The Most Important Thing a Leader Does in a Crisis Isn’t Fix It

Scripture: Psalm 46:1–3  •  2 Chronicles 20:12  •  Isaiah 43:2  |  Episode 7  |  Approx. 7-min read 

Every leader gets a crisis. You don’t get to choose whether it comes. You only get to choose what you do with it when it arrives. 

Not a bad quarter. Not a difficult client. The real thing — the kind that fundamentally threatens what you’ve built. A major client representing 40% of your revenue calls to say they’re out. Your key performer resigns with two weeks’ notice. A lawsuit lands that could shut you down. A global event closes your market overnight with no reopening date in sight. 

Those moments come for every leader, in every industry, at every size. And what I’ve observed is this: the quality of a leader’s response in a crisis reveals more about who they actually are than the previous ten years of normal operations. 

The Central Variable Nobody Talks About 

You can have a crisis communication plan. A business continuity document. Scenario planning and tabletop exercises. All of that is useful. But none of it addresses the central variable in a real crisis: what does the leader do with the fear? 

Because that’s what a genuine crisis produces. Not discomfort — fear. Fear about your people, your finances, your reputation, whether everything you’ve spent years building is about to disappear. And fear does specific things to human cognition. It narrows your field of vision. It accelerates your decision-making impulse before your thinking has caught up. It pulls your attention toward worst-case outcomes and makes it very hard to see anything else. 

The leaders who navigate crises well are not the ones who don’t feel that fear. They all feel it. The difference is that they have something underneath them when the ground moves. A foundation that holds. And for the leaders who handle crisis with genuine inner stability — not managed PR, but actual clarity — that foundation has almost always been something more than competence. It’s been conviction. 

That’s not a soft observation. A leader who panics contaminates their team’s ability to think. A leader who spirals into worst-case thinking makes reactive decisions that compound the crisis. The most important thing a leader can do in the first hours of a real crisis is not fix the problem. It’s stabilize themselves enough to actually see it clearly. Everything else flows from that. 

What Psalm 46 Says About the Ground Moving 

Psalm 46:1–3 (ESV):  “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling.” 

This psalm was written for catastrophe. The imagery is extreme on purpose — the earth giving way, mountains falling into the sea, waters roaring. The psalmist is reaching for the most disorienting scenarios imaginable. And the point is precisely this: even then. 

The phrase “very present help” in the Hebrew is mātsāʾ məʾōd — found to a surpassing degree, immediately accessible, not remote. This is not a God who watches from a distance and will eventually show up when the crisis is over. This is a God described as immediately, intensely present in the middle of the trouble itself. 

The word for “refuge” — māḥseh — means a place of shelter you run to when exposure would destroy you. And “strength” — ʿōz — is not the strength you generate yourself. It’s strength that comes from outside you, that you receive rather than manufacture. 

The leadership principle isn’t ‘God will fix your crisis.’ It’s more specific: when the ground moves, you have a place to stand that isn’t the ground. A leader who has internalized this doesn’t panic when circumstances become extreme — because their stability isn’t derived from the circumstances. 

The Bravest Prayer in Leadership History 

2 Chronicles 20:12 (ESV):  “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.” 

The context: Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, has just received word that a vast coalition army is marching against him. Three nations. His kingdom is outnumbered and outresourced. He has no military solution. He calls the entire nation together to fast and pray, and at the end of that prayer he says this: we don’t know what to do. But our eyes are on you. 

What makes this remarkable is what Jehoshaphat doesn’t do. He doesn’t fake confidence he doesn’t have. He doesn’t pretend he has a plan. He doesn’t hide the scale of the problem. He names it honestly in prayer, directed toward the only source of wisdom that can actually help him. 

For the business leader in crisis: the temptation is always to perform confidence. To hold things together by projecting certainty you don’t feel. In some circumstances, managing tone and protecting the team from panic has real value. But there’s a difference between measured communication and dishonest performance. Jehoshaphat models something rare — a leader who is honest about the limits of his own understanding, who directs that honesty toward God in prayer, and who holds steady not because he has the answer but because he knows where to look for one. 

