On a cool Wednesday morning in March 2020, I was standing in my office, mentally checking off my packing list.
My daughter’s high school marching band trip to Disney World had just been disrupted by a wave of out-of-state field trip cancellations due to COVID-19. Our family decided to fly down anyway since we already had the flights and tickets. I was scheduled to leave for the airport at 1:00 PM to meet them.
Then, around 9:00 AM, my phone rang. It was the Chief Administrative Officer.
“I need you to implement that pandemic plan you wrote,” he said. “Today.”
I paused. “You know I am flying out of DC in a few hours, right?”
“Yes, I do,” he replied. And he hung up.
I was entirely alone in my office. I closed the door, took about twenty deep breaths, and let the reality of the situation settle. Outside my door, a busy, high-volume recruitment and hiring division was buzzing with its usual daily chaos. Polygraphs, Interviews, etc. No one out there knew what was coming.
As I pulled the team together into the waiting room for an emergency briefing, you could feel the tension spiking. People were throwing questions at me left and right. They could sense that I was stressed.
“You’ll find out in a moment,” I told them. “I don’t have time to explain it multiple times.”
Once the room was full, I laid it out: “Things don’t always happen when we want them to. We are implementing the pandemic plan immediately. All testing, polygraphs, medicals, psychs, and in-person interviews need to cancelled by the end of the day for the foreseeable future.” The room instantly erupted. It was complete, frantic chaos.
What about this candidate? Who is handling X? People are flying in today!
In that exact moment, the room was acting like a thermometer.
A thermometer has no agency. It can only reflect the temperature of the environment around it. When the environment spikes into a fever pitch of panic, the thermometer spikes right along with it.
But true leadership requires you to be a thermostat.
A thermostat doesn’t mirror the room. It steps into the chaos, diagnoses the climate, and forces the environment to regulate to its setting. You are working to make the environment a product of your influence.
As the voices bounced off the walls, I ignored the noise and scanned the room for an anchor. I noticed one of my Sergeants standing quietly, a contemplative look on his face. He wasn’t catching the panic; he was working the problem.
I locked eyes with him. “We’re fine, right?”
He looked back at me. “We’ve got this. What time do you need to leave for the airport?”
With that single interaction, the first follower had aligned with the dial. The temperature was beginning to shift.
I stepped into the center of the room, told everyone to take a couple of deep breaths, and did something completely counter-intuitive for a high-stakes briefing: I sat down. By lowering my physical posture, dropping my vocal register, and cracking a quick joke about how they ignored me when we went over this plan weeks earlier, the frantic energy began to drain out of the room.
“We have a solid plan,” I said calmly. “We just need to prioritize things and start working down the list.”
We stood up a micro-Incident Command System (ICS) right there in the waiting room. We isolated the immediate 24-hour problem—the candidates currently traveling to or sitting in DC. We called our contractors and told them to give us until noon before sending out cancellation notices because we were going to control the message.
I looked at my team members one by one, gave them explicit, isolated ownership of a single task, and checked for dependencies. Anytime the panic started to creep back in, I reminded them of a fundamental truth:
“No one is dying. Bullets aren’t flying. We’re good here.”
By 1:00 PM, I walked out the door and made it to the airport on time. Before my plane even boarded, I received confirmation that every single immediate issue was completely contained, and the team was already working on the next week’s operational schedule. For the rest of the week, I called in every morning before hitting the theme parks with my family, keeping our core team aligned, cool, and calm.
🛠️ The Thermostat Blueprint for Executive Command
When a corporate crisis hits—whether it’s a sudden restructuring, a massive PR fire, or a structural market shift—your team will automatically look to you to figure out how they should feel.
If you mirror their anxiety, you validate their panic. We have all seen this happen. Frantic leaders have frantic teams. Apathetic leaders? Same deal.
If you behave like a thermostat, you give them a safe baseline to return to. Here is how you control the climate of your organization:
1. Reset Your Internal Dial First
Before you open your mouth or call a meeting, you must manage your own physiological response. Close the door. Take that deep breath. Filter out the corporate sirens. If your internal thermostat is spinning out, you cannot regulate an external room.
2. Lower the Posture, Lower the Voice
Panic travels upstream on high volume and frantic movement. When a room is shouting, do not shout over them—force them to quiet down by speaking in a calm, deliberate whisper. Sit down. Take a relaxed but commanding posture. Your physical stillness is a psychological signal that the situation is under control.
3. Build a Micro-ICS (Command Structure)
Chaos paralyzes people because everything feels equally important and equally broken. Step in and break the panic by isolating the immediate horizon. Give your key players singular, hyper-focused ownership over the next 24 hours, and tell them to ignore the rest until the baseline is stabilized.
4. Find Your Quiet Sergeants (Early Adopters)
Don’t waste your energy trying to convince the loudest, most panicked person in the room to calm down. Scan the room for the people who are quietly working the problem. Positively reinforce them, lean into their stability, and use their alignment to anchor the rest of the team.
The Bottom Line: Success, culture, and operational resilience don’t happen by accident—they happen by design. When the temperature spikes around you, stop acting like a thermometer. Set the dial, manage the silence, and command the room.
Join the Conversation: Think back to a high-pressure moment in your career. Did your leadership team act as a thermometer that escalated the panic, or a thermostat that cooled the room? Let’s discuss in the comments below.
The thermostat analogy was a particularly effective illustration. Consistently assessing the operating environment, audience and level of subject matter expertise has worked for me to calibrate ops tempo or battle rhythm. “Slow is fast” comes to mind, taking the time to establish clarity, alignment of objectives and mutual understanding leads to efficiency in execution. Thank you for sharing your valuable experience.
Very well written article. Great examples.