People who know me know that calm is one of the qualities I try hardest to preserve, both as a person and as a leader.
Calm is not the absence of stress. And it certainly isn’t indifference to problems.
It’s the awareness of something very simple: a problem doesn’t become easier to solve just because everyone is more stressed about it.
Quite the opposite.
A major client threatens to leave. The numbers miss the target. A project falls behind. Someone makes a serious mistake.
And the storm begins.
Meetings. Messages. Calls. Constant requests for updates. Everything is urgent. Everyone needs to be involved.
Suddenly, we no longer have just one problem.
We have the problem, and we have the stress surrounding the problem.
And very often, the second becomes more destructive than the first.
Stress is contagious.
When a leader goes into panic mode, the organisation quickly learns to go into panic mode too.
People become defensive. They take fewer risks. They start protecting themselves. They hide bad news. They look for someone to blame. And, most importantly, they stop thinking as clearly.
It’s a paradox: the harder the problem, the more calm we need to solve it.
And calm does not mean passivity.
We can be facing a very serious problem. We may need to decide quickly. We may need to make difficult decisions.
But there is a huge difference between urgency and stress.
Urgency says:
“We don’t have much time. Let’s focus.”
Stress says:
“We don’t have much time. Everybody panic.”
These are two completely different ways of leading.
Over time, I’ve come to believe that one of the most important roles of a leader is to reduce entropy.
When there is chaos, create clarity.
What do we know? What don’t we know? What is the actual problem? What do we need to decide now? Who really needs to be involved? When do we reassess?
And then let people do their work.
Perhaps that is the real test of leadership.
Not when everything is going well, but when something goes seriously wrong.
Because in those moments, everyone looks at the person leading — even if they never say it out loud — for the answer to one very simple question:
“How worried should we be?”
That is when a leader’s emotional state stops being theirs alone.
It spreads. It amplifies. It becomes culture.
A leader doesn’t have to be immune to stress.
Leaders feel fear. They have doubts. They worry, like everyone else.
But they have an additional responsibility: not to turn their own stress into the operating system of the organisation.
The team already has a problem to solve.
It doesn’t need a stressed leader on top of it.