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When Crisis Hits, This is the Leadership Skill That Matters Most
“Disasters don’t wait. They don’t ask permission. They just arrive.”
– Juliette Kayyem, Homeland Security Leader & CNN Analyst
One of the nation’s top crisis experts, Juliette Kayyem has led responses to hurricanes, pandemics, and terror threats. A former Homeland Security official and Harvard professor, she advises Fortune 100 boards and the White House on how to lead when everything goes sideways.
But what surprised me most about our conversation? Her unshakeable mindset and what that means for leaders facing uncertainty in their own organizations.
Why Every Leader Needs a Crisis Playbook
We like to believe crisis happens somewhere else—to government agencies, emergency responders, or global brands making headlines.
But crisis doesn’t care about titles or industries. It walks right into your boardroom dressed as a product failure, a PR nightmare, or a sudden talent exodus.
The real question isn’t if you’ll face chaos, it’s whether you’ll be ready when it comes.
That’s where Juliette Kayyem comes in: showing leaders how to stay grounded, make better decisions, and guide their teams forward, even when the terrain keeps shifting.
The Science Behind the Shift
One of the most powerful insights Juliette shared is rooted in neuroscience: The brain under stress wants simplicity.
When we’re under threat, real or perceived, our prefrontal cortex (the center for higher-order thinking) goes offline. We default to instinct, reaction, and black-and-white thinking.
That might help in a burning building. But in the C-suite?
That tunnel vision can lead to poor decisions, missed signals, and a breakdown of trust.
Juliette’s work, and the strategies we discussed, center on training leaders to anticipate their stress response before the crisis hits, so they can override reactivity with clarity and composure.
Three Action Steps for Crisis-Ready Leadership
Here’s what leaders can start doing today to prepare for tomorrow’s uncertainty:
- Run “Pre-Mortems” Instead of Post-Mortems
Juliette teaches her clients to ask: “If this project fails spectacularly, why did it fail?”
By reverse-engineering potential breakdowns before they happen, leaders build agility and foresight into every initiative.
Try this: Before your next big launch or strategic plan, carve out 20 minutes with your executive team to brainstorm the top 3 failure points. Assign owners to each.
- Separate Urgency from Panic
Crisis requires speed, but not chaos. Juliette emphasizes the importance of managing emotional tone, especially at the top.
If your voice shakes, your team spirals. If your mind races, theirs follows.
Leaders must practice the art of urgent calm.
Try this: In your next pressure-filled meeting, pause for a breath before responding. Ask: “What’s the most important decision we need to make right now, and what can wait?”
- Redefine “Success” in a Crisis
Perfection is not the goal. Movement is.
Juliette calls this “progress over polish.” In a high-stakes moment, success might look like stabilizing the team, getting 70% of the plan right, or simply holding the line.
Try this: Set “crisis metrics” for your leadership team. What does good-enough execution look like under stress? Codify that before the fire alarm goes off.
Final Thought: Leadership Isn’t a Performance—It’s a Practice
Juliette’s wisdom is a reminder that real leadership isn’t about control, it’s about clarity.
Whether you’re managing a crisis of public trust or just a week of relentless pivots, the leaders who rise are the ones who’ve done the inner work before the storm hits.
So ask yourself:
- Where do I default to control when I should pause?
- How do I define success when the playbook no longer applies?
- What’s one decision I can make this week to lead with urgent calm?
Because as Juliette says, the devil never sleeps.
But with the right mindset, you’ll be ready when he knocks.
Want to learn your leadership patterns under pressure?
Explore the Enneagram Applied assessment for insights into how your type shows up in crisis, and what to do about it.
Episode Transcript
Susan Drumm: Natural disasters don’t wait. Global pandemics don’t ask permission. And crises arrive without warning. Today’s guest builds leaders who are ready when they do. I’m Susan Drumm, and this is The Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership revolution. Each week, we spotlight cutting-edge strategies to help executives and entrepreneurs grow in their leadership and life.
Today, we’re diving into what it takes to lead when everything goes sideways, and I can’t think of anyone better to guide us than my longtime friend and fellow Harvard Law classmate, Juliette Kayyem. Juliette is a national leader in crisis management and homeland security. She served as President Obama’s assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and was Massachusetts Homeland Security Adviser.
