5 ways to streamline decisions in a time of crisis
The word “crisis” originates from the Greek krisis, which translates, literally, as “decision.”
Even in the best of times, decision by committee rarely works. Teams endlessly debate and swirl when trying to find an outcome agreeable to everyone. During a crisis – it can not only make a tough situation even tougher, but it can hit your company’s bottom line.
Take the example of the president of a health insurer who described the challenge to us this way. He and his leadership team are finding that the timeframe they have to make critical decisions has shortened significantly. In addition to moving thousands of employees to remote work environments – leading to risks of server overload – there have been real-time, completely new decisions to be made on telehealth coverage, COVID19 claims processes, getting front-line doctors paid more quickly, assessing complicated patient cases and responding to difficult questions from clients and partners. In this environment, his leaders are working long hours and trying to do the right thing, but there has been overlap and confusion as multiple people have tried to tackle the same decisions. They are struggling to streamline the decision-making process so that they can get the right things done faster.
They, like many organizations, have defined familiar ways of making decisions and getting things done. But right now, executives trying to lead their companies through COVID19 are telling us that the biggest barrier they are running into is actually sticking to those carefully thought-out processes. There’s no clear roadmap for a global pandemic crisis. Emotions and stress levels are high, the flow of information has leaders drinking out of a fire hose, and everyone has an “expert” opinion on what the company should do.
Unless leaders decisively move things forward, you put a lot at risk:
- Losing the confidence of your leadership team, employees, and stakeholders
- Wasting valuable time that could be spent solving other problems
- Delaying manufacturing and distribution decisions that can impact company liquidity
- Pivoting the business too slowly toward innovation and growth opportunities
Company performance is largely driven by how effective leaders are at making decisions, and how nimbly they can act on them. Research done by Bain & Company found that the greatest determinant of a company’s performance is the ability of that leadership team to efficiently make critical decisions when you take into consideration the following attributes of a decision: quality (did the decision end up being the right one), speed (faster or slower than competitors), outcome (what action was taken) and effort (what resources went into making the decision).
So how can you continue to drive company performance while helping your organization adapt to the current crisis—all without losing sight of some of the fundamentals that made you successful in the first place? Here’s our list of five key steps to staying on track.
- Decide who’s deciding.
In a crisis, the evolving landscape may require a change in who makes the decisions and how the decisions get made. Depending on circumstances, one of four decision-making styles may be a better fit.In the midst of a crisis when leaders feel a strong need to act, many will choose to take a Command approach. This involves making a decision with little or no input from those around the table. These types of decisions result in compliance, but don’t generate much commitment. For instance, in a life-or-death situation, a leader may not have time to consult with others, or the plan of action may be clear and just needs to get started.
To generate more commitment, leaders can take a Consult approach and ask for input while still maintaining ultimate decision-making authority. Getting input from others does not mean giving up decision rights. A leader may have a couple of options in mind and solicit feedback before deciding, or they may want to get additional options on the table before making the call.
Leaders may want to gain even greater buy-in from those affected by sharing decision making through a Collaborate approach. The pain associated with group decision making comes from doing it poorly. When the process is well structured and the leader sets a time limit, collaborative decisions can be just as efficient as getting group feedback before the leader decides. Particularly when many people share ownership around the plan execution, this approach can help put it into action.
Finally, leaders don’t have to make every decision. When taking a Constrain approach, the leader sets boundaries on decision options and leaves the deciding to others. As an example, the leader may ask the IT team to source a new platform for remote meetings within a stipulated budget and time frame, but they maintain the freedom to choose the vendor.
- Look beyond the numbers.
