185: The Human Side of Crisis Recovery, Part 2

Silence after a disruption is louder than most leaders realize. When people are scared, overloaded, or grieving, they don’t just listen for facts, they listen for proof that someone is steady, honest, and actually paying attention. 

Listen to part two of my presentation to the Business Continuity Institute's (BCI) Business Continuity & Resilience Awareness Week (BCAW+R) 2026. Mine was one of dozens of presentations on the topic: Think You're Resilient? Well, Think Again.

In this episode, we talk about why uncertainty is inevitable in the first hours of a crisis, and why waiting for certainty can destabilize teams even more than bad news. If you lead in business continuity, crisis management, or any high-pressure environment, this conversation is a practical guide to communicating when you don’t have perfect answers.

We share a personal story that reveals two radically different leadership responses to the same basic request: “I’m struggling, and I need help.” From there, we break down what psychological safety looks like when the stakes are real, including why many people can’t explain what’s happening to them yet, why forced disclosure can shut people down, and how invisible psychological injuries can outnumber visible physical impacts in disasters. 

The goal is trauma-informed leadership without turning leaders into therapists, just humans who can name reality clearly.

You’ll also get a simple, actionable five-question culture audit to pressure-test your resilience culture before the next incident hits: information flow, operational versus human communication, timing of check-ins, whether “I don’t know” is acceptable, and whether people feel safe asking for time off. We close with concrete ways to build human recovery checkpoints into your post-incident process, so “systems back up” isn’t the only milestone that matters.

If this helps you rethink how you lead under pressure, subscribe, share it with a leader who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find the show. 

What’s one message you wish leadership had said during your hardest week?

Listen to the first part of the presentation here.

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Transcript

Uncertainty And The Cost Of Silence

Manya Chylinski 0:01

A lot of uncertainty, especially early on in crises. And don't wait for that certainty because people read silence as leadership doesn't know what's going on. Or they don't care what's going on.

Welcome And The Talk’s Context

Manya Chylinski 0:16

Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Mania Chelinsky. Today's episode is part two of Think You're Resilient? Well, Think Again. A presentation I gave for BCI's Business Continuity and Resilience Awareness Week. And I want to thank them for letting me share this with all my listeners. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode.

Two Leaders After Trauma

Manya Chylinski 0:44

But this is such a contrast. And the story that I started with, the manager that I was working with. Right? A week after the bombing, like I said, it was about two hours before my deadline, and I told him, I'm not going to meet my deadline. And I was the first in a chain of people on that project. If I missed the deadline, everybody was going to be behind. And I had multiple deadlines that I was now going to miss. And so somebody was either going to have to pick up the slack from me, or the whole project was going to be delayed. But he just said those six words. I understand. I was at Columbine. It wasn't a problem. He protected me from the consequences. He didn't say somebody else needed to deal with it. He just let me do what I needed to do. And, you know, he knew from his own experience that the human timeline was different. And that's the difference I'm talking about. These are two completely different responses. Two leaders, one institutional, one personal, identical situation, a traumatized person saying, I need help, I need some accommodation here. I'm struggling. Completely different outcomes. And completely different way than I remember them, even 13 years later. Right? The city had crisis plans, I'm sure. They had protocols and emergency management infrastructure. This happened at the bombing when they had their own, you know, emergency management system set up just for that event at the marathon. And I'm not sure if they had a plan for the mental health side of things. It certainly isn't one that I ever learned about. And they didn't seem to have a plan for people who lived in the neighborhood, because I also live in the neighborhood and never heard from the city about it. So I think they just didn't have a culture that understood this very well. And they definitely couldn't see outside of what was in their plan. Because in that moment of dealing with crisis, you can't imagine those new things. You can't think of those new