Now she leads major initiatives at Harvard’s Kennedy School and advises public and private sector leaders on how to prepare for and respond to disaster. She’s a CNN senior national security analyst, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and author of six books, including “The Devil Never Sleeps,” described by The New Yorker as “an engagingly urgent blueprint for disaster readiness.”
Well, Juliette, welcome to the show. I’m so excited to have you here, and it was great that we got a chance to connect in the spring — about, what, six months ago? — at our law school reunion. So, gosh —
Juliette Kayyem: Our fifth. Our fifth. Our fifth. Our fifth.
Susan Drumm: Our fifth. Oh, yeah. Sorry, fifth. So great to have you. Thank you for coming.
Juliette Kayyem: Well, I’m so thrilled to be here and thank you for having me.
Susan Drumm: And so I think about your career — what an incredible career you’ve had since law school. How did you get into the field of crisis management?
Juliette Kayyem: I had a sort of course-correction eureka moment. I should say, right after law school I went to be — as I say — a real lawyer, and I litigated cases at the Department of Justice in the national security and counterterrorism space. Counterterrorism in particular, in 1995, was very niche — very few cases. And in some ways my career sort of happened to me because of September 11th; there were very few experts in the space. I began my academic career with the writing and the teaching after that.
But it was really 2005 when I really think about how I got into this space. I was home — my middle child had just been born — and I’m watching TV. I’m in counterterrorism, thinking about nineteen terrorists and four airplanes and doing all the things necessary to protect our nation, and I’m watching Hurricane Katrina drown New Orleans. What we call the response or preparedness apparatus was really not ready for a different kind of threat — we had been so focused on this one.
So fast-forward — my career has now been in government, the private sector, and in media and teaching. I say I have one career in many jobs, and I’m really in the get-ready, preparedness space: anticipate the bad thing, then be ready to minimize the harm. The mantra I use in my class is always, we’re going to learn to fail safer. We can’t stop all bad things from happening, but we can minimize the harm if we’re ready.
Susan Drumm: Yeah. So, it sounds like the preparedness for the potential bad thing to happen is obviously key in your work. What are some of the insights or mindsets that leaders need to think about with regards to that?
Juliette Kayyem: So part of it is — I should just say that my field is changing dramatically because of the nature, timing, and scope of these crises. You have a little blip here and consequences there. It’s a doctrine where the disaster management doctrine, like a lot of other things, is under stress because of this.
But generally, how we used to think about it was what I call left and right of boom. The boom could be anything. If you’re a CEO, it could be some disruption to your supply chain. If you’re an offshore oil-drilling company, it could be a blowout preventer — a protective feature — that no longer protects the drill, and you have an oil spill. It could be anything.
Left of boom is all the things you do to stop the bad thing from happening. Then the boom. And then right of boom, which is the preparedness, response, recovery, and eventually — one hopes — resiliency. We used to think about disasters as both random and rare, which I don’t think we can anymore.
I don’t talk about crisis leadership — I talk about leaders in crisis. Every leader now has to anticipate that they will have a crisis. They will manage the crisis. They will guide the crisis. There’s not a group of crisis leaders you pull off a shelf who become the CEO when the bad thing happens.
So I focus on the right of boom. What are some of those features? One is: get your head around it — assume the boom. That seems obvious, and most leaders think they have their head around it, but what I really mean is, what are the details of your preparedness planning? Because the pressure will be so great on that leader at the moment of that crisis.
A crisis is different from all the other problems any industry has, because your ability to respond successfully is truncated in time. Your runway is short. If you’re a CEO and the runway’s short, you’d better be ready, or find ways to extend the runway.
A second thing is what we call situation awareness: when the disruption happens, are you confident in being able to understand what is in fact happening, what will happen, and the consequences to your industry? You can’t learn that in real time, and you can’t learn it on truncated time. So I always call it the what, so-what, and now-what.
You might have a franchise, people out in the field, an internal team, an intelligence division. So — what is happening? So-what — does it matter to my equities, my company, my cause? And then the now-what is how am I going to deploy resources to minimize the harm.
