Is your reactive leadership costing you trust?

The first time I saw it happen, it looked like momentum. The founder walked into our Tuesday stand-up with fresh intel from a client call and flipped the sprint on its head. Engineers nodded, product scribbled, marketing swallowed hard. By Friday, the team was still moving fast, but nothing important had moved. Two weeks later, the same founder asked why deadlines kept slipping and morale felt heavy. He didn’t see the link between his urgency and the team’s quiet retreat. To him, it was responsiveness. To them, it was whiplash dressed up as leadership.

I’ve made that mistake. In my first company, I thought speed was a virtue you could transmit. If I lived in the inbox and stayed close to every conversation, the team would mimic my pace. What they copied instead was my anxiety. Every late-night Slack from me reset priorities. Every new datapoint demoted yesterday’s plan. The result wasn’t agility. It was a constant, invisible tax on trust.

Reactivity sneaks in with good intentions. A customer threatens to churn, so you promise a hotfix by Monday. A competitor ships something loud, so you yank the roadmap to answer it. A board member asks a pointed question, so you start running the company by the last slide you saw. None of these moments are crazy on their own. Piled up, they teach your team a single lesson: your word is provisional. People can’t plan inside provisional. They cope. Coping looks like sandbagging estimates, hedging in meetings, or saying “yes” and quietly doing the thing that seems safest. Work still happens. It just stops compounding.

In Southeast Asia, this shows up with a local twist. We operate across time zones and cultures, ship during Ramadan and school holidays, negotiate with partners who move on WhatsApp at 11 p.m. Founders here get praised for being “on” and “available.” The risk is we confuse availability with stewardship. You can be reachable and still be reactive. The tell is simple: does your presence reduce ambiguity or create new ambiguity? If your arrival in a thread sends people back to square one, the problem isn’t the team’s resilience. It’s your leadership rhythm.

The turning point for me came during a review with a Saudi founder I mentor. His COO said something that stung because it was true: “Your urgency is real. Your decisions are temporary.” That line unlocked the pattern. We weren’t suffering from a lack of ideas or effort. We were suffering from decision decay. Choices couldn’t hold their weight for more than a few days, so every project lived in perpetual day zero. You can’t hit velocity if the ground keeps moving under your feet.

Here’s what changed my approach, and what I’ve since watched work for founders in KL, Singapore, and Riyadh. I stopped treating every input as a call to action. I started treating it as a call to clarify the plan. That meant fewer “we’re changing direction” messages and more “here’s how this fits the direction we already chose.” It meant committing to a cadence that we would protect with the same seriousness we protect client relationships. In practice, that looked like three steady anchors: a planning day that was sacred, a decision log that any team member could reference, and a personal rule that I would not override a plan outside the cadence unless the business faced real risk, not performative risk.

The planning day forced tradeoffs into the light. Instead of micro-pivots at 10 p.m., we stacked inputs and decided once, with context. The decision log sounded bureaucratic until it saved us from our own memory. It captured not just what we chose but why, which gave the team permission to say, “Unless the why has changed, the what still stands.” And the override rule changed my relationship with urgency. I learned to separate true fires from hot feelings. A true fire threatens cash, customer trust, or compliance. Hot feelings are what you get after a sharp email or a competitor’s launch. We address fires immediately. We let feelings cool until planning day.

If you’re reading this and thinking you don’t have time for rituals, you are already paying for the lack of them. You’re paying in context-switching. You’re paying in shallow work that feels busy but doesn’t ship. You’re paying in the slow erosion of confidence, which is the most expensive resource in an early team. In Malaysia and Singapore, where talent markets are tight and good people can move fast, confidence is retention. People stay when they believe their effort adds up to something predictable.

There’s a fear that steadiness equals slowness. It doesn’t. The teams I’ve seen scale well are not calmer because they lack ambition. They’re calmer because they designed their ambition into the week. The founder still responds to the market; they just don’t ask the whole company to emotionally co-sign every spike in adrenaline. When a large client in Jeddah requested a custom feature, one founder I work with wrote a one-paragraph note mapping the request to the existing roadmap. It took ten minutes. It saved ten days of confusion. Nobody panicked, nobody felt ignored, and the client got a firm answer without the team paying with chaos.

If you want a quick diagnostic, listen to the way your team talks about time. Do they speak in clean horizons—this week, this month, next quarter—or in vague survival language—ASAP, soon, later? Do they reference a shared plan when they push back, or do they read your mood? You’ll know reactive leadership has set in when mood becomes the operating system. People wait to see where your energy lands before they commit theirs. That is how strong performers turn cautious, and how cautious performers disappear.

The reframe that helped me was painfully simple. My job was not to personally carry urgency. My job was to build a container where urgency could be converted into momentum without spillage. Containers are made of cadence, clarity, and consequence. Cadence is when decisions get made, not just when work gets done. Clarity is what “done” means, not just what “next” means. Consequence is what happens when we break our own rules. Most founders have the first two in their heads and almost nothing written down. The third one—consequence—is usually missing entirely. Without consequence, your exceptions become the culture.

I won’t pretend this is easy. You will slip. An investor text will catch you at the wrong moment, and you’ll throw a grenade into a stable plan. When you do, own it quickly and reset the frame: “I broke our rule. Here’s why. Here’s what we’ll protect next time.” That single act repairs more trust than any offsite. The team learns that the rules matter because you’re willing to feel inconvenient for them. It’s not about perfection. It’s about modeling that you take the container seriously.

There is a specific place for agility in early-stage life. It belongs in discovery, not delivery. Discover rapidly, inside boundaries. Deliver predictably, inside commitments. If you keep swapping those two modes, your company will feel thrilling and untrustworthy at the same time. That sugar rush will carry you through a few quarters and then leave you with a brand that looks busy and a product that looks unfinished. Markets here are small, and reputations travel fast. Engineering leaders message each other. Designers compare notes. If your leadership style makes planning impossible, you’ll struggle to hire the people who could fix it.

The irony is that many founders push into reactivity because they care deeply. You want to signal that you’re in the fight with everyone else. I still feel that pull. What keeps me honest now is a simple question I ask before I type: am I adding energy or adding clarity? Energy is cheap. Clarity is expensive and rare when pressure rises. In a week where everything feels loud, the quietest act is usually the strongest one: restate the plan and go back to work.

If this hits a nerve, you’re not alone. You don’t need a new personality. You need a sturdier operating rhythm. Start by choosing when decisions get made and protecting that window. Write down why you chose what you chose. Teach your team to measure their week against the why, not your latest message. And when the next spike in adrenaline arrives, honor it by doing the most disciplined thing you can do. Let it inform the plan without owning the plan. That’s how you move from reactive leadership to leadership people can build a life around.