Real Psychological Safety Under Pressure

Manya Chylinski 3:02

things. So, what does it look like to actually build a culture that works even in a crisis? So these are four conditions you can think about what's going on in your own organization right now. To think about is your leadership culture genuinely resilient? And is it genuinely supportive? And not resilient and supportive on paper or what you say to the press or what's on your website or that sign on the wall in the lobby in your headquarters, actually resilient. Do you have psychological safety? Right? A lot of organizations have done that. And a lot of that looks great in normal times. But a crisis or some sort of pressure is going to test whether or not it's real. And you probably don't want to find out the hard way. So when there's bad news to share, when someone needs to say, I don't know, or this isn't working, or I think we need to change the plan, what happens to them? Are they supported? Is it okay to say I don't know? If you say there's something wrong with the plan, do you then sit down and figure out what you need to change? Or is that person somehow punished? Does the information flow up or down to who needs it? Up to executive leadership if necessary, down to frontline staff if they need to know. Or does it somehow stop with the person who said, I don't know, or I think we need to change something? And it never gets past them. And this is why support structures in the organization are so important, right? The because this is a culture question. It's not HR specifically. If the only way someone can get help is if they have to tell their manager exactly what happened to them, or they have to fill out in detail an EAP form, you're probably going to lose a lot of people who might need help the most. For one thing, especially early on, people don't necessarily understand what happened to them. I definitely didn't understand what was going on with me. I know that probably sounds strange if you've never been through a crisis, but I didn't understand why I was struggling so hard. And some people might get it, but you don't have the language for it. You don't know how to say what's happening to you. Or you don't think it counts. And I said this to somebody. I was, I ended up a few months later talking to a victim advocate, and I said, Well, I know that what happened to me didn't count because there are these people who lost family members and there are people who lost their legs. So obviously what happened to me doesn't matter. Now, she disabused me of that notion, but that is a very common thought process. And the other thing is, if you require that somebody disclose, people don't necessarily trust these systems. They don't trust that I can say this in this filling out this form and that it's going to stay confidential. So it's important that you are communicating in a way that stabilizes the situation. That doesn't mean you have to have all the answers. It just means the leader being present and direct and honest about what you know and you don't know, and recognizing that the people who are listening to you or reading your email need to know that someone is in charge. And they need to know that you see them and understand their experience and what they're dealing with. If you are overly optimistic too early, or you are silent after the disruption, or you fill the silence with spin, or you know, send operational updates and you don't acknowledge the emotional side of things, that's destabilizing for people. And the test is really simple. After your last significant disruption, did people feel more or less steady after hearing from leadership? Research shows that in disasters, so think of natural disasters or terrorist attacks, for example, there are more psychological injuries than there are physical injuries. On the order of four to 50 people with mental health injuries to every one person with a physical injuries. So depending on what the crisis is, most of the people who are impacted are not going to be visible to you. You are not going to see it on their bodies. So when you are communicating, you want to make sure you're communicating stabilizing messages and that you're talking to everyone because you don't know which person needs to hear that information. Some people will tell you they're struggling, most people are not going to. So have that clear understanding of that human recovery, right? Do your leaders understand that? Do you have plans for post-crisis human check-ins? And you know, we want to get back to normal. It's important to get back to normal. I mean, that's the truth. And we want to get back to normal quickly. That's just the way these things are. We don't like crisis. We want to get back to the way things were. So, whatever version of normal that you get back to, are your people ready for that? Like I said, you're not always going to know who's struggling. So you need to build in some human checkpoints, right? Not to identify who's wounded or not to require people to self-disclose, but to create the conditions where someone knows they are supported, whether they choose to share what happened to them or not. All systems back up and running, that's a milestone. But it's not the only one. And organizations who get this right, who recognize the human side of things, they retain people better. People might come back stronger because they understand that the organization treats them like a human being. And can your leaders be honest when they don't know the answer to something? In a crisis, it's much more dangerous to have somebody acting with false confidence and saying things that they cannot know whether they're true or not. That's much more dangerous than having someone say, I don't know. And a culture that's resilient, leaders can say they don't know. They can say, here's what we know, here's what we don't know, and we're going to try to figure out the rest together without feeling like a failure. Right? You know this from your own life. We can tolerate uncertainty. Most people can tolerate uncertainty when we have the information and we know we have as much information as possible. We cannot tolerate feeling like we're being managed or someone's holding back information because they don't think we can deal with it, or we know that they're lying to us. So your leadership culture either has these qualities or it doesn't. And it's not great to find out whether you do or don't in the middle of a

Five Questions To Audit Culture

Manya Chylinski 10:11

crisis. So I've got five questions. A very simple framework. It's observational, not a survey. Just ask yourself these questions about your organization and see what comes up as the answers. So in your last major disruption, even something small, did the information flow accurately and in time for people to make decisions about it? And again, information flows up to managers and executive leadership. It might be need to flow down. Or does it get filtered, or does it get softened in some way? Or does it simply get stopped with the person who notices it? The second question to ask think about the last time you were in a crisis and your leader was communicating. Was the primary content operational? Systems, logistics, that kind of thing? Or did they also acknowledge the human side? And three, if you did check in on your people, how long after things were operationally stable did you check in on your people? Right? Days, weeks, not at all? Depending on your crisis and some crisis, that operational stuff is what you absolutely need to be focusing on in the first hours, days. So when you get past that time, that's when you need to start thinking about when did we communicate with our people? And again, number four, ask the question is I don't know an acceptable answer for leaders in your culture? Is it considered responsible, or do people think of it as a weakness and somehow you've now risked your career by saying you don't know something? And the last question if a team member was struggling, would they feel safe telling that to their manager? Or would they feel safe asking for time off without feeling like they had to tell you why?