It’s important to leverage data and information that is easily accessible. But during times of crisis, there can be too much intel, and not enough time to analyze it. That can leave you with analysis paralysis, and can get in the way of being quick, and being decisive. On the other hand, you don’t want to act without any basis of judgment at all—you want to take advantage of past experience and leverage your own intuition. Seasoned crisis leaders leverage what we define in the Bates ExPITM as Practical Wisdom – the ability to distill the most relevant information needed and anticipate the likely consequence of a decision – something that comes with having lived through catastrophe before. For instance, a leader may draw on lessons from the Great Recession around how they maintained key customer relationships as they assess options for how to reorient their priorities now.
- Make room for others.
Even if you’re serving as the ultimate decision maker, it’s important you remember that you don’t know it all. Creating an environment where ideas and opinions can be raised and appreciated creates a sense of trust and belonging. COVID19 is not a crisis event. It is a crisis cycle which will likely ebb and flow in waves as the situation unfolds over time, and you need to manage engagement and productivity over the long-term. Make sure you set up a way to gather feedback and be open to reevaluating your plans and decisions as time allows.
- Check your bias at the door.
It’s human nature for unconscious bias to sneak into our decisions. We may rely too heavily on information that validates the direction we already want to go, something known as “confirmation bias.” Or we may look for affirmation from a peer group that unconsciously practices group think and is less inclined to be open to alternative views. One good way to tackle this is to have a designated “devil’s advocate” on the crisis management team; someone whose job is to ask questions, probe for dissenting views, and generally validate that the leader has considered other perspectives.
- Communicate, communicate, communicate.
Often, the biggest team breakdowns during a crisis are the result of misunderstandings or mismanaged expectations. If an executive team thinks they have a different role in the decision-making process or expects problems to be solved within a set timeframe – they may be frustrated, disappointed, or even hostile towards the leader when things don’t go as planned. A leader with good interpersonal skills and a clear, defined communication strategy will help keep the team aligned and focused on a common goal – serving employees, stakeholders, and the business.
A crisis can derail even the most stable and grounded leader. We hear every day from executives who feel they are spinning their wheels, overwhelmed with the pressure of looming decisions and personally emotional about the impact COVID19 is having on their companies, their families, our global community. It’s a heavy burden to carry. But this is a time to double-down on your confidence, to lead decisively, to connect with your stakeholders, to demonstrate empathy, and to focus the firm on the future – one decision at a time.
Related content
Last night I started reading a book by Irvin Yalom, a psychiatrist who has written several novels that I’ve loved. But right now I’m reading something different—a book of short lessons he’s learned from many years of working with patients.
Early in his career, Yalom was inspired by something he read. The gist of it was that all people have a natural tendency to want to grow and become fulfilled—just an acorn will grow up to become an oak—as long as there are no obstacles in the way. So the job of the psychotherapist was to eliminate the obstacles to growth.
This was a eureka moment for Yalom. At the time, he was treating a young widow. Suffering through grief for a long while, she wanted help because she had a “failed heart”—an inability ever to love again.
Yalom had felt overwhelmed. How could he possibly change someone’s inability to love? But now he looked at it differently. He could dedicate himself to identifying and eliminating the obstacles that kept her from loving.
So they worked on that—her feelings of disloyalty to her late husband, her sense that she was somehow responsible for his death, and the fear of loss that falling in love again would mean. Eventually they eliminated all of the obstacles. Then her natural ability to love—and grow—returned. She remarried.
Reading this story made me think of the responsibility of leaders toward the people they need to develop—and for the growth and learning that leaders themselves require to be the best that they can be.
Many leadership development challenges seem overwhelming—even impossible. The leaders that we coach usually have a list of areas where they want to get better, but how? How do you “build better relationships with your peers and direct reports”? How are you supposed to “get out of the weeds and demonstrate enterprise-wide thinking” or “build executive presence”? All of these goals are as abstract as they are huge.
So the best approach is to not focus on the huge and fuzzy goal. What we try to do is to break these goals down into concrete actions through working on real-time business problems. To put it simply, though, we do just as Yalom does: We identify the obstacles and work toward knocking them off, one at a time.
