To create pervasive disengagement, ignore your people. If you pay them no attention whatsoever—no positive feedback; no negative feedback; nothing—your team’s engagement will plummet, so much so that for every one engaged team member you will have twenty disengaged team members.

Before I learned to create a little distance between what I felt and what I needed to express at work, I let too many of my worries and fears leak into my voice and into my daily interactions. Your team amplifies your mood, so when I was frustrated, those feelings rocketed around the office and came back tenfold. The more upset I got with our lack of progress, the more those frustrations infected the rest of the team. So I had to learn to modulate myself. To crank my personal style down a couple of notches to establish an effective management style.

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.

Patrick M. Lencioni’s best-selling book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable defines the unhealthy situations that can derail your leadership team: an absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.

It’s a cliché that culture can’t be taught; it has to be caught. And what better way to appreciate the exquisite nature of Daniel’s food than to spend six months ferrying plates from the kitchen to the table? More important, while we were teaching people the technical points a little bit at a time, it would give them the opportunity to fully absorb the culture we were building, long before they became point person with a guest. And how we chose which people to invite onto the team became central to our success.