When disruption hits a business, most leaders reach for the language of resilience. They talk about grit, determination, and staying the course. Yet the real test of leadership in volatile times is not how loudly you speak about resilience, but how quickly you are willing to examine and change the systems you have built. Markets can tighten, customer behavior can shift, and funding can slow, but those forces alone do not destroy a company. The real damage comes from the way leaders respond, the assumptions they cling to, and the mistakes they repeat when the landscape is no longer stable.
A common early mistake is treating disruption as a passing storm instead of a lasting change in climate. When a leader frames a shock as something to ride out, they unconsciously tie the organisation to an old version of reality. Decisions are delayed on the assumption that conditions will soon revert to normal. Pricing models, product lines, revenue mix, and sales channels are defended as if they are permanent truths rather than design choices. Small, cosmetic changes are made around the edges in order to show activity, while the core remains untouched. By the time it becomes clear that the baseline has shifted for good, the company has burned cash, exhausted people, and used up the trust it needed to make harder moves.
That framing error is often reinforced by an emotional attachment to existing plans. Leaders fall in love with a strategy deck, an annual operating plan, a board approved roadmap, or the narrative told at the last fundraising round. In periods of disruption, that attachment becomes a liability. Instead of asking what the market is signalling, teams work to protect the story. Bad numbers are softened or hidden so they do not trigger a cascade of revisions. Product teams keep building against outdated specifications because that is what was signed off months ago. Sales teams chase segments that no longer convert because those names appear on a slide everyone has seen.
Thinking this way treats the plan as the asset. In a disrupted environment, the real asset is the feedback loop. The companies that are able to adapt move faster from signal to decision. They are willing to retire their own stories when the data contradicts them. They mark their narratives to market without waiting for a crisis meeting to tell them that something has broken. That requires leaders who can admit, in public, that their previous assumptions no longer hold, and who reward teams for surfacing uncomfortable information instead of punishing them for it.
Communication style is another area where leaders easily make mistakes leading during disruption. Many leaders are trained to project confidence at all times. During stability, that habit can be harmless. During volatility, it quickly becomes a problem. Downplaying risk to employees, investors, and customers may buy a few weeks of calm, but it destroys credibility when the truth eventually emerges. On the other side, constant dramatic updates with no structure or clear thresholds can make people feel like they live inside a permanent crisis.
The more effective approach is neither false calm nor performative panic. It is a disciplined honesty about what is known, what is unknown, and what decisions are being made in the presence of uncertainty. Leaders who say plainly, for example, what will happen if runway drops below a fixed threshold or if a key channel underperforms for a defined period, create a frame people can work with. Teams do not need guarantees that everything will be fine. They need clarity about the conditions under which the strategy will change, and about the principles that will guide hard choices if those conditions arrive.
At the same time, disruption often pulls leaders back into a kind of heroic centralisation. Founders and executives decide that, because the stakes are higher, they must personally touch every decision. They jump into every deal review, approve every budget line, rewrite specifications, and insert themselves into conversations that used to be handled by senior operators. To the leader, this feels like taking responsibility. To the organisation, it looks like panic and mistrust. This hero mode creates a single point of failure. Work queues form behind the leader’s calendar. Experienced people learn that their decisions will be second guessed, so they stop owning outcomes. Middle managers hoard information instead of using it to act, because they expect that all real decisions will be pulled upwards. The organisation becomes busy but oddly slow. The energy of the company is directed toward getting the attention of one person rather than toward solving the new problems that disruption brings.
The companies that navigate volatile environments well usually do the opposite. They build distributed clarity instead of centralised heroics. They treat leadership as the work of setting constraints, choosing a direction, and maintaining coherent priorities, not as the work of personally running every play. If your presence is the only thing keeping the system moving, then the system itself is fragile. True resilience shows up as an organisation that can keep making good decisions even when the most senior person is absent for a period of time.
Other leaders react to disruption by overcorrecting into constant motion. They equate agility with endless change. The strategy shifts from month to month. Teams are restructured so often that no one understands the reporting lines. Product direction swings with every major customer conversation. Inside the company this does not feel nimble. It feels like whiplash and erodes trust.