Leadership development is not usually a quick fix. You’re not going to develop executive presence through a half-day workshop or a one-time meeting. If you’re interested in meaningful, lasting growth—whether for yourself or for those who work for you—it’s a commitment.
But don’t ever forget that we’re all capable of growth throughout life and our careers. The trick is to find the right coach or mentor who will guide you through that obstacle course.
In my work as an executive coach, I meet at least once a month with each of my coaching clients.
I often talk to them on the phone and exchange emails with them as we work on their real-time business challenges. So, what happens in those conversations? Recurring themes start to come up. I find that many leaders have a “talk track” of words and phrases that they use all the time—without always being aware of the impact. For better or worse, this talk track ends up becoming part of their executive presence and their brand as a leader.
One of my clients had a talk track for many years that led to a reputation for negativity. In one meeting alone, I noticed that he had described about ten different work experiences as “nightmares.” Strong word! So we talked about this talk track. And the next time I heard him lapse into that way of talking, I decided to delve into it. “What I just heard from you was an example of that ‘talk track’ we’ve talked about,” I said. “So let’s talk about this. You say it was a ‘nightmare.’ Okay—why do you call it a nightmare?”
The upshot was that he had made a sales presentation but didn’t get the deal. I said, “Let’s use accurate language to describe the situation.” Was it a nightmare? No. Maybe it was a disappointment. Maybe he could have said, “Unfortunately, we didn’t get the deal” or “They decided to go with another vendor” and state why, objectively. My goal was to get him to stop “catastrophizing” when something didn’t work out.
This leader didn’t want to be defined by that negative “talk track” anymore. So I told him that the only way to do that is to turn up the volume on a very different talk track—one that captures the brand and presence that you want to project.
I’ve had clients who always talked about how difficult or challenging or complex things seemed to them. You’ve probably had a boss or colleague with any number of talk-track themes:
- “I’m so exhausted/overwhelmed/unhappy/unappreciated….”
- “Everyone here is useless/stupid/incompetent….”
- “It’s such a difficult environment/project/client/travel schedule…”
- “That will never work/We won’t get that deal/It’s a dumb idea/What were they thinking?”
Often people aren’t even aware of how much they harp on a conversational theme and how negatively this lack of executive presence is affecting their professional brand. So what can you do to make sure your talk track is working for you and not against you as a leader? Take these four steps:
1. Identify your talk-track themes.
What are the words and phrases that you find yourself constantly using in conversations at work? Write down the things you seem to say almost every day—or think about what themes come up all the time for you in conversation at work or elsewhere.
2. Consider the impact of your talk track.
As a leader, your words carry more weight than others. You’re setting the tone for your team or division or organization. Whether that tone is absurdly optimistic, cynical, critical, upbeat, energized, or overly emotional, it’s going to be the model for others. Make sure that your talk track is consistent with the values and behaviors you want to drive.
3. Challenge the reality of your talk track.
How accurate is your talk track? Do you have a natural tendency to see the part of the glass that’s empty? How do you respond to setbacks? Do you gloss over the pain? Do you make a mountain out of a molehill? It’s crucial for leaders to be balanced, objective, and real about what’s happening. Your language choices need to reflect that.
4. Consider what you could say differently.
It’s easy to lapse into your talk track. When you catch yourself saying the same old things, try to catch yourself as if an alarm was going off. Can you find another way to say it—something that’s consistent with the brand and presence you want to project.
Don’t get me wrong. Leaders do need to be “real” about challenges and setbacks, and a somber tone may be appropriate and even helpful at times. The goal is to become more aware of your talk track and what it’s doing for you and others. As a leader, people take their cues from you. Before you know it, your talk track can dominate or drive the culture.
Changing your talk track is a challenge. Our ways of talking and viewing the world are pretty ingrained through several decades of life experiences. But change is also very possible. Pump up the volume on a more positive talk track for the holidays, and your presence will be viewed as a gift.
