Leading Through Crisis

Every leader gets a crisis. You don’t get to choose whether it comes. You only get to choose what you do with it when it arrives. 

Episode Summary 

Crisis communication plans and business continuity documents are useful. But they don’t address the central variable in a real crisis: what does the leader do with the fear? Fear narrows your vision, accelerates your impulse to act before you’ve thought clearly, and floods your mind with worst-case outcomes. The leaders who navigate crisis well aren’t the ones who don’t feel that fear. They’re the ones who have something to put underneath them when the ground moves. 

This episode draws from three passages — Psalm 46, 2 Chronicles 20, and Isaiah 43 — to build a biblical framework for crisis leadership that is operational, not just devotional. You’ll see what Jehoshaphat’s prayer and two 2020 hospitality leaders have in common, and you’ll walk away with two disciplines to build before the next crisis lands on your desk. 

What You’ll Learn 

• Why the most important thing a leader can do in the first hours of a crisis isn’t to fix the problem — and what to do instead 
• What the Hebrew word for ‘very present’ in Psalm 46:1 actually means, and why it changes the way you read that promise 
• Why Jehoshaphat’s prayer — “we do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” — is one of the most operationally useful things in Scripture for a leader in crisis 
• What two hospitality leaders did differently in 2020 — and why one made it while the other restructured twice 
• Two concrete disciplines: one to build now, and one five-word practice to deploy the moment the next crisis hits 

Scripture References 

Psalm 46:1–3 — God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble 

2 Chronicles 20:12 — We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you 

Isaiah 43:2 — When you pass through the waters, I will be with you 

Key Quote 

“Sandra gave her team something Greg couldn’t: a leader who was stable when the ground was moving. That stability didn’t come from certainty about the future. It came from certainty about something deeper.” 

