If you’ve ever led through a transformation, you know: the plan always looks clearer on the whiteboard than it does in real life.
In our case, we didn’t move fast enough.
We knew we had to shift from low-margin, commodity work to higher-value, engineered solutions. We knew we had to right-size the business. We had the analysis. We had the plan. We even had alignment.
But the economy moved faster than we did.
Customers pulled back. Orders dropped. Cash got tight. We were playing catch-up, and the cost was high: more layoffs, missed opportunities, deeper scrutiny from our stakeholders.
It was one of the hardest seasons of my leadership journey.
The Leadership We Needed
In times like these, traditional management skills aren’t enough. You can’t spreadsheet your way through complexity. You need something deeper: a new way of seeing, deciding, and responding.
I began to realize that the kind of leadership required in these moments wasn’t just about clarity or execution. It was about capacity.
Not just organizational capacity—but personal leadership capacity.
Inspired by the Level 5 and Strategist leadership models, I started reflecting on what it really takes to lead in complexity:
- Professional humility. Putting the mission above your ego.
- Right action. Not the easiest or most popular path, but the right one.
- 360-degree thinking. Seeing the whole system, not just your corner of it.
- Intellectual range. Drawing from outside your industry or function.
- Authenticity. Leading as a whole person, not a title.
- Followership. Inspiring—not demanding—commitment.
- Collaboration. Knowing you can’t go it alone.
These aren’t soft skills. They’re survival skills. And they’re what allowed us to stabilize, regroup, and keep moving.
The Honest Takeaway
We didn’t execute the strategy as fast as we should have. And that taught me something vital:
The speed of change around you is often faster than your organization’s ability to process it.
So your job as a leader is not just to create strategy. It’s to build capacity—for yourself and for your team—to navigate what’s next.
Reflection Questions
- Where are you underestimating the pace of change?
- Which leadership capacity do you most need to build right now?
- How are you helping your team see the system—not just their silos?
In the next post, I’ll introduce the seven-step transformation model that helped us turn these lessons into a repeatable, teachable process—one that leaders at every level could use.