A while back, I heard an anecdote on the radio about cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and it really struck me. Surprisingly, Ma said that once of his biggest inspirations was chef, author, and television personality Julia Child.
Huh?! Well, it turns out that thinking about Julia Child helped him get in the right mindset before a performance. He would think about watching her on television, making a roast chicken that looked beautiful—only to have it fall off the plate and onto the floor. Did she flip out? No, she never stopped smiling. She just acknowledged what happened and went on with the show.
Reflecting on this, Ma realized that the best mindset he could have as a performer was to ensure that his audience was having a good experience—rather than worrying about being perfect. Speaking to the St. Louis Post Dispatch last October, he said, “The idea of performing is hosting. It’s like you’re giving a party. You invite people to come to a place and enjoy something special; basically, they’re subject to whatever you dish out. You want them to have a great time, they want to have a great time, and what are you doing to facilitate that?”
In a Malcolm Gladwell article that I read years ago, Yo-Yo Ma also admitted that he used to strive for perfection in performance. When he was 17, he practiced a Brahms sonata for a year with technical perfection in mind. So what happened when he did that? “In the middle of the performance I thought, I’m bored. It would have been nothing for me to get up from the stage and walk away. That’s when I decided I would always opt for expression over perfection.
”There is a valuable lesson here for executive presentations. In my experience, many leaders worry too much about precision when they present. Aiming for total accuracy, it’s easy to end up with text-heavy PowerPoint slides—and far too many of them. And once you have a ton of bullets on a slide, you usually feel compelled to read them all. At best, slides still tend to distract the audience’s energy away from you—and the presentation is really all about you, not your visuals.
Think about it: What would you rather be able to say at the end of your presentation?
- I covered every point perfectly and spoke without a single stumble.
- I connected deeply with the audience, and I could sense that they were completely engaged with my presentation.
It’s a no-brainer, isn’t it? If you’re able to really connect with your audience’s questions, concerns, and needs, they won’t even notice if the imperfections that jump out to you as the expert.
Of course, there’s a catch here. Connection trumps precision… but the more you master your topic through preparation and practice, the more you’re freed up to focus on connecting with the audience. When you don’t have to work to remember your key points and transitions, you can concentrate more on your eye contact, gestures, and reading the room.
So give some thought to drawing some inspiration from Julia Child, just as Yo-Yo Ma does as a concert performer. When you’re giving a speech, you’re the host, and your job is to set the tone and make sure that everyone has a good experience.
That’s a recipe for a successful presentation.
Related content
Candidates now arrive at interviews pre-coached by AI, with their resumes optimized to pass every checkpoint. Polish has stopped being a signal. The traditional hiring process was built to read exactly the cues that AI is now best at producing, and the signals hiring managers once relied on have weakened as a result. And for roles where the wrong hire carries real business consequences, losing the ability to tell who will actually perform is not a minor inconvenience. It is a material risk, and it exposes the business to unnecessary turnover, reduced performance, and heavier investment for talent growth and development.
So how do you observe the behaviors that matter most, before someone is in the role?
Not by asking better questions, but rather by putting candidates in situations designed to elicit that behavior.
The limits of predicting from paper
Credentials tell you what someone has done. Structured interviews tell you what someone says they would do. Neither lets you observe what they actually do in the moments that count.
This distinction matters most in client-facing, relationship-driven roles, where the performance gap between a strong hire and a weak one plays out in real business outcomes (revenue, retention, client growth). Organizations that hire at scale in these roles carry that gap across hundreds of decisions at a time.
The better approach is to watch candidates do the work before you hire them. Put them in simulated, role-relevant scenarios, and pair the simulation with a second, different kind of measure so no single method carries the whole decision. That combination is what lets you evaluate real performance before anyone is in the role. Organization-specific simulations provide a clear read on who is ready and capable of performing on day one. In a world of AI-supported candidate signals, the use of simulations makes the process harder to prep for. It is harder to fake. And, when designed well, it is substantially more predictive than other hiring methods.
