LEADERSHIP
December 18, 2025
Alec Witham
When things start going sideways, most leaders instinctively pull back. They focus on the numbers. The roadmap. The pressure from above. That can cause them to go quiet.
I call that quietness strategy hibernation, a necessary mental retreat where leaders focus on diagnosing the problem and rebuilding the strategy behind the scenes.
That instinct is understandable.
And it’s exactly the wrong move.
The hardest moments are when leadership becomes deeply personal. This is when your team needs more presence, more predictability, and far more care than usual.
Not less. Not neutral. Ten times more.
Because when uncertainty creeps in, people don’t just worry about the work. They worry about themselves. Their role. Their future. Their worth. And if you don’t get ahead of that emotionally, the damage compounds fast.
Yes, strategy hibernation still matters. You do need your space to fix the root of the problem, however, you can't let that allow you to go quiet on your team. But when you come back with a solution, your team has to be ready to move with confidence. If they are not, the best strategy in the world stalls on impact.
When that happens, morale drops. Trust erodes. People stop raising their hand. Small frustrations turn into resentment. What could have been a temporary dip turns into a long, grinding decline that takes far more energy to recover from than it ever should have.
The leaders who navigate this well understand something critical... you have to know your people well enough to predict what they need before it hits. You don’t wait for motivation to collapse. You don’t wait for guilt, remorse, or burnout to show up in performance reviews. You see the signs early, and you start doing the prep work to rebuild before things break.
That might mean rolling up your sleeves and getting closer to the work. It might mean stepping into uncomfortable conversations. It might mean absorbing pressure yourself so your team doesn’t have to carry it alone. Real leadership is rarely clean or convenient.
In one instance, a small team spent months pushing a rebrand and digital experience forward. The end result was not universally celebrated. At first glance, it felt like a loss. But it wasn’t.
Three people accomplished what would have cost a quarter of a million dollars through an agency. Designers stretched beyond their lanes. A brand lead held the entire operation together across creative, technical, and strategic fronts.
I knew the brand rejection was coming before it reached them. While I worked to understand where executives were coming from, defending a stance, learning, and adjusting, I also thought about the team. How they would take the news. What it would feel like. How I needed to show up.
When the moment came, I met them in that emotion. It sucked. We sat in it together. But I already knew the next steps. Rebuild confidence. Call out what we accomplished. Explain why the work was right. Acknowledge that we did everything we could with the information and resources we had.
The result: accountability stayed high. Standards stayed intact.
That only happens when people feel seen and supported during the grind.
Here’s the truth most leaders avoid: if you don’t show up with humanity when things are hard, the bottom gets lower. The recovery gets longer. And the ripple effects extend far beyond the moment you failed to lead.
But when you do show up, consistently and predictably, something different happens. People push through. They take ownership. They stay connected. What looks like a setback becomes groundwork. What feels like a loss becomes momentum for the next iteration.
Hard times don’t destroy teams.
Absence does.
And the leaders who understand that don’t just get through rough patches.
They build teams that can survive them.
© Made by Alec Witham
