Long Story Short
People follow you through a crisis because your values were clear before things got hard. Do the values work before you need it, and the best people on your team opt in and take control. We built you a Crisis Leadership Toolkit with Suneet Bhatt to get you started.
Libby here.
One of my proudest moments as a leader was leading my team at Whetstone through a crisis that threatened to blow up our entire company in 2018. (Not so proud that the crisis came about because of poor leadership decisions on my part, but I suppose that’s how you learn.)
I won’t bore you with the details (I can’t, actually, some are still under NDA), but I’ll tell you how I know I did a decent job: my employees told me I did.
Not in words, but in their actions. They worked nights and weekends. They jumped in to help other teams that were at capacity. They noticed the hard work of others and were generous with their praise. In the crisis room, my leadership team grabbed whiteboard markers without being asked and made each version of the response plan better than the last. We came out the other side with 100% employee retention and 100% customer retention.
But the thing that said the most to me was that not a single person jumped ship. If they had, I wouldn’t have blamed them. AND, it meant the world to me that all of them stayed when things got hard.
Then came the time I jumped ship.
New company. New crisis. I gave all of myself to turn the ship around for a year, and then I said, “I’m done.” I’ve felt bad about this ever since. I knew it was the right thing for my health (the stress was so great that I couldn’t eat or sleep), but I’ve always done well in a crisis and I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t hack this one.
I didn’t really understand until I wrote this article.
What it comes down to is that an organization’s true values are what show up in a crisis. Not the ones on the “About Us” page. The real way the organization operates.
At Whetstone, I realize now that it was our shared values — “Get a little better every day” and “Build it right” — that made our team show up in the incredible way it did. At the other place, what I ran into was closer to blame first, ask later. No matter how I tried to shift things, those ingrained values weren’t budging. I’m realizing now that I didn’t leave just for my health. I left because I was embarrassed, and with no indication that things would ever change, I chose the exit door rather than the “Definition of Insanity” door.
At Whetstone, nobody handed us those values the day the crisis hit. We’d built them for years beforehand, on ordinary Mondays and Tuesdays, when values felt like the least urgent thing on the list. They were just there when we needed them, which is the reason they held us together.
The values you’ll lead with in a crisis are the ones you already have. You don’t get to choose them in the moment — you only get to find out what they are.
The person who loves a crisis
Suneet Bhatt and I have three things in common: we love tennis, we love strategic planning, and we’re both good in a crisis. The difference is, Suneet loves a crisis, whereas I’ve spent the last five years designing my life to avoid them. (See above for why.)
Here is the fastest way to explain Suneet: He identifies with the character The Wolf from Pulp Fiction. He’s the guy who shows up when everything has gone sideways, fixes it, and leaves. (Please don’t tell him I’ve never seen Pulp Fiction.)
“I love really messy and yucky situations. I love stabilizing them and then giving them to somebody else. If I was in a hospital, I would want to be in the emergency room at all times.”
He’s also clear-eyed about why that works for him: “I’m not a perfectionist. I am not the person that’s going to get you from 85% to 100%. I hate that work. I love going from zero to 80.”
A crisis is the one situation where nobody is asking for 100%. “Nobody’s worried about perfection in a crisis. They’re worried about getting things stable, and then the optimization is for somebody else.”
There’s something else in it for him, too, and it’s the thing that makes him unusual in a room full of people bracing for impact: “I’m a big fan of “don’t waste a crisis.” It is a moment to do incredible things.”
Suneet’s resume is essentially a list of things on fire. After business school, he was project manager on FEMA’s Alternative Housing Pilot Program post-Katrina. The question was how to get people out of trailers that were off-gassing formaldehyde, a literal life and death emergency. The team scouted alternative housing capacity across the Southeast, built a scoring algorithm, and went from concept to a full short-term/medium-term/long-term recommendation set in 60 days.
“As soon as it becomes a big crazy problem, I find a way to make it really simple and clear to make progress.”