What counts as evidence
Claims about predictive power are easy to make. Evidence for them is rarer than you would expect.
A predictive validity study, the kind that links pre-hire assessment scores to how someone actually performs once hired, is some of the hardest evidence to produce and the rarest to see. Many assessments are validated against proxies: another test, or a theoretical model of the role, rather than real results on the job. Connecting scores to concrete business outcomes and doing the statistical work to show the link holds, takes years of shared data and a level of commitment from both the assessment provider and the client that most partnerships never reach. That is precisely why it is worth asking for. A provider who can show how assessment scores track to training completion, retention, and first-year output is offering something categorically different from one who can only show a correlation with another test.
Why simulation holds up where other methods do not
When a candidate sits across from a trained assessor (someone playing the client or prospect on the other side of the conversation) and has to work through a real situation, they cannot rely on a rehearsed answer. The scenario is specific. The stakes feel real. What you see is close to what you would get on the job.
That is the value of simulation-based assessment: it does not test what candidates know about the role.
It shows how they use what they know when a real person is on the other side of the conversation, before the stakes are real.
For roles that carry significant business responsibility, this distinction is the whole game. The cost of the wrong hire in a high-stakes client-facing role is not just a missed quota for a quarter - It plays out in relationships that do not develop, clients who leave, and productivity losses that compound over time. Getting those hiring decisions right, at scale, with consistency, requires methods that are built for predictive accuracy, not just candidate experience or hiring speed.
What this means for how organizations think about hiring
Most organizations are still optimizing the wrong things in their hiring process. They invest heavily in employer branding, application flow, and interview structure, all of which matter, but less in the core question: does our hiring process actually predict who will succeed in this role?
AI has sharpened the stakes here. If every candidate can present as polished and prepared, screening based on presentation becomes less useful. What holds up is direct observation of the behaviors that the job requires.
A few principles worth building from:
- Measure what the job requires, not what is easy to measure. Cognitive tests and personality questionnaires have their place, but they do not look much like the job. The closer the assessment is to the actual work, the better it predicts performance in it.
- Ask what your assessment predicts. Training completion? Retention? First-year output? Most organizations cannot answer that question today, largely because providers have rarely been asked to prove it. It is a fair thing to ask for.
- Take the human element seriously. In a simulation, a candidate is having a real conversation, responding in real time, navigating a situation that requires judgment. Even with the help of AI, that is hard to game. And it remains one of the strongest predictors of on-the-job performance available.
The data exists to make hiring decisions more accurate, fairer, and more directly tied to business outcomes. For organizations operating in high-stakes roles at scale, there is too much on the line to rely on methods that cannot hold up to that standard.
You may be interested in BTS’ thought leadership in the five talent shifts AI is forcing now.
La IA ya forma parte del día a día de las ventas. Hoy cualquier asesor puede llegar a una reunión con datos, tendencias e insights generados en segundos. Sin embargo, disponer de más información no garantiza conversaciones de mayor valor.
A través de una experiencia real con un consultor comercial, este artículo explica por qué la inteligencia artificial funciona como un GPS: ayuda a interpretar el entorno, pero no conduce la conversación ni entiende las prioridades del cliente.
En este artículo descubrirás:
- Por qué el acceso a la información ya no supone una ventaja competitiva.
- La importancia del business acumen para interpretar los datos con criterio.
- Cómo hablar el lenguaje del cliente genera credibilidad y diferenciación.
- Por qué las relaciones B2B evolucionan hacia relaciones P2P basadas en la confianza.
- Qué capacidades consultivas seguirán siendo exclusivamente humanas incluso en la era de la IA.
La tecnología seguirá evolucionando, pero la ventaja competitiva estará en quienes sean capaces de combinar inteligencia artificial con conversaciones centradas en el cliente, pensamiento estratégico y relaciones de largo plazo.