Timestamps 

0:00  —  Hook and Introduction 

2:05  —  Why This Matters in Business 

4:40  —  What Scripture Says 

8:45  —  Illustration 

12:32  —  Application 

16:00  —  Encouragement and Prayer 

Call to Action 

If you’re in the middle of something hard right now, this episode was written for you — listen today. And if things are good right now, that’s exactly when to listen — because the anchor gets built before you need it. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Every leader gets a crisis. You don't get to choose whether it comes. You only get to choose what you do with it when it arrives. I'm not talking about a bad quarter. I'm not talking about a difficult client or a personnel problem. I'm talking about the real thing. The kind of crisis that fundamentally threatens what you've built. A major client that represents 40% of your revenue calls you to tell you that they are pulling out. Your top performer, the one your whole operation runs through, resigns within a two-week notice. A lawsuit lands on your desk that has the potential to shut down the business. A global event closes your market overnight and you don't know when it reopens. Those moments come for every leader in every industry at every size. And here's what I've observed. The quality of a leader's response in a crisis reveals more about who they really are than the previous 10 years of normal operations. Everything you've been building, your character, your faith, your teams, your processes, they all get tested at once, under the worst possible conditions. I'm Daryl, and this is Profit and Principle. And today we're talking about leading through crisis, not just surviving it, but leading through it in a way that you and your organization come out on the other side stronger than when you went in. And I want to show you three passages of scripture that speak directly to what you face in those moments. Not as religious comfort, but as operational guidance. Here's what you'll walk away with: a framework for how to hold yourself together when everything is falling apart. And two concrete disciplines to start building now before the next crisis hits. So why does this matter in business? Here's the thing about crisis that most leadership development ski over entirely. You can't fully prepare for it by thinking about it in advance. You can have a crisis communication plan. You can have a business continuity document. You can run scenario planning and tabletop exercises, and all that's useful, and I'm not dismissing it. But none of it addresses the central variable in a crisis, which is this. What does the leader do with fear? Because that's what a real crisis produces. Fear. Not discomfort, but fear. Fear about your people, about your finances, about your reputation, about whether everything you spent years building is about to disappear. And fear does very specific things to human cognition. It narrows your field of vision. It accelerates your decision-making impulse before your thinking has had time to catch up. It pulls your attention toward the worst possible outcomes and makes it very hard to see anything else. The leaders who navigate crisis well are not the ones that don't feel the fear. They all feel it. The difference is that they have something to put underneath them when the ground moves. A foundation that holds. And for leaders I've watched handle crisis with genuine poise and clarity, not just managed by PR, but actual inner stability, that foundation has almost always been something more than confidence. It's been conviction. It's been a settled sense of who they are, what they believe, and who they're ultimately answerable to. That's not a soft observation. It has hard operational consequences. A leader who panics contaminates their team's ability to think clearly. A leader who spirals into worst case thinking makes reactive decisions that compound the crisis. A leader who freezes leaves their organization without direction at exactly the moment it needs it most. The most important thing a leader can do in the first hours of a real crisis is not fix the problem, it's stabilize themselves enough to actually see the problem clearly. Everything else flows from that. Let's take a look at what Scripture says, and we're going to start out in Psalm 46, verses 1 through 3. And it says this God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling. This Psalm was written for catastrophe. The imagery is extreme on purpose. The earth giving way, mountains falling into the sea, waters roaring and foaming. The psalmist is reaching for the most disorienting, destabilizing scenarios imaginable. And the point is precisely this, even then, even in the worst case you can construct, the foundation holds. The phrase very present help in Hebrew means found to a surpassing degree. It's immediately accessible, not remote. This isn't a God who's watching from a distance and who will eventually show up when the crisis is over. This is a God described as immediately, intensely present in the middle of the trouble itself. The word refuge means a place of shelter. It's a place that you can run when exposure would destroy you. And strength is not the strength you generate yourself. It's the strength that comes from outside you, that you receive rather than manufacture. The leadership principle here is not God will fix your crisis. It's something more specific. When the ground moves, you have a place to stand that isn't the ground. A leader who has internalized this truth doesn't panic when the circumstances become extreme because their stability isn't derived from the circumstances. That is a measurable difference in a crisis. And it changes everything about the quality of leadership the team receives. Let's stay in the Old Testament, but let's take a look now at 2 Chronicles chapter 20, verse 12. And the chronicler writes this We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you. This is one of the most honest prayers in all of Scripture, and one of the most relevant for leaders. Here's the context. Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, has just received word that a vast coalition army is marching against him. Three nations. His kingdom is outnumbered and outresourced. He has no military solution. He calls the entire nation together to fast and pray, and at the end of his prayer he says this, We don't know what to do, but our eyes are on you. What makes this remarkable is what Jehoshaphat doesn't do. He doesn't fake confidence he doesn't have. He doesn't pretend he has a plan. He doesn't hide the scale of the problem from the people around him. He names it honestly. We don't know what to do. And he names it in prayer, directed toward the only source of wisdom that can actually help him. For the business leader in a genuine crisis, the temptation is always to perform confidence, to hold things together by projecting certainty you don't feel. And in some circumstances, managing tone and protecting the team from panic has real value. But there's a difference between measured communication and dishonest performance. Jehoshaphat models something rare, a leader who is honest about the limits of his own understanding, who directs that honesty toward God in prayer, and he holds steady not because he has the answer, but because he knows where to look for one. The answer God gave Jehoshaphat, by the way, is one of the most unusual battle strategies in military history. Go stand on the field, position your choir at the front of the army, and praise God while the enemy destroys itself. You won't have to fight this battle, but you do have to show up. That's the response to honest, God directed prayer in a crisis that seems