I joined a panicked call, followed by an emergency team meeting. I could see everyone's faces — I was the only one on the screen because everyone else was around the table. The company had just lost its largest client. $2.5 million gone in a single call. Layoffs were on the table. I didn't deliver a turnaround speech. I gave them a choice between two kinds of hard.
The founder's job in a crisis is not to eliminate pain. It's to restore perceived choice. When a room feels like something is happening to them, they fragment. When a room understands they are choosing one hard over another, they can move. That shift — from passive recipient to active agent — is the specific intervention that keeps a team functional when the ground disappears underneath them.
Name both paths. Own the selection. Then the team can rally around a decision they understand instead of fracturing under a fog they can't.
The Room Nobody Wants to Walk Into
A direct-to-consumer brand lost its largest client on a Tuesday afternoon. One call. $2.5 million off the top line. By the time the all-hands was called, the team already knew something had shifted. You can feel it before anyone says a word — the cadence of Slack slows, the hallway conversations get shorter, people stop asking questions they don't want answered.
The conventional move in that room is to project confidence. Minimize the loss. Lay out the recovery plan. Deliver the turnaround speech that says we've been through hard things before and we'll get through this one.
I don't do that.
What I've learned working with founders running $8M to $25M companies is this: the turnaround speech almost never lands. Not because founders deliver it badly, but because the team is already doing the math. They know the number. They know what it means. Confidence that ignores the math doesn't reassure them — it isolates them. They stop trusting the room.
Fear of the unknown is worse than known pain with a reason behind it. The job in that moment isn't to make the room feel better. It's to make the pain legible — and then to show the team that someone has a hand on the wheel.
The Lie Leaders Tell Themselves in Crisis
The default instinct is to soften. Protect morale. Defer the hard conversation until the path is clearer, the numbers are better, the plan is tighter.
This instinct costs more than it saves.
And it compounds with delay. Every week the conversation is deferred, the team is filling in the silence with their own story — and it's almost always worse than the truth.
When a leader softens the blow, two things happen at once. The team loses their sense of agency — they can feel that information is being managed, which makes the situation feel more uncontrollable, not less. And the leader loses theirs. Withholding requires maintaining a performance, which burns exactly the cognitive bandwidth the leader needs to make good decisions under pressure.
The team doesn't need the pain gone. They need to know what it's for.
Think of the difference between a clean cut and a slow bleed. A clean cut is sharp. It hurts in a concentrated way. But the wound is defined, the edges are clear, and the body knows what it's healing. A slow bleed is something else entirely. The damage accumulates in the background. The uncertainty is the injury. That's what deferred honesty does to a team — it doesn't protect them from pain, it converts acute pain into chronic erosion.
Before the all-hands, the company's head of people spent a session stress-testing the communication framework. Not the words — the frame. His instinct was to protect the team from the sharpness of what was coming. That's a decent instinct. It comes from a real place. But the shift was realizing that the sharpness, framed correctly, was exactly what made the decision land as leadership rather than calamity. The clean cut, delivered with clarity and care, was more humane than the slow bleed of managed messaging.
Pain with a reason holds teams. Pain that feels random fragments them.
What "Choosing a Different Hard" Actually Means
In that all-hands, the room got two futures.
Hard Option A: maintain the current structure. Fight uphill against deteriorating revenue. The company stays the same size, absorbs the loss across every function, and grinds forward against a headwind that compounds every quarter. This path is survivable — maybe. It's also exhausting in a way that accelerates attrition, kills performance culture, and burns out the people you most need to keep.
Hard Option B: cut now. Right-size to a model that's actually winnable at the new revenue level. Absorb acute pain to escape chronic pain. The layoffs are real. People lose jobs. Every leader takes a pay cut. Some leaders are cut. No one is spared. There is extreme ownership in the decision — the pain hits the people making the call, not just the people affected by it. That is genuinely hard. But the company that emerges is sized for the reality it's operating in, not the reality it was planning for six months ago.
The exact framing from the all-hands: making these cuts moves the company from losing money fighting uphill to choosing a different, winnable path forward.
The word "choosing" carries the most weight in that sentence. The team knew the cuts were coming before they walked in the room. What they didn't have was agency. The reframe gave it back. Not by pretending they had more options than they did — they didn't — but by making the selection explicit. This is a decision. We are making it together. Here's what we're choosing and here's what we're choosing it over.
That is not spin. It is an accurate description of what leadership decisions are: selections between constrained options, all of which carry cost. The leader's job is to make that selection visible, name both prices, and own the choice.