The answer God gave Jehoshaphat was one of the most unusual strategies in military history: go stand on the field, put your choir at the front, and praise God while the enemy destroys itself. You won’t have to fight. But you do have to show up. That’s what follows from honest, God-directed prayer in a crisis that seems impossible. 

Isaiah’s Word to People Who Lost Everything 

Isaiah 43:2 (ESV):  “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” 

Notice the prepositions. Not “if.” When. God is not offering a crisis-free existence. He’s offering something better: his presence in the crisis itself. 

Isaiah 43 was written to people in exile — a community that had experienced catastrophic national failure. The temple destroyed. The city burned. Their whole world dismantled. And God speaks into that context not with an explanation for why it happened, but with a promise about what comes next: through the waters, through the rivers, through the fire. The passage doesn’t end before the crisis. It goes through it. 

For the leader in crisis: the question that almost never helps in the acute phase is “why is this happening?” The more useful question is “what do I do now, and who goes with me?” Scripture’s answer to the second part is consistent from Genesis to Revelation. You are not the last line of defense. The God who called you to this work is present in the hardest part of it. In a crisis, that changes how you lead. 

Two Leaders, Same Crisis, Different Foundations 

In 2020, virtually every business leader experienced some version of crisis simultaneously. Two leaders in the hospitality industry handled the first ninety days very differently. 

Greg ran a chain of mid-sized event venues. When his entire forward revenue disappeared overnight, he went quiet. He stopped communicating with his team for two weeks — not out of carelessness, but paralysis. He was running worst-case scenarios in his head around the clock and couldn’t find a way out of any of them. When he finally called a meeting, his team could feel the panic he was trying to hide. Several of his best managers quietly started looking elsewhere. Not because the crisis was unsurvivable — but because the leader wasn’t leading. 

Sandra ran a comparable operation. The week everything shut down, she called her leadership team together and said something they didn’t expect: I don’t know how long this will last or exactly what it’s going to cost us. But here’s what I know — we’ve built something real, we have good people, and we’re going to move through this together. And then she did something Jehoshaphat would have recognized: she prayed with her team. Out loud. For their families, their business, and wisdom about what to do next. 

Her team didn’t leave. They rallied. Not because Sandra had a better plan in week one — neither of them had a plan. But Sandra gave her team something Greg couldn’t: a leader who was stable when the ground was moving. That stability didn’t come from certainty about the future. It came from certainty about something deeper. 

Sandra’s business made it. Greg’s restructured twice and never fully recovered. 

Two Things: One to Do Now, One to Do in the Crisis 

First — build your anchor before you need it. A Psalm 46 kind of stability is built in ordinary time through ordinary practices. Prayer. Scripture. Community with people who will tell you the truth. Regular rhythms of reconnecting with what you actually believe. The leaders who navigate crisis with clarity didn’t find that clarity in the crisis. They brought it with them because they’d been building it. 

This week, identify one specific practice you’re willing to commit to that builds that foundation. Ten minutes of Scripture before you open your email. A regular meeting with a mentor who can speak into your life honestly. A prayer practice that’s more than the occasional desperate plea in a parking lot. Be specific. Write it down. 

Second — in the next crisis, say five words before you do anything else: I don’t know. Help me. Before you call the lawyer, before you send the team communication, before you run the spreadsheet. Say those words to God, out loud if possible. Not as a ritual — as a genuine admission of dependence and a genuine request for wisdom. 

That single practice changes the quality of everything that follows. It slows you down exactly enough to think. It shifts your posture from performing control to seeking it. And it puts you in the position Jehoshaphat was in: eyes up, waiting for direction, ready to move when it comes. 

Listen to the Full Episode 

Episode 7 of Profit and Principle — “Leading Through Crisis” — is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen. The companion PDF for this episode includes the crisis foundation audit and the five-word prayer framework. 

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