You remember those solemn emails from company officials, reminding everyone to remain resilient and take care of each other in these unprecedented times, that appeared almost daily during some periods of the pandemic. These days, the disruptions are almost as common, from new wars to $5-a-gallon gas to huge staffing changes caused by AI. And yet, where are the calming emails from leadership?
To be sure, experts say corporate leaders are responding behind closed doors as each disruption percolates. They will shift business strategy when new tariffs are announced and change staffing when AI tools become more accessible. But few are apparently making public statements or being internally transparent with their workers. “Most leaders are coping—but few are actually leading,” says Andrew Healey, principal at Prospice Consulting in Newcastle, Australia. Publicly, firms are greeting many events with the same response: a shrug.
To be sure, some of this makes sense. Surprising events have always existed. In the aughts, academic Nassim Taleb popularized the term “black-swan event” to refer to rare and unpredictable happenings. (The term comes from the 1600s discovery of black swans in Australia, exploding the European belief that all swans were white.) These impactful events were typically treated as shocking outliers that required an emergency response. But this year, leaders say they have become so consistent that they are more akin to “gray swan” events: They’re not entirely unpredictable, but still consequential—and no longer commented on by the brass, who try to carry on as if everything is normal.
"Leaders need to take a measured, but not silent, approach to disruptions."
For example, major weather disasters happened on average every 82 days in the 1980s, compared to every 19 days over the last 10 years, according to government data. Similarly, roughly nine major data breaches are reported daily in the US, a count that didn’t even exist in the early aughts. And yet, reactions are tempered. “So many difficult and terrible occurrences have become so normalized,” says Karen Huang, senior director for search assessment at Korn Ferry. “Leaders can’t possibly comment on all of them.” Research suggests that even when leaders want to comment, they frequently don’t know what to say or do: A Korn Ferry survey of CEOs and directors found that 63 percent of global leaders said they face heightened business risks, yet only 11 percent feel fully confident in managing them.
Some of the silence follows years of previously strong responses, via both company messaging and logistical changes, which backfired. The tariff announcements of last year are one of the last major events to which many leaders reacted publicly. Firms spent millions on yanking foreign operations, only for some to discover that they may not have needed to. Now, many leaders stay mum.
Still, experts say great risk lies in the silence. When little is said publicly, different messaging tends to leak out to different audiences: one message goes to the board and another goes to employees, while customers get inexplicable silence, potentially leading them to assume that the leader is in self-preservation mode. “The danger is fragmentation,” says Julian Baldwin, a former healthcare executive who now leads Cohere Leadership Group.
Experts advise firm leaders to handle ongoing disruptive events with a steady, measured approach, rather than responding to each as an individual crisis. Any response should be part of a broader long-term strategy. For the leader, “it should be part of an ongoing conversation over a long period of time,” says Jeff Constable, coleader of the Global Financial Officers practice at Korn Ferry. The key messaging is a sense of control, achieved by highlighting that there is continuity in the firm’s efforts to adapt to upheaval, says Lorenz Graf-Vlachy, a chaired professor of strategic management and leadership at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. As a rule of thumb, look for opportunities in every event—and highlight them to stakeholders. The messaging is that yes, the underlying change is challenging, but there is an opportunity in it too. “Find the potential gain in the change, and frame it as an opportunity to get employees to adapt and not remain rigid,” he says.