Why This Works: The Physiology of Perceived Control
This isn't intuition. The mechanism is measurable.
Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that leaders maintain measurably lower cortisol than non-leaders under stress — but only while they perceive control over the stressor. Strip away perceived control and the buffer vanishes entirely. The leader's capacity to think clearly under pressure is directly tied to felt agency, not actual power over the situation.
This matters in two directions.
For the leader delivering the message: if you walk into that room without a frame — without a clear articulation of the decision and why it's the right one — you are walking in with elevated cortisol and degraded executive function. You feel it as anxiety. The team reads it as uncertainty. It compounds.
For the team receiving it: the shift from "this is happening to us" to "we are choosing this hard over that hard" gives people their footing back. The research on what happens without that shift isn't subtle — but you don't need a journal article. The founder described it.
After the client loss, the team had gone quiet in a way that wasn't grief. It was paralysis. People stopped bringing problems forward because they couldn't see how the company would respond to anything new. The reframe broke it. Not because the situation changed — it hadn't — but because the team could suddenly see that someone was making deliberate decisions rather than reacting to events.
The Pre-Work Behind the Reframe
The moment in the all-hands didn't come from nowhere.
Weeks before, a series of coaching sessions built the architecture underneath it. The budget model got rebuilt at the new revenue level. The right-sizing framework got tested against the actual cost structure, not the hoped-for one. The decision to treat the cuts as a deliberate move toward a winnable model — rather than a reaction to what was lost — got stress-tested until it held.
The two-path comparison took shape in those sessions. We mapped what staying on the current path actually cost, month by month, quarter by quarter. We priced the slow bleed explicitly: what does the team look like in Q3 if revenue doesn't recover? What does attrition do to the functions that are already stretched? What does grinding against a headwind do to the culture you've spent three years building?
That comparison is what made the all-hands possible. You cannot frame your way out of a bad decision. The team will sense it. If the strategic logic isn't sound, the language will ring hollow no matter how well you deliver it. The reframe only holds if the thing being reframed is actually true.
The communication framework came last. Decision first, fully tested. Then words.
My role in those sessions wasn't to write the message. It was to pressure-test the decision itself — to keep pushing on the logic until it either broke or held. It held.
How to Lead Your Team Through Layoffs and Downsizing: A Practical Protocol
Step 1: Name both hards precisely. Vague pain is uncontrollable. Specific pain is selectable. Whether you're navigating layoffs or a broader company downsizing, the clarity requirement is the same: "We are eliminating 20% of positions" is harder to say and easier to choose than "we're making some difficult changes." Precision is a form of respect.
Step 2: Establish the comparison honestly. Show both paths, both costs, over time. Founders often present the cut as the only option available. It lands with more trust when the other path is visible and honestly priced — including the cost of staying where you are.
Step 3: Make the agency explicit. "We are choosing this" is not spin if it is true. A team can rally around a decision they understand. They cannot rally around a fog. Say the words. Own the selection.
Step 4: Name what the chosen hard makes possible. The reframe completes when the room can see the winnable future on the other side of the acute pain. Not a guarantee — none exists. A visible path. Something worth moving toward.
One constraint: this protocol is not a technique for making bad decisions feel acceptable. The strategic logic must be sound before the communication begins. The frame is only as strong as the decision underneath it.
The Leader's Actual Job in a Crisis
The instinct is to eliminate the pain. The actual job is to clarify which pain is worth bearing — and own that selection out loud.
Teams don't fracture under hard news. They fracture under uncertainty and the sense that no one has a hand on the wheel. The difference between a room that grieves together and a room that fragments is almost always whether the leader gave them something real to hold onto.
This is what steward leadership means in practice. You don't own the outcome. The market is going to do what it does. Clients leave. Revenue shifts. Competitors move. What you own is the clarity of the path chosen — and that clarity is the product of leadership in a crisis. It is the thing you are uniquely positioned to provide, and the thing your team cannot generate without you.
The related move is hold fervently to the path, loosely to the outcome. The reframe is the mechanism that allows that grip to hold under pressure. When the path is named and chosen deliberately, you can absorb turbulence without losing direction. When the path is vague, every new piece of bad news feels like a verdict.
Every crisis you're navigating right now contains a version of this choice. The hard isn't optional — but which hard you select is. The first move isn't to fix the situation. It's to name both paths clearly enough that you and your team can actually choose one. Which hard are you selecting — and have you made that choice visible to the people who need to execute it?
