Here's how you can navigate high-pressure situations and boost team morale as a manager.

I've been referred to as "Cool, calm and collected" by my peers. This approach and attitude are crucial aspects of leadership management. Your team looks to you for stability. If they see a manager lacking calm, self-control, and overall poise, many may panic, while others might consider the situation hopeless. Staying calm is central to making good decisions. It allows you to gather and review the right data, making sound and strategic decisions. A calm demeanor is necessary to navigate high-pressure situations effectively, instill trust and boost team morale.

Having a guiding light can make a very big difference in a very stressful decision making period. - Have you established proper governance on how to make the best decisions? - Do you have an approach to quantify the risks with this issue? - Are there reputational or financial risks that might require that you need to bring to your senior executives or board? - Does this decision fall within your ethics guidelines? Your corporate culture?

The importance of positive reinforcement cannot be overstated. Recognizing accomplishments in one-on-one meetings, team meetings, and even all-hands meetings is crucial. This recognition can make the difference between employees deciding to continue learning, improving, and persevering through challenges. It also demonstrates trust in team leads, helping their members trust and collaborate better. A vote of confidence from you as a senior leader translates into further buy-in from all levels, energizing everyone to work smart and hard to achieve business goals and execute strategy.

Delegate wisely, yes, but remember to alleviate some of the pressure as opposed to simply transferring/imposing it on one team member. Some, on one's team, are "go getters" and usually do get the job done, but they also tend to inherit most of the urgent adhoc projects. A manager should not only delegate wisely, based on skills and attitudes, but also should remember to distribute the sense of pressure or urgency, by temporarily shifting roles and responsibilities across the team, to accommodate the "urgency". This approach usually helps in addressing the urgency while preventing to overworked your "go getters", but also does great at keeping the team nimble and maintaining the team spirit (aka: "we are in this together").

In a very high pressure situation a strong leader will know who to empower to take on additional tasks and what are the best usage of their talents. If we follow the Pareto principle, 80% of the risk will come from 20% of the outstanding issues. Therefor you can prioritize your time as a leader on the highest risk items (or items that leverage your background the most) and know that your team can more than handle the lower risk items.

More often than none a new employee will struggle with knowing where to turn to. A best practice in your onboarding process is to assign a mentor and make sure that you introduce them to the supporting coworkers that they will rely upon in the near future. Getting an internal mentor is important, but so is an industry expert or someone you trust and respect. That way in a crisis you can also reach out to your mentor to see if they have been through this and see if they have any recommendations.

A practical tool is the KUBA Pilot Strategy. Start with KNOW YOURSELF: Check in with yourself, what it’s important to you, to the company, to the team, what are the options that come to mind. How do you feel about the situation? Then seek to UNDERSTAND OTHERS by checking in with your team, what is going on, what are their priorities, what suggestions do they have. From there you BUILD CONNECTIONS between what you know and what you learned from others. Bring the team together to collaborate on what can be done, by whom and when. Identify options. Lastly, you want to ALIGN DECISION by looking at the impact of the preferred options. Are they aligned with the broader strategy, team values and prevent bigger issues down the line?