Then came Boldr. Suneet was board chair when the company hit the kind of real growing pains that come with scaling fast, and he was asked to come in and help. He signed a six-month contract as President in January 2020. You know what happened next. He stayed, took on more of the business, led an outsourcing company through a 40% revenue loss, and then got it growing again, from 200 people to 1,200, one location to five, with employee satisfaction improving the whole way.
Ask him what was actually on his mind through it and the answer is about the team in the Philippines he had only ever met on a screen. “We had so many people depending on us and most of these were kids. I’d never met any of them. They looked to us to take care of their livelihood. And yeah, in January 2020, livelihood meant where’s my paycheck. But in March…”
What Suneet is most proud of is how he and his team showed up for the day to day work of getting through it. The way they lived their values, “whatever it takes for the client” and “no person left behind,” is why, four years later, when he was in town for a wedding, 35 of his direct reports came straight off a night shift and sat in two hours of traffic to meet him at his hotel at 8 in the morning, in person for the first time.
“It’s been four years since I worked there and I still love these people.”
The rule of three
Ask Suneet how he approaches any of it and he gives you the same three things every time: Money, Time, Values. He calls it a rule of three, and it works for a strategic plan, a crisis, or what you want for dinner.
Money. “You’ve got to get incredibly truthful about your money.” The actual financial picture as it stands today. Expectations, constraints, what’s really available at this moment.
Time. “You’ve got to get clear about your time horizon. What time horizon are you operating against? This week? This year? The next 12 hours?”
Values. “How do you want to show up when you’re on this journey?”
Most of us in the leadership seat are pretty good at the first two! I have sat in a lot of rooms where money and time got worked over thoroughly and thoughtfully.
“But the thing where people get hung up, and where you start to see the cracks — very few actually think about their values, and how they want to show up, and where they will not compromise.”
When the hard thing arrives, money and time tell you what you can do. Values tell you what you will do.
The Key Takeaway
You have to know your values before the crisis. As Suneet puts it, if you try to make sense of them in the moment, you’re going to fight about what they mean.
What holds a team together while everything shifts around them is the alignment itself. Suneet goes to the research on this one: “We are better when we are self-concordant. We are more resilient. We burn out less. We bounce back faster. We persevere more and better when we are aligned to the actions we are taking.”
Values that are clear, simple, and internalized before you need them are what make that alignment available on the day it counts.
Suneet’s Crisis Leadership Pre-Work Process
The values work does its job in the moment you need it, which is exactly why it belongs on an ordinary week, long before anything is on fire.
The first three steps below are the pre-work. They’re the unglamorous ones, the ones that feel like a nice-to-have right up until the week you find out they actually weren’t. The last two are what you do when it hits.
If you’re a “just give me the worksheet, I’m ready to get started” kind of person (aka me), we built you a Crisis Leadership Toolkit with the Money, Time, and Values worksheet and a What We Cannot Predict planner..
If you’re a “tell me why this works” kind of person (aka our Founder Jess), read on. Here’s what we’re going to cover:
- Step 1 — Find your values in your people
- Step 2 — Sharpen the list to the two you’d actually use when everything’s on fire
- Step 3 — Infuse them into your day to day work
- Step 4 — When a crisis hits, ask the values question for every single decision
- Step 5 — Shrink the time horizon and communicate the uncertainty with certainty
How Suneet’s Crisis Leadership Process Works
Step 1: Find your values in your people
Most values exercises start with a blank whiteboard and a marker, and about forty minutes later you have “Integrity. Excellence. Collaboration.”
Suneet’s version starts somewhere else entirely: with the humans already in your building.
“In your next leadership team meeting, go around the room, identify the best people in your company. Who are the people that you think embody what you think your organization actually stands for when it’s at its best? Identify those people and then talk about the traits that you see in them. Put the traits on a whiteboard and talk about them. Whittle the list down to what really matters. That’s where you will find the true values of your company.”
