The Moral Art of Leading in a Crisis
“Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.”
In markets and in life, we are awash in uncertainty. Some aspects of the future arrive as predicted, while others arrive as unwelcome and startling as a tax audit in the middle of a honeymoon.
The comfort we find in such times is rooted in certainties — that which is under our control and in the values we hold dear and the behaviors we exhibit. These are totems of our character and culture that provide map and compass in moments of crisis.
Part of Timeless Leadership is informed and inspired in part by the Working Together© Leadership & Management System that prepares us with this stark but realistic warning: “Expect the unexpected, and expect to deal with it, positively.”
Crisis is inevitable, but with the proper mindset and values, we can prepare ourselves and others to be resilient.
I regularly talk to teams about leading in a crisis. Can I join your team for an offsite meeting or a conference? Let's make it happen and give them the tools to manage.
The Invisible Heart
The invisible hand is attached to the human heart.
Adam Smith once suggested that the measure of a civilization lies not in its wealth but in its sympathy. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he suggests that despite human selfishness, we still find a way to be interested in the well-being of others.
The sentiment may sound quaint to ears tuned to the static of markets, mergers, and mayhem, yet it remains the most radical proposition in political economy: that we are bound, by nature, to care.
It is a curious thing that this Scottish moralist — whose later Wealth of Nations would become scripture to the apostles of laissez-faire — should have begun his great project with a treatise on empathy.
But perhaps he foresaw the paradox that has stalked us ever since: that prosperity without sentiment leads to ruin as surely as sentiment without prudence leads to chaos.
The invisible hand, it turns out, is attached to a human heart.
Reflective — not Reflexive —Leadership
We douse one blaze only to ignite another with our haste.
In times of crisis — whether personal or industrial, natural or social, financial or existential — the heart is the first casualty and the last hope.
The executive, the statesman, the parent, each must confront the same problem that vexed Smith’s philosophers: how to govern one’s own passions amid the suffering of others.
The modern manager, schooled in spreadsheets and “performance metrics,” is encouraged to believe that leadership resides in the most efficient allocation of resources. Yet when the storm breaks, resources are the least of it. What’s required is something older and less tangible: the moral imagination to see oneself in another’s place.
The little voice within that judges our actions as if from the outside is the first faculty to go silent in a crisis. Panic drowns it out. “Before we can feel much for others,” Smith wrote, “we must in some measure become the same person with them.”
But to do so demands time, reflection, and a humility that the 24-hour news cycle and the quarterly earnings reports conspire to banish. The crisis, like a fire, feeds on immediacy.
We douse one blaze only to ignite another with our haste.
People First. Love ‘em Up.
The health of the whole depends on the spirit of the parts.
I think often of 2008, or 2020, or any of the years since when the pillars of order trembled. The executives and politicians who fared best were not those who knew the most, but those who felt the most — who understood, as Smith did, that “the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved.”
They managed not through the calculus of fear but through the arithmetic of trust. They told the truth (see “The Data Sets You Free,” Timeless & Timely, August 7, 2025) admitted uncertainty, and acted with visible regard for the people whose lives hung in the balance.
Their authority came not from position but from proportion — the ability to balance sympathy with judgment, action with introspection.
To manage in a crisis, then, is not merely to restore normal operations but to restore moral proportion. It is to remember that organizations, like nations, are moral enterprises before they are economic ones.
“No society,” Smith warned, “can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” Substitute “demoralized” for “poor,” and the admonition applies as readily to a corporate boardroom as to a country.
The health of the whole depends on the spirit of the parts.
The concept of people first is a key element of my Timeless Leadership coaching.
The Only Durable Strength
Leadership in moments of crisis requires attention in two directions: one eye fixed upon the immediate demands of survival, the other upon the enduring claims of conscience.
The leaders who can maintain this equilibrium are not unlike the Stoic sage whom Smith admired: “cool and circumspect in his judgments,” but “warm and affectionate in his affections.” The Stoic did not deny emotion; he mastered it.
So too must the leader in crisis — feeling fully, acting wisely, and knowing that compassion, far from being a weakness, is the only durable strength.
“It is he who shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice; the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own for the yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves.”
We live, alas, in an age that mistakes sentiment for softness and cynicism for sophistication. Yet every disaster peels back the illusion. When the markets crash, when the systems fail, when the lights go out, we rediscover what Smith took to be self-evident: that no one manages alone.
The invisible hand reaches out for another’s. The moral sentiment becomes the operational plan.
And when the smoke clears, the only leaders left standing are those who understood that leadership is not a science of control but a practice of care — a moral art whose first principle is sympathy, and whose final product is trust.
There’s so much to learn,