There are lots of other things, but if I’m asked what matters most, it’s leadership that embraces the failure, embraces failing safer, and brings the right people to the table. Second, awareness by the leader of what is in fact happening in real time so they can use their best judgment — which requires a team that’s willing to engage. It requires you, as the CEO or the leader, to bring in the right team, and even for public companies, to think about your board membership.
Something like six percent — only six percent of public boards have someone at the table who understands response, preparedness, cybersecurity, climate disasters. You’ve got to bring them to the table, because they have to give voice for your company to what could happen.
Susan Drumm: Of what could happen. So let’s talk about — I love the bifurcation of right and left of boom. Let’s speak, because you’re talking right now about the events happening and what you need to do. So a couple of lessons learned there, and then I want to go back to the pre-, because what can we do?
Juliette Kayyem: Yeah.
Susan Drumm: Obviously that’s where we should spend the most time. But let’s say the crisis is here. One of the things I’ve seen leaders go wrong is they’re not considering the impact more broadly on all stakeholders. Certainly we’ve seen companies where there’s an issue that’s also affecting the environment, or affecting others outside the company, and their lens is too narrow — they’re just focusing on the company, and then that becomes a PR crisis for them. What have you seen in terms of missteps that people have made once a crisis has presented itself?
Juliette Kayyem: That is exactly right. This stakeholder engagement — I’ll give an anecdote from my world, the public-sector disaster world, during the BP oil spill, the largest oil spill. Two things: one, our outreach to the community as responders was really only to the maritime or oil industry. But an oil spill like that — everyone is impacted. The oceans are closed, the restaurants are closed, everything.
And so we really struggled to be able to engage, listen, and empower through information. In a disaster, people want to feel agency. If you either ignore them or don’t give them the capacity to engage and, in fact, assist, your response capabilities will be wrong.
As an example — and I wrote about this in the book — I was sitting in the BP response, total nightmare in terms of our ability to respond in time, and we started getting calls from the Treasury Department. I’m in the situation room, and the Treasury Department says, “We’re getting calls from the Prime Minister’s office in London.” And we’re like, what? Of course, BP — the B stands for British.
The message coming to us was: you can criticize BP, you can hate them for what they’re doing, they could be at fault, but the UK government, as well as pensioners, their economy — everyone is very dependent on this company surviving. So you can be mad at them, but you can’t kill them. I’m like, this is very far from an oil spill — all of a sudden I’m talking macroeconomics and pension funds. And it’s great you mentioned that, because we call it imagining the cascading losses.
The word “boom” makes you think something got blown up and you have to clean it up. No — you think about the cascading losses that can occur if you’re not able to manage the disaster as it moves through your communities. We do a lot of tabletop exercises imagining, okay, what could be the ripple effects? And then, as importantly, what do we do now — left of boom — to engage people so they know this is a potential consequence, and what would we do to empower them?
Empowerment in a disaster is so important, because if people feel like they have no agency over their community, their economic destiny, their livelihood, and their lives, they will behave in ways that may be unhelpful to the response.
Susan Drumm: What’s an example of empowering someone in a situation like this?
Juliette Kayyem: Yeah. So a lot of times it’s information. It’s really interesting — I have this analogy. Imagine you have a friend who says, “I need to cut this loaf of bread. Will you put your hand here and tell me when I’m close?” They’re cutting the bread, and you’re going to tell them to stop really far away from where your hand actually is, because you have no control over the danger.
Now imagine the opposite: you have the knife, and you’re cutting right up close, because you know how to do this. I always think you’ve got to give the person both the loaf and the knife. That’s information — it is absolutely what is happening and why it’s happening — and it empowers them to make a decision based on the risk.
In hurricane preparedness, for example, we have a lot of issues around information and disinformation. But generally, if we do this right, people evacuate because you’re keeping them informed. About eight percent of any population won’t evacuate — for freedom, for pets, whatever. We’ve been able to adapt shelters now to take pets, because people will not leave their dogs behind. We have to understand that as disaster managers, rather than force them out.
There’s what we call the “freedom group” — this is my house, I rode out the last one, whatever, that’s fine. If you want to make that calculation, that’s fine, but here’s the information I owe you: as the person staying put, for three days I cannot and will not deploy resources to save you. So now we’re not talking about the hurricane, we’re talking about three days.