Or, the way he says it when he’s making the point: “Show me your people, show me who you celebrate, show me who you elevate, and I will show you your values.”
Values are a thing you already are. The work is noticing it. (And, if you don’t like what you notice, the second set of work is fixing that.)
“Values are terrible when they’re aspirational. Values are not goals. Values are a reflection of who you are. So you have to generate your values from the inside out.”
This matters because ingrained values are the ones that hold up in a crisis. Suneet is clear that Boldr’s values worked in the pandemic because the company had actually hired and fired and made decisions against them for years beforehand. “If we were a cutthroat margin-driven company and I tried to make the values about something that we weren’t, it would have failed.”
Years later, this is still how Suneet checks his own work: “When I close my eyes and I think of the people that were in the conference room the day we began our crisis response, all of those people embody “whatever it takes for the client” and “no person left behind.” They embodied that, and those are the people that stepped up.”
Show me your people, show me who you celebrate, show me who you elevate, and I will show you your values.
Step 2: Sharpen the list to the two you’d actually use when everything’s on fire
Boldr had values before COVID, and they were real ones. Then the pandemic hit and they got a lot sharper, fast.
“We had a bunch of those abstract values, too. But as soon as the pandemic hit, we realized that we really only had two: “We take care of our people” and “We take care of our clients.” We do everything for them first. And when we do that, the business will take care of itself. We obsess about being aggressively helpful to our clients. And we obsess about being aggressively supportive of our people.”
Aggressively helpful. That word is the whole difference between a value everyone nods along to and one that tells you how to act when you have a lot of big decisions to make in quick succession.
“In times of urgency or crisis or change, the values need to be simple, clear, tangible, visible.”
Two things worth sitting with here.
The first is that the crisis codified what was already there. Suneet’s word for it is exactly that: they had the list, and the pressure sharpened it. Which means you can do this work now, during a (hopefully) non-crisis week, by asking a slightly uncomfortable question: If we lost half of our revenue next quarter (a crisis if we ever heard one!), which of these would we actually reach for, and which are we still aspiring to?
The second is the number. Suneet is deliberate about landing on at least two. “I’m not a fan of a single, north star metric.” He’s a believer in the constellation theory of a scorecard, where a series of metrics (or values) keep each other accountable. “We could have a client where we’d be aggressively helpful, but if that meant compromising on being aggressively supportive of our employees, then we weren’t living our values.” Two values keep each other in check. That negotiation between them is the decision-making.
Step 3: Infuse the values into your day to day work
“Sometimes when I’m working with a client, they’ll show me around their office and say, ‘Oh, look! Here are our values beautifully painted on the wall.’ And I’m like, ‘No! Don’t put them on a wall! Put them in your employee review process. Put them on your hiring scorecard. Put them on your product roadmap.'”
Here’s how that can look:
The sales pipeline. Suneet is a strong believer in saying no to revenue if it means you can’t live your values. “We fired clients who did not treat our employees well.” Suneet didn’t just fire clients, he turned some away. “It was hard but there were times where we would not take new business, really profitable business! We just couldn’t take it when it became clear it was in conflict with our value of taking care of our team.” Saying no to revenue is one of the hardest things a leader ever does. It is also, I’d argue, the fastest way to build the kind of trust you’ll want on hand later. Suneet puts it plainly: if you turn down revenue in favor of values, they trust you.
The product roadmap. Boldr had the chance to take on content moderation work for a major social platform, the kind where people spend their days reviewing the worst material on the internet. “We refused to take the work because it was going to be horrible for our employees’ mental health. We didn’t want that work.”
The management metrics. When Suneet took on service delivery, the team was carrying the load that fast growth in this industry tends to put on people. “Everybody was burned out. Everybody was in the red. And I was like, This isn’t working. We’re not treating these people correctly.” So he made employee vacation time a manager KPI: if someone hadn’t taken a vacation in 60 days, that employee went red on a scorecard. Every week, he asked who was in the red and coached his managers to create space for them to take a vacation. “Within 12 months, I went from people being burned out after Christmas, to the next year going into Christmas and everybody saying, I don’t need an urgent vacation. I feel good, I’m ready for this.”
