A CEO can make the right call and still damage the company by mishandling the moment. Pressure does not just reveal judgment. It reveals whether the person in charge can control the reaction everyone else is using as a signal.
Marc Hildebrand, a former LAPD Sergeant with 20 years of experience, has seen people respond to dangerous situations with remarkable discipline. He has also seen leaders create more confusion than the situation required. Business leaders are not managing crime scenes, but the principle transfers cleanly: when people are uncertain, they study the person in charge before they decide how worried to be.
Your Reaction Can Become the Bigger Problem
Hildebrand remembers officers in command who became overwhelmed and started shouting over the radio. Everyone listening could hear the uncertainty, and it shaped the confidence of the people trying to respond. He also remembers a lieutenant who stayed calm when situations became complicated. His demeanor made the problem feel serious but manageable.
That same dynamic shows up inside companies. When a major customer threatens to leave, a key employee resigns, or a department misses a critical target, employees are not only listening to what the CEO says. They are watching tone, pace, and self-control.
A leader who immediately demands explanations or assigns blame may think they are creating urgency. Often, they are creating self-protection. People get careful. They share less. They start managing the leader’s reaction instead of solving the problem.
Calm does not mean passive. It means the executive refuses to add emotional noise to an already difficult situation. The first responsibility in a crisis is to protect the team’s ability to think clearly.
Are You Correcting Behavior Before You Understand It?
One of Hildebrand’s most useful lessons came from a police partner whose behavior suddenly changed. The easy move would have been to correct him on the spot. Instead, Hildebrand noticed that the behavior was out of character and asked what was going on.
His partner was dealing with marital problems and issues involving his children. That did not excuse the behavior, but it changed the conversation. Hildebrand could offer support and still make clear what needed to change.
Managers miss this all the time. An employee becomes impatient, misses a deadline, or reacts defensively, and the manager quickly assigns a cause: poor attitude, weak discipline, lack of commitment. Sometimes that diagnosis is right. Sometimes it is lazy.
An employee who does not understand expectations needs a different response from an employee who refuses to meet them. Someone dealing with an unusual personal problem needs a different conversation than someone with a sustained pattern of poor performance. Accountability gets stronger, not softer, when it is based on the real cause.
Hildebrand’s relationship with that partner improved. The officer later asked to work with him long-term and became more curious about other people’s circumstances instead of assuming the worst.
That is a leadership advantage a lot of leaders overlook. People generally tell the truth faster when they believe the person in charge cares, understands, and can handle it.
The Thinking Pattern Behind Bad Decisions
Hildebrand teaches a framework he calls the Growth Model: reality, perspective, emotion, response, and results. Reality is what happens. Perspective is the meaning we assign to it. That interpretation creates emotion. Emotion shapes response. Response affects results.
The model is simple enough, which is why many leaders need it. Executives usually can’t change the immediate reality. They can often change the perspective that determines what they do next.
Hildebrand experienced this after working about 12 hours when a child abuse call came in. He and his partner were exhausted. His first reaction was frustration because the assignment would extend an already difficult day. The reality was fixed. They were tired, and the call still needed a response.
What changed was his perspective. Instead of viewing the call as one more burden, he considered whether they might be exactly the officers those children needed. The investigation ended with two children being removed from their parents, including a child with a broken arm. What began as an assignment he wanted to avoid became a roughly 20-hour day he remembered with pride.
The same pattern shows up in business. A department misses a deadline. The CEO’s first perspective may be that the manager is careless or incapable. That interpretation produces anger, and the conversation becomes accusatory. The manager gets defensive.
A better leader still treats the missed deadline as a performance problem. The difference is that the leader does not pretend to know the cause before examining it. Were expectations clear? Were resources adequate? Did the manager fail to follow through on a clear commitment? Those questions are not softness. They are how adults find the actual problem.
Employees Resist Decisions They Don’t Understand
Hildebrand saw this when the LAPD changed its vehicle pursuit policy. Officers could no longer pursue someone solely for certain minor traffic infractions. Many officers were frustrated because minor violations sometimes led to more serious discoveries.
As a new sergeant, Hildebrand understood the frustration, but he also knew that repeating complaints would not help him lead. He researched the issue and found information showing that certain pursuits created serious danger for officers and the public, sometimes over relatively minor offenses.
He did not pretend to know every reason behind the policy. He explained what he had found, acknowledged what he did not know, and treated his officers as professionals capable of understanding a hard tradeoff. That didn’t make the policy popular, but it changed how people received it.
CEOs should pay attention to that. When leaders announce changes to compensation, staffing, procedures, or priorities without explaining the reasoning, employees do not sit quietly in a vacuum. They create their own explanation, and it is rarely generous.
Explaining a decision does not mean putting it up for a vote. It means showing that management has considered the consequences and can defend the business rationale. A decision may be final, but the explanation determines whether people support it, comply reluctantly, or quietly resist it.
Don’t Demand What You Don’t Demonstrate
Hildebrand’s standard is direct: before expecting someone else to demonstrate a behavior, he needs to be willing to demonstrate it himself. That includes staying composed in hard conversations, responding thoughtfully to mistakes, and doing the work he expects from others.
Executives diminish their influence when they miss this. A CEO who demands accountability but excuses personal mistakes has not set a standard. A manager who expects professionalism under pressure but loses control in meetings has taught the real rule.
Employees notice the gap. Authority may give a leader the right to make decisions, but it does not make the leader worth imitating. That part has to be earned.
The test comes when the leader is tired, frustrated, disappointed, or under pressure. Anyone can endorse patience when nothing is going wrong. Employees learn what the standard really means by watching what happens when the person in charge has every excuse to abandon it.
A CEO does not need to eliminate frustration, fear, or uncertainty. Those reactions come with consequential decisions. Employees remember the moments when good judgment is hardest to access because those moments reveal whether the person asking them to stay composed and professional can do the same.