Crisis Communication That Stabilizes

Manya Chylinski 12:05

So the other thing I want to talk about is communication. And think about what communication does in a crisis. It is so important to how teams recover. In some cases, it might be the only channel people have to understand what's happening beyond what they can see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears. Or what they read in the news or on social media, which we know quite often doesn't get it right, especially in the early moments of a crisis. Every conclusion they draw, do I trust my leaders with what's going on? Should I stay calm or is it time to panic? Does the organization have a handle on these things? All of that comes through your leadership communication. How someone communicates, what they say, when they say it, all of that. Now, communication is just one tool in the plan, but I'd argue that in some cases it is the whole game. So name what's happening, not just operationally, but existentially. What's happening to the people? Hey, I know this is a hard week, things are really uncertain right now. Here's what I can tell you and what I still don't know. Right? That's 15 seconds, that's a short email. And that will give you so much more validation to someone who's struggling than like a five, 10-paragraph status email that you would send. And that's the kind of thing I didn't hear. No one named what was happening for people like me. I didn't get the feeling that people recognized that what was happening to me was normal. Communicate even if you don't have something definitive to say. There's a lot of uncertainty, especially early on in crises. And don't wait for that certainty because people read silence as leadership doesn't know what's going on, or they don't care what's going on. And I think back to my letter to the mayor and the governor. I wrote that because they were silent about the mental health wounds. And I thought they just don't know what's going on. Now, from my mayor's office, I got the message they don't care what's going on. But even a message that says we're still gathering information and we'll get back to you in two hours, we'll get back to you tomorrow morning, that helps people. We can deal with that uncertainty if we know, like the leader is thinking about communicating with us. And by the way, if you say we're going to get back to you in two hours or we're going to get back to you tomorrow morning, then do. Even if you have nothing new to say. Explicitly acknowledge that human experience. You don't have to be a therapist. Leadership team, you guys are not therapists, just need to be human. I know this is stressful. I know some of you are worried about your family, your friends, your coworkers, whether you have a job to come back to. That's understandable. Now that kind of communication doesn't solve anything, but it changes the temperature in the room, right? We can absorb that uncertainty when we feel seen and heard. I mean, my story with the governor's office is case in point. Nothing changed when I talked to them. But she explicitly acknowledged that I was human and that I was struggling and that she wanted to find a way to help. And I remember that conversation fondly.

Stop Broadcasting And Be Present

Manya Chylinski 15:42

Number four, separate the operational updates from the human check-ins. They serve completely different purposes. Operational updates, what is happening? Human check-in is do we matter? And try not to have one message that's trying to do both because usually they cancel each other out. And then lastly, know when to stop broadcasting information and just really being present. Usually, once operational urgency starts to settle down is when people don't necessarily need more information. Now they need community and conversation. So what happened to you? And how did you see this? And what happened to your family? And let's start talking about the human side of things. And when you stay in just broadcast mode, we're sending information out to you, you're going to lose the room. And again, this is not HR, this is culture. If you continue broadcasting information, if you're not sharing that human experience explicitly, if you don't even want to say what's happening to people, you know, the solution isn't wellness initiatives or leadership training, or not only those things. They absolutely could have a part. It might, those things might make sense depending on what the crisis is. But the root cause might also be structural. Are your leaders rewarded for honesty or are they punished? Bad news get shared or does it get hidden? Does your leadership model actually have room for uncertainty?

Build Human Checkpoints Into Recovery

Manya Chylinski 17:20

So the practical path forward is start with those five questions. Run that audit even informally in your organization. And what did you notice? And what did you realize you don't even know the answer to? That's your roadmap. And then invest in this communication layer now. Train your leaders on these kinds of communications before they need it. Because you and I both know, I said this before, it is so much harder to teach someone something new or to bring in a new concept in that moment of crisis. And build that human recovery checkpoints into your post-crisis plan. Operations normal, check. That's great. People normal, check. Well, maybe normal isn't the right word, but as normal as possible, right? Make it official. And in that official acknowledgement, also understand that it can take a long time. People recover on their own timelines, and it's almost always going to be longer than you really want it to be. Most organizations have a plan. Do they have the culture to execute it in the moment of crisis? So that man who wrote to me after the bombing, that manager I was working with who'd been at Columbine, he didn't learn that in a leadership training class. He learned it in the parking lot of a high school in Littleton, Colorado. I learned it in the bleacher seats in front of the main branch of the Boston Public Library. Please don't wait for your people to learn it the same

Trust Is The Real Resilience Test

Manya Chylinski 18:55

way. And that's the paradox. The knowledge that makes organizations most resilient is your people. It's in your people. It's what they've been through, it's how your leaders treat them, whether the culture gives them something to hold on to in uncertainty. You know, I've been calling this resilience, but we're also really talking about do your people trust you, especially when it matters most. And that's a relationship. And like every relationship, that trust is built in the small moments, the ordinary moments, so that it's ready when you need it in that crisis. So you have those five questions and you know the answers at least intuitively for your organization or the organizations that you're working with. And the question is, do you know them officially? I would argue your organization's resilience depends on it. And this is where business continuity professionals can move the needle beyond the plan, right? Take those five questions to the leadership team. Have a conversation. What do you notice? What do people lean into? What are they confused about? What makes them hesitate? Also, make that human recovery timeline an official part of your post-incident process. Make sure it is part of the framework and you train on it and you think about it in advance. And you can actually start right now. As soon as this call is over, or first thing Monday or Tuesday morning when you go into the office, you can do what that project manager did for me. Notice someone who might be struggling and acknowledge it that somewhere in your organization right now, there is someone who would be helped by just two sentences, six words. They're not gonna tell you that. They're waiting to see if the culture makes it safe. Going through a crisis changes people. And your culture determines part of what that change can look like. Do they feel seen and supported? Or were they told to suck it up and just expect it to move on? Thank you.