And secondly — this is a tactic used in Florida, a conservative state — here’s a Sharpie. Put your name and Social Security number on your arm, because if you do drown, it might be hard to identify you, and you want them to be able to contact your next of kin. Now I’ve given them the correct risk calculation, and lo and behold, lots of people will load their cars.
It’s not to scare them — it’s simply giving them the information so they can relate to this. Think about communities that don’t often have a seat at the table: a minority community, an immigrant community, or sometimes an insular conservative community. What are the ways you can give them information so they can understand what the risk is to them and their community?
A lot of it is information. Some of it is mantras, like “72 on you” — if you live in a high-risk zone, have 72 hours of provisions and water, if you can afford it, that will just get you by. Chances are you won’t have to wait 72 hours, but it relieves the stress on an apparatus that may need it more than you do.
And we never give numbers to these things — so, for your watchers: 72 hours. For water, we always say one gallon a day per person in the house. Family of five, that’s fifteen gallons — it’s a trip to Target. We’ve got to make it much easier for people.
On the CEO and corporate side, there are obviously lots of stakeholders to consider, from the board to the vendors. Think of a mega-event — we have the FIFA World Cup coming up in the months ahead, and the Olympics. But also, of course, your employees — they are as invested in the success of the company as you are.
If you close them out, if you lawyer up, if you don’t communicate and show empathy, they will either create narratives that are unhelpful, or tune out where they could otherwise be helpful. We saw this — we saw CEOs get very creative during COVID, with videos of themselves at home, leaders at home. I think that’s really important.
Susan Drumm: Yeah, that connectivity and staying connected and sharing information. Keep sharing, keep sharing, keep getting out front.
Juliette Kayyem: We have — in the intelligence world, in the disaster-management world — a “need to know.” Well, it’s “share and know.” In other words, people generally make pretty good risk calculations about themselves if they have the information. But if they feel like you’re hiding something, or they’re infiltrated with misinformation, those vacuums will get filled by fear, panic, and lies — and we’ve got to push back on that.
Susan Drumm: For sure. I mean, I think there’s that whole phrase: in the absence of information, people make it up. And so, your job is both to share what you know, but also to share what you don’t know.
Juliette Kayyem: Exactly. And so people don’t feel like you’re withholding something — like, “we don’t know yet” — that’s where I see some of the best practices happen.
What I tell leaders is there are two things you can do — one before, and one during the disaster. The first thing you want to do as a crisis leader is make sure you have mechanisms in place to share information in real time, because, as you said, that vacuum will get filled very quickly. That’s not hard to do. People sometimes call it crisis comms, and it kind of is, but you can build it now — you don’t have to be surprised by it. What are the mechanisms? What would you want? We call that the battle rhythm.
Let’s say you’re a shipping company and the Suez Canal closes — that could be a long-term disaster. You already know what you’re going to do operationally, the ships will go here or there to get around it. But maybe your employees don’t know that, because this person is in finance and that person is in another office.
So you can already set up a way to communicate to everyone — set up Zoom, set up recordings — and do it consistently. It can’t be one and done. It’s got to be, “tomorrow at 3:00, I’ll be back here to answer any questions.” You set up this battle rhythm, the emergency broadcast system is there.
And one of the benefits we’ve learned, especially in policing, is if you tell people when you’ll be back, they’re less inclined to create all sorts of meshugas in between. You know, if you say “we’ll be back in touch,” after a day it’s like a date — when is he calling? You want to set up a specific battle rhythm over the period of it, and then let people know.
So let’s say things start to subside — then you say, “We’ve got things under hand, these operations are up and running. I’m going to come back to you in a week and let you know what our after-action is — what are our lessons learned, I’m not happy with this.” So, that’s empathy and that outreach.
The second is in the crisis. The whole class is on crisis communications — whole books on it. I have it down to two, three words: numbers and hope.
When I study leaders in crisis — I don’t believe disasters happen because one person did one stupid thing. These are systemic networks falling apart because of lots and lots of decisions made. But when the leader is asked to step forward, it’s incumbent on them to do two things. First, have the facts — the numbers, the data, what’s happening, what are the priorities for getting operations back up. Be transparent with people; they’re going to figure it out anyway.