impossible. Not always a dramatic rescue, but a direction to move. And then finally, let's take a look at Isaiah chapter forty three. We'll be in verse two. It says this When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. Notice the prepositions not if, but when. God is not offering the Israelites a crisis free existence. He's offering them something better, his presence in the crisis itself. Isaiah forty three is written to a people in exile, a community that has experienced catastrophic national failure. The temple is destroyed, the city is burned, their whole world dismantled. And God speaks into that context, not with an explanation for why it happened, but with the promise about what comes next, through the waters, through the rivers, and through the fire. The passage doesn't end before the crisis, it goes through it. The phrase, I will be with you, is the covenant promise God made to Abraham, to Moses, and to Joshua. It's not a new idea. It's the deepest oldest promise in Scripture. And Isaiah invokes it here for a community in the middle of the worst thing that had ever happened to them. For the leader in crisis, the question isn't usually, why is this happening? That question, while legitimate, almost never helps in the acute phase. The more useful question is, what do I do now and who goes with me? Scripture's answer to the second part of that question is consistent from Genesis to Revelation. You are not alone in this. The God who made you, who called you to this work, is present in the hardest part of it. That's not a consolation prize. In a crisis, knowing you're not the last line of defense changes how you lead. In 2020, virtually every business leader in the world experienced some version of crisis simultaneously. I want to tell you about two different leaders who were running similar businesses, both in the hospitality industry and how they handled the first 90 days. The first leader, we'll call him Greg, he ran a chain of mid-sized event venues. When his entire forward revenue disappeared overnight, Greg went quiet. He stopped communicating with his team for the first two weeks. Not because he was careless, but because he was paralyzed. He was running worst case scenarios in his head around the clock and couldn't find a way out of any of them. When he finally called a team meeting, his team could feel the panic he was trying to hide. Several of his best managers started quietly putting out feelers elsewhere. Not because the crisis was unsurvivable, but because the leader wasn't leading. Now the second leader, we'll call her Sandra. She ran a comparable operation. The week everything shut down because of COVID, Sandra called her leadership team together and said something they didn't expect. She said, I don't know how long this is going to last or exactly what it's going to cost us. But here's what I've known. We've built something real. We have good people and we're going to move through this together. And then she did something Jehoshaphat would have recognized. She prayed with her team out loud for their families, for their business, for wisdom about what to do next. Her team didn't leave. No, they rallied. Not because Sandra had a better plan than Greg. In the first two weeks, neither of them had a plan. But Sandra gave her team something Greg couldn't. A leader who was stable when the ground was moving. That stability didn't come from certainty about the future. It came from certainty about something deeper. Sandra's business made it. Greg restructured twice and never fully recovered. So what do we do with this? Well, I have a couple of things for you to do. One right now and one to do in the crisis itself. And the first thing is this build your anchor before you need it. The time to build a crisis foundation is not during the crisis. A Psalm 46 kind of stability is what you need. The kind that holds on when the earth gives way. And this is built in extraordinary time through ordinary practices, prayer, scripture, community with people who will tell you the truth, regular rhythms of reconnecting with what you actually believe about God and about your work. This week, not next month, but this week, identify one practice you're willing to commit that builds that foundation. It might be 10 minutes of scripture in the morning before you open your email. It might be a regular meeting with a mentor or pastor who can speak into your life honestly. It might be a prayer practice that's more than the occasional desperate plea in a parking lot. Be specific. Write it down. The leaders who navigate crisis with clarity didn't find that clarity in the crisis. They brought it with them because they'd been building it. Now here's the next action step. In the crisis, say five words before you do anything else. Jehoshaphat's prayer is this we do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you. Now that's twelve words in English, but the heart of it is five. I don't know. Help me. Before you call the lawyer, before you send the team communication, before you run the spreadsheet, say those words to God out loud if possible, in writing if that helps, not as a ritual, but as a genuine admission of dependence and a genuine request for wisdom. This single practice, honest prayer before reaction, changes the quality of everything that follows. It slows you down exactly enough to think. It shifts your posture from performing control to seeking it. And it puts you in the position Jehoshaphat was in. Eyes up, waiting for direction, ready to move when it comes. I want to close with something I genuinely believe. The crisis you're in right now, or the one that's coming, it's not a detour from the work God has for you. It may be the center of it. The leaders scripture remembers are almost universally people who were shaped by circumstances that would have destroyed a person with a smaller foundation. Joseph in prison, Moses in the wilderness, David on the run, Paul in chains. The crisis didn't disqualify them. It built them into the leaders they became. That's not a promise that your business survives intact. Let's be honest, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the crisis takes things you worked so hard for and it doesn't give them back. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But the promise scripture makes consistently across hundreds of years in writers talking about every form of human suffering, the promise is that God is present in it and that a life built on Him will not ultimately be destroyed by it. That's a foundation worth standing on. Build it now. Let me pray for you. Father, I'm praying for the leader listening to this who is in the middle of something hard right now, or who can feel something hard coming. You know what it is. You know the numbers, the relationships, the timeline, the fear they're carrying, be their refuge and their strength. Not a distant idea of those things, but the real, present, immediately accessible version. Give them the courage to say out loud what Jehoshaphat said. We don't know what to do, but our eyes are on you. And then lead them through, not around, but through with their integrity intact, their teams held together, and their faith in you stronger on the other side than it was going in. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Well, I thank you for joining us for another episode of Profit and Principle. If you haven't already done so, please head our website. There you will find a number of different resources available to you to help you unpack this material even more. We have a weekly newsletter that you can sign up for. It gets delivered every Monday morning to your inbox. 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