Leadership is the work of creating shared understanding, and language is the primary tool for doing it. Yet we spend remarkably little time examining our words. Every decision, expectation, priority, and piece of feedback reaches another person through words. If those words aren't doing the job, neither is the leadership.
The lighthouse
Some years ago, a large company hired a strategy consulting firm to rethink its leadership model. The firm came back with a beautifully produced framework built around a central metaphor: the lighthouse.
Leaders, the model declared, should be lighthouses.
The metaphor quickly found its way into playbooks, performance reviews, onboarding decks, and town halls. People repeated it with the confidence of those who had paid a lot of money for it.
There was just one problem: nobody could agree on what a lighthouse was supposed to do.
Was it warning people away from danger? Guiding them toward a destination? Standing firm while everything else changed?
Eventually, the company hired another team to translate the metaphor into specific, observable leadership behaviors.
It was an expensive way to discover that a word everyone confidently repeated wasn't creating nearly as much shared understanding asthey thought.
Why jargon prevails
- Parking lot that
- Double-click
- Close the loop
Business jargon survives because it’s largely designed to manage social risk. Using it signals, I know how this world works. It demonstrates membership, competence, and credibility.
Business is messy, and leaders don't always have complete information. Abstract language lets us project confidence while preserving flexibility.
Altitude without traction
Specific language creates accountability. The more specific you are, the easier it is for people to disagree, question your thinking, orhold you accountable. That's part of the appeal of jargon. It creates distance between the speaker and the detail. The more abstract and elevated your language, the more strategic you sound.
A 2020 study by Harvard Business School professors Laura Huang and Andy Wu, published in the Academy ofManagement Journal, analyzed over 1,000 early-stage startup pitches and found that founders who spoke in abstract, visionary terms were significantly more likely to advance in the funding process.
A separate study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2025, found the other side: jargon raises how credible a speaker appears and lowers how much the audience retains.
The very language that helps people see you as a leader can make you less effective once you're leading.
The most trusted leaders tend to be the ones who resist impressive-sounding language and say the plainest version of what they mean.
In fact, four words probably do more for a leader's standing than any carefully crafted message: I made a mistake. Not "we encountered some headwinds," not "there were learnings from this experience," but the plain version.
The cost of comfort
When a conversation gets uncomfortable at work, it almost always feels easier to soften your message than to say exactly what you mean. You hedge, add qualifiers, cushion the point with extra reassurance, or leave the hardest part unsaid. Most of the time, you mean well. You don't want to discourage someone, damage the relationship, or create unnecessary conflict. The conversation becomes less uncomfortable for a moment, but the work often becomes harder afterward.
Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and author of The Fearless Organization, found that the fear of making a negative impression pushes people to stay silent exactly when clarity is most needed. According to her research, silence is one of the most consistent predictors of teams that miss problems early and never learn from them. The friction avoided in the meeting resurfaces later, at greater cost.
KimScott, former executive at Google and Apple and author of Radical Candor, calls this ruinous empathy: softening your message to protect someone's short-term feelings comes at the cost of the clarity they need. Her argument is simple and uncomfortable: clear, direct communication, even when it is hard, is an act of care.
The quiet power of saying what you mean
None of this is an argument for bland, colorless language.Vivid, precise writing does the opposite of jargon: it sharpens meaning instead of hiding it. Before reaching for a word, pause on two questions:
- What do I mean by it?
- What will my audience hear?
A surprising amount of corporate language wouldn't survive those two questions.
Leaders have more influence over language than they often realize. Whatever tone, vocabulary, and level of directness they model becomes the standard everyone else copies. Word choice is one of the quietest ways leaders shape culture.
This matters even more as we hand our language to AI. These tools can already learn to write in our voice. The question now is whether we've been deliberate enough about that voice in the first place to like what we see.