Resilience Under Pressure: Five Strategies To Help Leaders And Their Teams Thrive In Crisis

Leaders are navigating increasingly volatile environments, and burnout is on the rise. Luckily, being resilient under pressure is a learnable skill. Here are five strategies that can help leaders become more resilient and build more resilient teams.

1. Keep Your Focus On Your Sphere Of Influence 

All organizations are at the mercy of forces completely outside their control, especially in a crisis. Some of these forces simply cannot be reckoned with, but struggling leaders often forget this. They fail to see that the best of leaders cannot halt the tides of macro-economics, geopolitical shifts, or technological disruption. As a result, they exhaust themselves, and their teams, fretting over the uncontrollable.

Any time and energy leaders waste on what they cannot control is time and energy taken away from what they actually can. Leaders thus must watch where their attention and thoughts dwell. Instead of obsessing over events and metrics beyond their control, they need to balance threat assessment with time dedicated to solution-oriented planning.

Here are three questions to ask to gain more clarity on where one should focus energy:

• What outcomes can we control completely?
• What external factors can we partially influence through our actions?
• What forces must we simply acknowledge and adapt to?

Acknowledging these limits isn’t about limiting ambition; it is about channeling energy toward maximum impact. When leaders can spell out what is genuinely uncontrollable, this serves another vital psychological function: it facilitates acceptance of difficult realities, reining in the denial and wishful thinking that plague many leaders during crises.

2. Choose Empowering Perspectives

The way leaders frame difficult situations can make or break employee morale and productivity. Offering an empowering perspective isn’t about spreading false optimism or spinning bad news into good news. In fact, being realistic and providing regular and honest updates is a key principle of crisis management. But effective leaders choose to promote perspectives that enhance rather than diminish organizational capability, without resorting to omission or misrepresentation.

How can leaders promote an empowering outlook in a threatening environment? The key is framing challenges as opportunities.

When software giant Adobe faced the disruptive shift to cloud computing, instead of lamenting the end of boxed software, leadership asked: “How can this transition help us build deeper relationships with customers?” This led to their successful subscription model, leading to a skyrocketing share price.

Similarly, leaders facing market disruption may ask: “Could this accelerate improvements we have been postponing?” When dealing with resource constraints, they may urge their teams to explore: “What unnecessary complexity can we finally eliminate?” When confronting competitive pressures, they may consider: “Can we discover capabilities we didn’t know we had?”

If this way of thinking gets embedded in an organization’s culture, people start automatically looking for growth opportunities within challenging circumstances. Such a growth-oriented culture is the foundation of an organization’s sustainable success in an uncertain world.

3. Maintain Direction And Motivate Action 

A main leadership challenge in turbulent times is shifting attention away from what generates anxiety and toward what fuels motivation, energy, and action. Not an easy task, because under threat, people become fixated on dangers and lose their ability for innovation and adaptation. Leaders thus need to be deliberate about addressing the psychological dynamics of threat.

Two leadership behaviors are particularly effective for keeping teams motivated through tough times. First, leaders need to maintain clarity of purpose: every single team member should be clear on organizational priorities and collective goals. Core objectives should be communicated repeatedly so that people move in the same direction rather than working at cross-purposes.

Second, leaders need to actively cultivate positivity. They should make it discipline to highlight positive developments, even if they are small. For example, meetings should start with a review of recent wins, progress markers, and emerging opportunities. To sustain morale and momentum, leaders should also regularly acknowledge and praise team members’ contributions.

4. Turn Outward And Connect 

A crisis naturally drives people inward, toward self-protection and tunnel vision. Leaders need to deliberately move their people in the opposite direction, toward seeing the bigger picture and making connections.

One way leaders may achieve this is by contextualizing the organization’s challenges as part of broader difficulties faced by others. Many challenges organizations face are shared with other organizations.

For example, a service company struggling with artificial intelligence (AI) integration is navigating the same pressures affecting an entire sector. A consumer goods company trying to adjust to an inflationary environment is one of thousands confronting the same challenge. There is psychological relief in recognizing “we are all in the same boat.” When people understand that their difficulties are due to broader macro trends, it transforms the situation from an isolated failure into a shared challenge, and replaces shame with solidarity.

Such an outward look opens up possibilities for collaborative solutions that insulated leaders and organizations can miss. Leaders may seek industry partnerships, ways to share resources, and platforms for collective problem-solving. For example, they can run a “challenge consortium” with noncompeting peer organizations facing similar pressures, where they share solutions, pool resources for research, and coordinate joint responses to industry-wide challenges. Systemic problems become more manageable through broad consultation and collaboration.

5. Invest In Physical Foundations 

As they try to take care of their teams and organizations, leaders sometimes forget to take care of themselves. However, mental resilience depends on physical well-being, and a leader’s physical condition directly impacts their decision-making and emotional regulation. Sleep-deprived leaders make poorer choices, struggle with emotional regulation, and model unsustainable work practices.

This implies a leadership imperative that extends beyond personal wellness. Leaders who want to sustain high performance need to strategically invest in their physical well-being and the well-being of their teams. Even small gains in sleep quality, regular movement, a healthy diet, and time spent in natural environments can make a real difference to performance and well-being.

Leaders are in a prime position to champion a culture of wellness. When they embody healthy work habits, they grant others permission to operate more sustainably. To this purpose, leaders could arrange walking meetings, use their vacation time, and openly discuss the importance of rest and recovery.

About The Author 

Dr. Selin Kesebir’s research interests include cooperation, competition, gender, inequality and cultural transmission. She teaches executive leadership and negotiations in her role as Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School. Prior to joining the School, she was a post-doctoral research associate at UVa’s Darden School of Business. She completed her undergraduate studies in economics and international relations at Koç University in Turkey. She has an MA in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University and a PhD in social psychology from the University of Virginia.

This article first appeared in a special edition of Inc. Arabia created for Money20/20 Middle East in September 2025. To read the full issue online, click here.