Leadership Lessons from a Company's Near-Death Experience

Navigating a company through a near-death experience, such as a market crash or the loss of a major customer, requires a specific set of leadership principles that go beyond peacetime management.

1. Reset and Re-Commit the Team

After a major pivot or crisis, the original vision is gone. The leader must be brutally honest with the remaining team about the new reality and the challenges ahead. This is the time to "resell" them on the new mission and ask for their explicit commitment. It's better to know who is truly on board and allow those who are not to leave with dignity.

2. Ship the Wrong Product to Learn What's Right

When entering a new market, you don't have enough information to build the perfect product. The engineering team will often want to add more features based on old assumptions. The leader must have the courage to ship an imperfect product, knowing that the fast, painful feedback from real customers is the only way to learn what the market actually needs.

3. Take Absolute Ownership in a Crisis

In a "do-or-die" situation, there is no room for excuses or hesitation. The leader must:

• Remove all roadblocks: Institute a process (like a daily standup) to ensure no one is stuck on any problem for more than 24 hours.
• Take personal command: The company will live or die by the quality of the CEO's decisions. While delegation is important in peacetime, a crisis requires the leader to take full responsibility for the company's survival.

4. Ask "What Are We Not Doing?"

In the day-to-day fight for survival, it's easy to become hyper-focused on the current activities. A powerful strategic question for a leader to ask their team is, "What are we not doing?" This question can uncover massive, overlooked opportunities that are adjacent to the core business and could change the company's trajectory.

5. Ask for One More Heroic Effort

After a long struggle, a team can be exhausted. The hardest thing for a leader to do is to ask for one more massive, all-in effort. When the situation is truly dire, the leader must level with the team, explain the stakes (e.g., "We have one bullet left"), and inspire them to charge up the hill one last time. Surprisingly, these moments of intense, shared struggle are often remembered as the most rewarding times in a company's history.

Tags: #leadership #crisis-management #turnaround #startups #strategy #team-building #hard-things