When everything is shifting — a restructure, a board crisis, a project on the edge of collapse, or just the relentless uncertainty of leading a team through sustained change — the expectation is that you hold it together. You stay steady. You have the answers.
But nobody tells you how.
In this episode of Leading Women in Tech, Toni Collis builds out the adaptive leadership toolkit every senior leader needs for navigating a genuine crisis — not the kind of crisis leadership that sounds good in a conference keynote, but the practical, honest, unglamorous work of staying grounded when everything around you is shifting.
This is not about eliminating the pressure. It is about developing the specific capabilities that let you remain clear, present, and effective within it.
What's covered:
Why crisis leadership is a trainable capability, not a personality trait — and why the unruffled leader you're comparing yourself to is a fiction
The team-speed problem: why your team is not where you are emotionally, and what it actually means to meet people where they are
Crisis communication as a leadership skill — not just a PR function. The specific language that calms, orients, and aligns your team when they're in crisis mode. And why you need to say it far more times than you think
The internal dimension: staying grounded in yourself before you can hold space for anyone else
Protecting decision quality when the stakes are highest — the difference between genuine urgency and anxiety-driven urgency
The blame game, why a crisis is never the time to play it, and the story from early in Toni's career that has stayed with her ever since
The isolation of senior leadership in a crisis — and the structural responses that make it manageable
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