The second is hope: here’s what we’re doing, so that by tomorrow — or the next day — we’ll have that. The best leaders during COVID did that. The Prime Minister of New Zealand did that: here’s where we are, not looking good, pretty bad, but here’s where we hope to be. So, numbers and hope.
And I think, more recently, even in the political scrum we’re in — just last week, as of when we’re taping this — Governor Cox in Utah really took on a leadership role during the horrible political assassination of Charlie Kirk. If you look at all of his press conferences, it was, here’s what we know — to your point — here’s what we don’t know.
Susan Drumm: Yeah.
Juliette Kayyem: And here’s how we’re going to get through it.
Susan Drumm: Yeah.
Juliette Kayyem: And I think people are going to study that — it is just literally what people want. You left those press conferences feeling like, during this horrible thing, when things were getting more horrible, that he had a handle on his comms.
Susan Drumm: Flip side, right? Before — what should leaders be doing today? How should they prepare, and where are the biggest missteps you see leaders making?
Juliette Kayyem: Right. I’m a big fan of leadership having a keen understanding of, operationally, how it will work when the boom comes. You cannot delegate this. I’ve done so many trainings where a CEO says, “Oh, my security team has that.” Well, you wouldn’t tolerate that from a CEO if he said that about his financial team or his legal team. You expect a CEO to own this — so you have to own it.
So, of many things, I’ll give you three, before the boom. One: focus less on risk in your planning — this risk, or that risk, or that risk — and focus on the consequences, should there be a disruption, because you’re not going to know what the thing is that worries you.
Susan Drumm: That’s just what I was going to ask you. How do you even anticipate that? How could you know?
Juliette Kayyem: So — I’m a generic doomer, right? Or I’m a generic devil, right? The devil.
Susan Drumm: No, or Gen X.
Juliette Kayyem: Exactly. I know, exactly. But I have to tell you, so many people get so fixated on probability — “that’s probably…” — when you actually take a step back, things are so integrated and complex and combined now, it’s hard to disassociate a cyberattack from physical consequences.
But if you prepare and have a keen understanding of what the consequences are, you can do that now. You’ll then be able to drive the resources — not just for information, but to get what’s of fundamental importance ready for the disruption. Lots of companies have cyber planning before the boom, and physical planning before the boom — you’d better merge them, because we have no idea what’s about to happen.
And look, any plan is going to be 80 percent correct. It’s not going to get you all the way there, but it’ll get you the basic features. So part of that is educating on what your risk is and what the consequences will be, should that threat appear. So that’s number one.
Susan Drumm: To do the consequences, though — don’t you need to identify what those key risks are?
Juliette Kayyem: I mean, you do —
Susan Drumm: You know them now? No CEO is not going to know. Everyone says the risk analysis is really hard. I get these things from companies — “our risk assessment for 2025, for US companies, China” — okay, I knew that. The weather — yeah, I knew that one. I don’t mean to be like that, but has anything been a surprise?
Juliette Kayyem: I always focus on the disruption, because any good CEO is going to know what the risk is, and what the challenge is going to be is how prepared you are — and that’s all your planning and preparedness, and that has to happen before the boom.
The second thing is testing for what we call single points of failure. Lots of systems, especially complex ones, are often dependent on a single person — crazy — or a single system — slightly less crazy. We call it a single point of failure: if that thing were to go down, what kind of redundancies — morally, legally, reputationally, financially — will you wish you had built in, once the boom arrives?
A lot of people rely on single points of failure, and in engineering, no engineer would build a system with a single point of failure without redundancy. So you can test for those now. And it might also be a person — make sure your social media feed isn’t solely run by a consultant named Julie whom nobody’s ever met except on Zoom.
I’m serious — you cannot imagine how many companies, when all hell is breaking loose, have a pre-planned post go out on Twitter, and you’re like, they’re kind of missing the moment. You don’t want to look like you’re not attuned to what’s going on.
And then the third — so we worry about single points of failure, and then what we call, in the language of disasters, the normalization of deviance. I don’t know how much that permeates in your world, but my cautionary tale beforehand is: don’t normalize deviance. It’s telling you something, when we study —
Susan Drumm: What do you mean by deviance?
