By Dominick Miserandino, CEO, RTM Nexus
There’s a moment that happens in almost every downturn, and it happens fast. Sales dip, the board starts calling more, the anxiety climbs, and a leader’s gut reaction is to push harder. Drive the team. Demand the numbers come back up. It feels like action. It feels like leadership. And it’s almost always the wrong move.
I was talking about this recently with Ben Thompson on Strategy for Breakfast, and the point I kept coming back to is this: you don’t drive people forward by driving them harder. You drive them forward by understanding them better. Those are not the same instinct, and in a tightening economy, the gap between them is where a lot of leaders lose their teams.
The gut reaction that backfires
I was talking with someone I sit on a board with recently, and he mentioned the board had been calling him more often. That’s the tell. The economy gets tight, the anxiety goes up the chain, and it comes out as pressure. A leader feels that pressure and passes it straight down to the team: sales are down, get them up. It feels responsible. It’s actually the opposite.
Tell a team the world is ending and you don’t get more effort, you get people quietly updating their resumes. I’ve watched this happen more times than I can count. The instinct to scare people into action is one of the most reliable ways to lose your best people, especially in a down economy when you can least afford to lose them.
Give them the idea instead of the order
The alternative isn’t to lower the bar or pretend nothing’s wrong. It’s to change who’s holding the pen. Instead of walking in with “sales are down, here’s what we’re doing,” ask the team what they’re seeing. What are customers actually saying? What do you think is happening here? Let’s figure this out together.
That’s not a softer version of accountability, it’s a different mechanism for it. When people help build the plan, they own the outcome. When a leader hands down the plan fully formed, the team’s only job is to follow orders they didn’t shape, and the first sign of trouble becomes the leader’s problem to solve alone, again.
Get past the first answer
Here’s a habit I picked up from years on the media side that applies directly to leadership: there’s almost always a first answer and a second answer. I asked someone at a conference recently how business was going with the tariff situation, and got the polished response: great, wonderful, nothing’s wrong. I just looked at him and said, come on, what’s actually going on. That’s when I got the real answer: they were hitting real difficulty.
That first answer is politically correct by default. It’s not dishonest, it’s just reflexive. Leaders who stop at the first answer end up managing a picture of their business that doesn’t exist. Getting to the second answer isn’t about being suspicious of your people, it’s about giving them permission to actually tell you something is hard.
Transparency runs both directions
The hardest part of leading through uncertain stretches isn’t the numbers, it’s transparency, and it has to run both ways. I see this constantly on the media side covering tariffs and trade policy: the actual disruption is often smaller than the disruption caused by not knowing what’s coming. The same is true inside a company. A team that understands clearly what’s happening, even when it’s not great news, performs better than a team getting a polished, incomplete picture from leadership.
And transparency from the top only works if it’s modeled, not just requested. You can’t ask your team for their honest second answer if you’re only ever giving them your own polished first one.
Know your team like a sports announcer knows the players
The best leaders I’ve seen, in business, in sports, anywhere, know their people well enough to notice small shifts before the data catches up. Watch a sports broadcast sometime: the announcer has never met the player personally, but can tell from how he’s walking off the field that he’s having a bad day. That’s just pattern recognition built from paying attention.
Most leaders don’t extend that same attention to the people sitting three desks away. If you don’t know your own team well enough to notice when something’s off, before it shows up in a sales report, that’s worth fixing before the next downturn, not during it.
The bottom line
Empathy and accountability aren’t opposites, and treating them like a dial you turn one way or the other is the mistake. The leaders who hold up best in hard stretches aren’t the ones who push hardest or the ones who go softest. They’re the ones who stay transparent, ask instead of order, and actually notice their people. That’s not a compromise between empathy and accountability. It’s what accountability looks like when it’s done right.
This piece grew out of a conversation on Strategy for Breakfast with Ben Thompson, available here.