what to do on their own. I needed to make sure people knew exactly what they were working on and had the tools to find solutions as fast as possible. I had to command and control.

In a crisis, everyone has their job:

• If you’re an individual contributor, you need to take your marching orders and start marching. Do your core job while continuing to look for and suggest other options to solve the issue. Try not to speculate or gossip. If you have concerns or suspicions, report them up the chain, then get back to work.

• If you’re a manager, you need to relay information from leadership without overwhelming or distracting your team. Check in with the team a couple of times a day—try not to harass them more than that (hourly messages just freak everyone out). You need to be there for them, not just to ensure that the work is getting done, but also to make sure they’re okay. You’re the first line of defense against burnout. The pressure, stress, red-eyes, and bad food in the middle of the night will get to people. You may need to give everyone a break—even during a crisis. Remember to set expectations and limits. You’ll probably have to work over the weekend. Okay. That happens. But tell your team what the plan is: we’ll work hard on Saturday but everyone needs to get out of the office at 5 p.m. and then we’ll have a check-in on Sunday night.

• If you’re the leader of a broader group or company, you probably spent years of your life unlearning the tendencies of micromanagement. Well, if you’re in a crisis then it’s time to be a micromanager again.

You’ll need to dig into the details—all the details. But you can’t make every decision on your own or fix everything single-handedly. You have experts, so you’ll need to delegate to them. Agree on the microsteps that need to be taken, but allow them to take those steps without you. Schedule check-ins in the morning and at the end of the day and instead of getting the usual weekly or biweekly reports from your team, start going to their daily meetings. You have to be in there, listening, asking questions, and getting necessary information in real time. You might have to be the conduit of that information to the rest of the company, to investors or reporters or whoever else is watching this situation like a hawk. You need to be able to answer their questions. You need to keep up their confidence that you’re getting somewhere.

Clear your calendar of nonessential meetings. Focus entirely on fixing the problem. And don’t let yourself get knocked off balance— you’re human. Don’t make things worse by losing your mind and ignoring the things you need to keep your head on straight. That might be exercising or resting or having dinner with your family or lying on the floor under your desk for ten minutes quietly singing show tunes. Whatever you need. And remember, your team is human, too—people need to go home. They need to sleep. They need to eat. And they need to feel like things are getting better.

It’s your responsibility as a leader not to try to deal with a disaster on your own. Don’t lock yourself in a room, alone, frantically trying to fix it. Don’t hide. Don’t disappear. Don’t imagine that by working for a week straight and not sleeping you can solve the problem yourself and nobody ever has to know. Get advice. Take deep breaths. Make a plan.

Then put on your rain boots and walk into the tidal wave.

The silver lining is that once the crisis is past—assuming you survived it, of course—you’ll have a team that’s gone through hell and back and is stronger for it. You’ll have time to go figure out the why—why did this happen in the first place? And what can we do so it doesn’t happen again? That may mean someone gets fired or the team reorganizes or the way you

communicate with each other drastically changes. The process may be lengthy and unpleasant.

The decision to disrupt businesses that are fundamentally working but whose future is in question—intentionally taking on short-term losses in the hope of generating long-term growth—requires no small amount of courage. Routines and priorities get disrupted, jobs change, responsibility is reallocated. People can easily become unsettled as their traditional way of doing business begins to erode and a new model emerges. It’s a lot to manage, from a personnel perspective, and the need to be present for your people—which is a vital leadership quality under any circumstances—is heightened even more. It’s easy for leaders to send a signal that their schedules are too full, their time too valuable, to be dealing with individual problems and concerns. But being present for your people—and making sure they know that you’re available to them—is so important for the morale and effectiveness of a company.

A frenetic approach just makes the company even more unstable. One, you’re not likely to be right. Two, even if you are right, nobody knows what the heck you’re doing. Three, you haven’t bothered to listen to anybody, so you have strained relationships you want to cement. Now, if you’re going to run out of money in five or six days, you’ve got a bit of a different story than if you’re going to run out of money in ninety days. That’s what I call the ‘burning platform’ problem. If you’ve got a burning platform problem, you don’t have a lot of time, so you have to take things in two steps. You have to gather your team together and say, ‘Guys, before we do anything else, we had better put this fire out. Then we’ll take a deep breath.’” - Henry Schacht.