Step 4: When a crisis hits, ask the values question for every single decision
Steps 1 through 3 are the pre-work. This is what you do in a crisis.
“Every conversation during COVID, every time something hard would come up, I would ask the team: Is this being aggressively helpful to our clients? Are we being aggressively supportive of our employees? And as soon as you ask those questions, everyone would go back and revisit their recommendation.”
That’s it. That’s the leadership work. You ask the values question and people re-sort their own thinking without you having to overrule anybody.
The solutions these questions created at Boldr are honestly a little wild. They needed to keep working through lockdown, and the work involved HIPAA and financial data, so security compliance for customers wasn’t optional. At the same time, some folks couldn’t work out of their now-cramped living quarters due to COVID restrictions. So the company secured hotel rooms and apartments and moved team members in together for six months. A secure environment, colleagues living side by side. That was the answer to the question: how do we do right by the client and right by these people at the same time?
And with this kind of values-based thinking, 300 people went from fully in-office to fully remote in 24 hours with no service disruption. “We flipped our model faster than anyone else I heard about in COVID. Every one of our clients was like, how?”
This is also the moment people choose. “Some people opted out. That’s what you have to be ready for. But our best people opted in and took control. And those are the people that grew, and even now to this day are still leaders in the organization. Because they took this opportunity to really align themselves with the values of the business.”
Suneet is clear about why the values are what carry a team, and not the numbers: “People are a heartbeat away from anxiety. They need clarity, and they need things to intrinsically connect to, and they are not intrinsically connected to your revenue goal. They are connected to your values. When your values are sharp and clear, leading a team through any change, any transformation, any crisis recovery, it’s the values that’s going to give you the greatest tool to keep your team moving and aligned.”
Step 5: Shrink the time horizon and communicate the uncertainty with certainty
Through his years of crisis work, Suneet has learned that how he talks to his team about the situation at hand can settle their anxiety or raise it. He works from a formula: anxiety equals fear plus uncertainty. Uncertainty is a given in a crisis. The fear you can take out by naming what’s happening honestly, and the uncertainty you can shrink to a size people can actually live with.
He says it this way: we can’t give certainty, we can give clarity.
Start with the naming. “Communicate about the uncertainty with certainty. Like, we do not know what’s going to happen. We will likely lose revenue, and we are working on a plan about how to mitigate that. Just own it. I don’t sugarcoat things. I just tell the truth. The truth is undefeated.”
Then shrink the time horizon of uncertainty. At Boldr they ran in four-to-six hour cycles: “It’s 12:00pm now. I’ll give you an update at 4 p.m. From 12:00p to 4:00p, just do all the things you’re doing.” In a time when folks were literally wondering if the world was ending, reducing the time horizon to the next four hours gave his team something concrete to work with, and the ability to set the uncertainty aside long enough to get some work done.
Suneet also kept a Google Meet open for office hours 24/7 for the first month of lockdown, so people could just walk in with a question. Just knowing they could ask him whenever something came up relieved the uncertainty. “They didn’t know how this would play out in 3 months, but they were certain that if they had a question they could ask me. So I was giving them any bit of certainty I could.”
Shrinking the window and planning ahead are the same practice, done at the right size. At Boldr, the very first exercise Suneet ran was a client-by-client scenario plan: which clients are we about to lose, which ones should we be giving money back to, which ones should we be making this easier for. His partners predicted a 25% revenue loss. He predicted 45%. They came in at 40%.
“We were wicked clear about what that would mean. This is how much revenue we’re going to lose, this is when it’s going to happen, and this is how we want to show up in those conversations.”
Because they’d done that work, they led those conversations instead of receiving them. They let clients off the hook. They restructured deals to cost – no profit, just cost – to keep people employed and the work moving.