Real adaptation has a coherent spine. It starts by identifying which assumptions are broken and which still hold. It continues with a clear new thesis about how the business will win in the changed environment. Resources are then realigned around that thesis, and the company gives itself enough time to see whether the new bets are working. This does not mean waiting passively. It means resisting the temptation to pivot every time a dashboard flickers, and insisting that each major change link back to an explicit shift in assumptions rather than to a leader’s mood.
During disruption, the earliest and most valuable signals usually emerge at the edges of the business. Front line teams notice that support tickets feel different. A small but fast growing group of customers begins to behave in a new way. A regional office reports numbers that deviate from the global trend. Leaders who spend their days inside polished board decks and clean executive summaries rarely see these signals in time. By the time a metric makes it into the high level dashboard, it often reflects a reality that has been taking shape for months.
Avoiding this mistake does not require a leader to drown in raw data. It does require deliberate exposure to the edges. That might mean reading full customer interview transcripts instead of only looking at a slide of quotes. It might involve regular rotations through support queues, listening to sales calls, or running office hours with specific customer profiles. It might be as simple as creating a standing channel where regional or functional leaders can call out anomalies without having to dress them up as fully formed business cases. In uncertain times, anomalies are not noise to be smoothed out. They are often early guides to where the market is moving.
Financial decision making is another area where leaders often fall back on blunt tools. Applied carelessly, cost cutting becomes a reflex rather than a considered response. Hiring is frozen across the board. All discretionary spend is slashed. Every initiative, regardless of its strategic importance, is slowed or starved in roughly equal measure. These moves can look disciplined on a spreadsheet. In reality, they often represent a reluctance to make sharper, more politically difficult decisions about what to protect and what to shut down.
Precision reallocation is harder than blanket austerity, but it is far more powerful. Instead of treating every line item as equal, leaders classify spend and headcount based on their contribution to the future state of the business, not to the version that existed before disruption. Some activities are stopped entirely, not gradually starved. Some are aggressively protected, even while cuts happen elsewhere. Others are funded on an explicitly experimental basis, with a clear time frame and defined success thresholds. This approach sends a more honest signal to the organisation and preserves the capacity to invest where the new environment offers genuine upside.
Underneath all of these choices lies the question of what the organisation measures. In calm conditions, many companies drift toward metrics that look impressive but do not tell the full story. Leaders celebrate total users without looking at engagement, focus on booked revenue while ignoring collections, or point to gross margin while support costs quietly explode. When disruption arrives, these vanity stability metrics allow leaders to tell themselves that the core is still healthy even as important parts of the business begin to fail.
Every meaningful disruption changes which metrics matter most. A dashboard built for growth at all costs is a poor tool for navigating a world where cash, unit economics, and resilience carry more weight. Leaders who keep steering with the old numbers are like drivers trying to navigate fog using a photograph taken on a sunny day. To avoid this trap, the metric stack must be rebuilt. Cash conversion, payback periods, cohort behavior, and segment level repeat value become more important than raw topline figures. Measures of cycle time, feedback loop health, and decision speed take their place alongside output measures. If a metric can remain green while the underlying business deteriorates, it is the wrong metric for a disrupted environment.
In the end, the mistakes leading during disruption tend to share a common root. They are not usually the result of bad intentions. They come from a refusal to update the leadership operating system as quickly as the outside world is changing. Leaders preserve stories that no longer fit, defend plans that no longer apply, and cling to habits that once worked but are now harmful. They spend energy on optics instead of feedback, on control instead of clarity, and on protecting their past choices instead of designing for the future.
Avoiding that pattern begins with a more honest self assessment. A leader can start by asking whether the people around them can describe the new reality in their own words, not just repeat phrases from a presentation. They can examine whether current decisions align with that description of reality or with last year’s assumptions. They can look at their own calendar and ask how much time is spent learning from real signals compared with defending old commitments. The answers to those questions are often uncomfortable, but they point directly to the changes that matter most.
Disruption is not an anomaly that happens once in a generation. For many sectors it is becoming the default backdrop. Leaders who remain useful in this environment will be the ones who treat their own mental models, structures, and habits as the first place that change must occur. Instead of fighting to preserve a familiar story, they will build organisations that can absorb shocks, listen closely, and respond with deliberate, precise moves. That is the difference between being carried by disruption and using it as a chance to rebuild a stronger, more resilient company.
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