The Powerful Role Leadership Plays During a Crisis.

Oprah Winfrey has described leadership as an act of empathy, rooted in the ability to relate to and connect with people in order to inspire and empower them. Few periods have tested that idea as thoroughly as the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when leaders across every industry were forced to rethink, almost overnight, what leadership actually requires.

That period offers a useful case study, not because the crisis itself was unique, but because of how visibly it exposed the gap between leadership as usual and leadership under pressure. Teams needed to stay considerate of the strain their colleagues were under, even as priorities shifted week to week. Momentum became hard to build when constant stops and starts forced organizations to change direction repeatedly. And many of the temporary adjustments leaders made in response, faster decisions, closer communication, more visible empathy, turned out to be worth keeping long after the immediate crisis passed.

That question, how do we make these temporary changes permanent, and how do we roll them out consistently across a large organization, is one we continue to hear from clients navigating any period of disruption, not only a pandemic. Our research and client work through that period surfaced three leadership styles worth understanding: human leadership, lighthouse leadership, and what we call unleadership.

Human Leadership

Dr. Prudence Gourguechon, former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association and an advisor to business leaders and political campaigns on the psychology of group behavior, has written extensively on empathy in leadership. Writing for Forbes, she made an important distinction: empathy means understanding how another person feels in their own circumstances, not projecting how you would feel in their place. That distinction became essential during the pandemic, when leaders needed empathy more than technical authority.

Our own research into what this looked like in practice pointed to four consistent elements.

Showing vulnerability. The strongest leaders during this period were willing to admit they did not have every answer and that mistakes were likely given how much was genuinely unknown. Rather than projecting false certainty, our consultants found that leadership teams who shared their own experiences openly, including the personal adjustments they were making, built more trust than those who maintained a polished front.

Extending empathy across locations. Working from home made leaders more visible and more human, and it also demanded a more global form of empathy. A pandemic does not affect every location identically; different cities and regions faced different restrictions and different realities at the same time. Leaders running distributed or global teams had to stay attuned to those local differences rather than applying a single approach everywhere, recognizing that what felt appropriate in one office might feel tone-deaf in another.

Providing reassurance. No leader had a clear view of how the crisis would unfold, so reassurance could not come from false certainty. It came instead from consistent, honest communication, more frequent check-ins, regular updates, and a visible commitment from leadership to do everything within its control to reduce risk for employees.

Investing in mental and physical wellbeing. Leadership needed to actively support employee health rather than assume people would raise concerns on their own. As Stephen Koss noted in an EY article on the topic, organizations cannot rely on people to self-report; two-way conversations, structured check-ins, and encouragement of peer support are what actually build trust. In practice, this meant creating regular, low-pressure opportunities for people to voice how they were coping, not just how productive they were being, alongside practical initiatives like virtual fitness sessions and informal team catch-ups to help distributed teams stay connected.

Lighthouse Leadership

Where human leadership addresses the personal side of leading through disruption, lighthouse leadership addresses the operational side, how leaders keep the business steady, decisions moving, and performance intact.

Think about what a lighthouse actually does: it provides a fixed point of light that gives ships confidence they are on course and clear of the rocks. Our research into effective crisis leadership identified seven characteristics that map closely to that idea.

Focus on a few key priorities. In Agile ways of working, leaders are encouraged to focus on outcomes rather than dictating method, on the "what" rather than the "how." During periods of high disruption, the leaders who fared best were the ones who narrowed their focus to a small number of clear priorities rather than trying to hold every initiative at once.

Be transparent. Leaders were called on to communicate more openly and more often than in stable periods, even when the information itself was uncertain.

Be visible and accessible. Structured forums, sometimes called a Mission Control, where leadership teams meet regularly to review priorities and progress, proved to be one of the most effective ways to maintain visibility during a crisis. Increasing the frequency and consistency of these sessions, paired with genuinely bi-directional communication so leaders both share information and take questions, helps employees feel connected to decision-making even when physical proximity isn't possible. This approach, established early in the health sector during the pandemic, is well documented as a way to keep dispersed teams aligned. It also matters in how organizations manage an increasingly blended workforce of permanent staff and contractors, where tighter collaboration depends on consistent feedback flowing in both directions.

Be responsive and make fast decisions. Leaders had to make consequential decisions with less data and less time than they were used to, and to become comfortable with that tradeoff. The idea that "done is better than perfect" moved from an Agile principle into everyday decision-making, bringing MVP thinking into daily operations. This also meant more mistakes were made, but it meant recovering from them faster too.

Hold regular realignment sessions. When priorities are shifting quickly, what was agreed a month ago, or even a week ago, may no longer hold. Building in regular alignment, planning, and shared learning became essential to keeping leadership teams and their organizations on the same page.

Develop new forms of influence. Without shared physical space, leaders who had relied primarily on in-person interaction had to learn, often quickly, how to build influence and communicate effectively through digital and remote channels instead.

Set clear expectations. Disruption tends to accelerate work already underway to encourage specific leadership behaviors, and this period was no exception. Many organizations turned to Agile ways of working as a structured channel for this, pushing leaders to articulate direction and outcomes clearly for both ongoing teams and specific initiatives. This often showed up as a marked increase in the use of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), both ahead of project kickoffs and as a way to define a team's mission and scope more precisely.

Unleadership

The third style is less intuitive: the "unleader" is a leader skilled at deliberately relinquishing control in order to empower their teams. Three traits define this approach.

Show trust. Organizations that continued to perform well during disruption were consistently led by people who trusted their teams and empowered them to deliver, even under fully remote conditions. Leaders who set clear objectives and success measures, then stepped back and let teams determine how to meet them, saw delivery hold steady despite the disruption around them.

Empower teams to self-organize. Allowing teams to organize their own work, rather than directing every task, consistently produced greater efficiency and productivity. The shift is a subtle but important one: from allowing people to get work done to actively empowering them to make decisions themselves.

Reframe what a mistake means. This is a core Agile principle that proved valuable well beyond Agile teams during this period. Rather than treating a mistake as a career-ending event, the leaders who fared best reframed it as part of a test-and-learn approach, replacing the pressure to be right the first time with a more adaptive mindset.

No single leadership style is sufficient on its own. Leading well through disruption requires all three at once: empathy, direction, and the willingness to let go of control where it counts.

Where AI Fits In

The pressures that shaped these leadership styles have not gone away, they have simply evolved, and AI now gives leaders a genuinely useful set of tools for meeting them without losing the human judgment at the center of good leadership.

Sentiment analysis applied to regular pulse surveys or check-in responses can help leadership teams spot early signs of fatigue or disengagement across large, distributed teams, well before those signals would surface through informal conversation alone. Predictive risk detection can flag where delivery pressure, sustained change, or workload concentration is most likely to strain a team, giving leaders a chance to act early rather than react late. And AI-supported synthesis of feedback from regular check-ins or retrospectives can surface patterns across dozens of teams at once, something no leader could realistically track manually, freeing up time for the parts of leadership that AI cannot replace: showing up, being present, and making the human judgment calls that build trust.

Used well, AI does not replace the leadership styles above. It reduces the friction involved in practicing them consistently, at scale, and gives leaders more of their attention back for the parts of the job that remain irreducibly human.