As time went on, his team expanded the time horizon. 4 hours turned into 12, which turned into 24. Then a week. Then 2. As new information came in (which clients churned, which stayed, whether the whole living-with-your-colleagues thing was going to work — it did), they were able to look further into the future. “At some point we got to a month, and then three, and then it was just the new normal.”
It can be hard if you’re a planner to see a 48-hour plan as a good thing, but Suneet is adamant that the expanding window IS the progress. Most of us blow right past it because we’re measuring against the plan we wanted (a perfectly clear picture of the next year) instead of the one we have mid-crisis.
When to do this yourself vs. bring someone in
Most of this you can do on your own, and you should. That’s the whole point of doing it before you need it. Pull your leadership team together, run the values exercise from Step 1, and get honest about money and time while nothing is on fire. The [Crisis Leadership Toolkit] gives you the worksheets. It’s a couple of hours, and it’s the cheapest insurance you’ll ever buy.
Consider bringing someone in if:
- You’re already in the crisis, and there’s no version of this week where you sit down and do foundational work
- Your leadership team can’t agree on what the values actually mean
- You want an outside read on whether the values you state and the values you use are the same ones
- You’re the person everyone is looking at, and you need one place where you get to not have the answer
If you want help
Suneet Bhatt has spent more than twenty-five years helping people and organizations get unstuck, turning around businesses, running emergency response, and coaching founders, leaders, and teams through growth, change, and hard resets. He teaches purpose and personal development at Rutgers, and works with organizations through his practice, My Authentic Story.
He’s a good fit if:
- You’re in the middle of something hard and you want someone who has been in the room for a few of these
- Your values exist, and you want them showing up where decisions actually get made
- You’re leading a transformation or a reset and you can feel people starting to drift
- You need triage and stabilization, the zero to 80, and someone else can take it to 100
- You want a thought partner who will tell you the truth rather than the comfortable version
Connect with Suneet!
Try it Yourself
Suneet’s Crisis Leadership Toolkit (free)
- Find Your Values in Your People — A one-hour leadership team exercise for naming your best people, the traits you see in them, and sharpening the list to the few you’d actually reach for in a hard quarter.
- What We Cannot Predict — List what you can’t predict, then decide now how you’ll talk about it and how you’ll address it.
Recommended reads:
- Making Sense of Purpose by Suneet Bhatt (Morgan James, 2026) — Suneet’s book on self-awareness, strengths, and values as the foundation for everything else.
Questions to Sit With
- If three people on your team named your organization’s values right now, without looking, what would you hear? What would you say?
- Who are the people in your organization you’d point to and say “that, that’s what we’re supposed to be”? What trait does each of them have that you haven’t named yet?
- Which of your stated values are already true on an ordinary Tuesday, and which ones are you still aspiring to?
- Which two of your values keep each other in check?
- What’s the last thing you turned down on principle, a client, a project, a piece of revenue? What did your team take from watching you do it?
Not sure Suneet‘s the right fit? Talk to Helia directly!
This article comes from a coffee chat with Suneet Bhatt in July 2026. These conversations form the heart of the Helia Library, because we’ve learned the most from doing and from talking with other doers willing to share their wisdom. We don’t need to start from blank pages or do everything alone.
As always, take what’s helpful, leave what’s not, and make it your own.
About Suneet
Suneet Bhatt has spent more than twenty-five years walking into other people’s worst weeks on purpose. FEMA after Katrina, a 40% revenue loss at Boldr, and a long list of messes in between. He identifies with the Wolf from Pulp Fiction, freely admits he’s terrible at the last 20% of anything, and will tell you that your two-week planning horizon is freaking amazing and mean it. His book, Making Sense of Purpose, is out now. He would also like you to know that Mats Wilander is his favorite tennis player of all time, and that John McEnroe holds the only racket he’s ever seen that truly felt like an extension of a hand.
Work with Suneet
