In partnership with
In this drop
The point: Your team mirrors your nervous system.
Why it matters: Panic creates guessing, and guessing gets expensive.
Try next week: Use a ten-second reset before you speak.
The point
In IT Ops, people love to talk about tooling, process, and runbooks. All important.
But when pressure hits, the first thing that moves the room is not the dashboard. It’s the leader.
Your tone sets the pace. Your pace sets the noise level. Your noise level sets the quality of decisions.
Most teams already have good people. What they need is breathing room. When the room is calm, people think. When it’s chaotic, people guess.
Reality check
If you bring chaos, you’ll get chaos back.
One proof
External source: Research on emotional contagion in teams shows mood spreads and changes group performance. The leader’s state matters more than most people want to admit.
Field note: I can usually tell within the first minute of an incident call whether it will be calm or messy, and it is rarely the technology that decides it.
One number with scope: Ten seconds. That’s all the reset needs before you speak.
Where this breaks
This fails when leaders punish honesty. If people get shut down, mocked, or blamed for raising early signals, they go quiet. Then you lose the best signal you had, the human one.
Try this next week
Before you speak on a call, do a ten-second reset: one breath, one headline, one next step.
Use the same three lines every time: what we know, what we don’t, what happens next.
Watch your face. If you want people to speak up, don’t punish mistakes with a look.
Three links I’m watching out for
Emotional contagion research summaries, because leaders underestimate it.
Incident leadership patterns that reduce noise and speed decisions.
Practical write-ups on calm comms in high-pressure work, not motivational fluff.
One question for you
What do people mirror from you when the system is burning, calm, urgent, or panicked?
Allan
PS: Want the audio version? Listen to the Signal Drop here: [Spotify link]
Join 400,000+ executives and professionals who trust The AI Report for daily, practical AI updates.
Built for business—not engineers—this newsletter delivers expert prompts, real-world use cases, and decision-ready insights.
No hype. No jargon. Just results.