Juliette Kayyem: So, when we study this — it came out of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. How did this happen? There’s always a technical explanation — in that case, it was the O-ring. But when you really drill down, it was a system, an organization, an atmosphere, an environment that viewed a variety of what would be called deviances in engineering — but basically, blips.
What do we call it — pilots call it “ghosts in the cockpit.” They know when an airplane needs mechanical fixes because they can’t explain it — it’s just this feeling that things are being slightly disrupted. Lots of companies view their ability to get through that deviance as a sign the system’s working. In most cases, it’s a sign the system is under stress.
So before the boom, people in my field are constantly educating CEOs and their teams: what are the deviances you’re ignoring? Maybe just blips. Remember when the Super Bowl in New Orleans went into half-darkness — when the lights went out in the third quarter, about ten years ago?
When we go back and study these, to a T, beforehand, lots of people who knew the system said they felt there were gremlins in the system, but they kept going forward because they were able to bypass the gremlins. So watch for the ghosts in the cockpit — those little signals that tell you something is wrong that you don’t want to believe, because you think the system is just going to run.
I will say, this left-and-right-of-boom concept is very helpful, but also, as we’re seeing, it’s more of an infinity loop now — the better you are left of boom, the fewer consequences you’ll have right of boom. It’s not “I do good,” it’s “I do less bad,” because something bad is going to happen.
But you’ll be able to minimize the consequences, and the floor doesn’t drop out — your institution or company is ready for the next disruption, whatever it may be.
Susan Drumm: Yeah. So what would you recommend a leader do? What’s one thing they could do tomorrow that would help prepare them and make that infinity loop —
Juliette Kayyem: Yeah.
Susan Drumm: — less stressful?
Juliette Kayyem: As I said earlier, if you ask me the one thing I wish someone had — the throughline of bad crisis management is the inability of a leader to understand what is happening in real time: the “what.” Understand the consequences to their institution: the “so what.” And then the “now what” — and deploy.
So I spend a lot of time building situational-awareness mechanisms for a company — it depends on what the company is. A small company is going to be much more aware of X, Y, or Z. But do you have your ear to the ground about weather? Do you have your ear to the ground about your supply chain, given the tariff issue?
You want to be ahead of the curve and understand what’s going on. Information, information, then information — not for information’s sake, but information so you can deploy resources, or pivot.
More generally, if this is helpful — the way I live, the way I think about my value-add in this world, if there is any, is that I’m expecting the crash landing. Lots of things I wish could have happened, didn’t, and I’m expecting the crash landing. Most plane crashes that occur on runways occur at the end of the runway — if you have enough runway, you’re okay, because you can basically guide the plane down. It’s when a pilot runs out of runway that things go wrong.
So I always say: if you know the crash landing is happening, either be ready for it — that’s all the left-of-boom preparedness, all the planning I’ve been talking about — or try to extend your runway. Buy yourself more time. You do that through redundancies, secondary and tertiary markets, whatever it is in your area.
And in disaster management, we think all the time about how we give people more time so they can protect themselves and their community. So that’s what I’d say: either be ready for the crash landing, or try to extend your runway — and then maybe you can fit all the specific pieces into that.
Susan Drumm: Wow, you’ve given us some great things to consider. So many times CEOs are looking ahead to opportunities, but really you need to balance that with looking ahead at the potential risks, and how you’re going to prepare yourself, your company, your employees, and all the stakeholders that might be affected by what happens. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Juliette Kayyem: Thank you for having me.
Susan Drumm: Where can people learn more about you and your work?
Juliette Kayyem: So, a couple of things — you can look at my website for all my written work, academic work, media, and corporate work, or you can contact me at my company. Just look up Juliette Kayyem — juliettekayyem.com — for my email, and I’m happy to help in any way.
Susan Drumm: Awesome. I was so personally excited to have you on the show. Thank you for doing that. So great.
Juliette Kayyem: So great. And thank you for everything you do — you certainly know the challenges we’re in right now, whether they’re the kind of crisis I worry about, or just more generally. So, empowering people — you’re in the empowerment business, too.
Susan Drumm: Yes, that’s very true.
So, if you like this episode, you’re not going to want to miss my interview with Candice Mama, a dynamic CEO, speaker, and survivor who talks about the power of forgiveness. Let’s all lead the way.
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