Conquering Crisis by Admiral William H. McRaven Ten Lessons to Learn Before You Need Them
What's it about?
Conquering Crisis (2025) draws on Admiral William H. McRaven’s experience leading through global conflicts to offer a blueprint for navigating turbulent times with courage, clarity, and resilience. It distills lessons from history, military strategy, and personal leadership into a guide for individuals and institutions facing unprecedented challenges. Emphasizing adaptability and moral fortitude, it encourages readers to prepare, act decisively, and inspire others in moments of crisis.
How do you stay calm when the world around you is falling apart? How do you lead a team, a company, or even just yourself when uncertainty clouds every decision? When disaster strikes – whether on the battlefield, in business, or in daily life – success depends on mastering the chaos. Without the right tools, even great leaders can falter.
Drawing from decades spent commanding special operations forces, Admiral William H. McRaven shares a clear message: crisis is inevitable, but catastrophe is not. His five-phase model – Assess, Report, Contain, Shape, and Manage – offers a clear path to navigating any crisis situation.
This lesson will show you what McRaven’s method is all about. You’ll learn why first reports are often wrong, how transparency can be the key to success, and what it takes to shape situations to your advantage. Whether you’re a seasoned leader, an entrepreneur, or simply determined to stay strong in hard times, the lessons ahead will equip you to confront any crisis with clarity, decisiveness, and strength.
Leadership in everyday life demands confidence, hard work, ethics, and good communication. But crisis leadership is something different altogether. It adds weight to every decision. It exposes every crack in your character. It stretches your team to the breaking point and dares you to act before you’re ready.
The author Admiral William McRaven has lived through nearly every kind of crisis, from personal failure to public scandal and battlefield disaster. Out of those experiences, he’s forged a five-step model for navigating the storm. Step one is always Assessment: slow down, survey the damage, and figure out what’s actually going on. Everything that follows depends on getting this first step right.
It’s easy to skip over assessment. There’s even an old saying that in war, the first casualty is truth. In December 1944, for example, American generals were confidently predicting an easy path to victory. Pamphlets described Belgian towns as “quiet places” for resting soldiers. Meanwhile, deep in the Ardennes Forest, the German army was amassing a major offensive that would become the devastating Battle of the Bulge. It took massive casualties and a near-collapse before leaders accepted the full scale of the crisis.
First reports are often inaccurate for a simple reason: people believe what they want to believe, even in the face of warning signs. Intelligence officers dismissed the German buildup, and commanders wagered on the war ending by Christmas. Though the Allies ultimately won the Battle of the Bulge, it came at a terrible cost.
Today, leaders – military, political, and corporate – face a flood of information. Drones, satellites, sensors, news cycles, Twitter feeds – leaders are buried in data. But information is not knowledge. And action without understanding is just flailing. The pressure to act fast is immense, but leaders must resist. They must verify every report, interrogate every assumption, and push back against their own biases.
That also means listening to dissenting voices. In Afghanistan, McRaven was confronted by an ambassador who warned him that night raids were turning locals against the US. Furious but determined to be thorough, McRaven assembled a “Council of Colonels” to assess the situation independently. Their verdict was tough: the ambassador was right.
Instead of doubling down, McRaven reformed operations. He gave Afghan leaders veto power, strengthened coordination with regional commanders, and ensured that every mission was vetted through Afghan channels. These changes built trust, enhanced legitimacy, and allowed the task force to resume operations with a clearer, stronger strategy. Listening to uncomfortable feedback – and acting on it – helped avert a slow defeat masked by short-term wins.
Step one is never optional. Whether you’re in a firefight, a diplomatic crisis, or a boardroom meltdown, you must pause and assess before you act. A flawed report passed on too quickly becomes a flawed decision. And the cost, as history shows, can be enormous.
There’s a saying in the military: bad news doesn’t get better with age. And during step two of a crisis – the Report stage – that truth is especially critical. After assessing the situation, a leader’s next duty is to communicate the facts – clearly, honestly, and quickly.
In Iraq, 2008, Admiral McRaven learned this lesson firsthand. Just hours after arriving to take command, he was woken up in the middle of the night with devastating news. A security guard, who was also a relative of Iraq’s prime minister at the time, had been accidentally killed during a raid. Instead of waiting until morning, McRaven called General Petraeus immediately to deliver the bad news. Petraeus wasn’t pleased, but he made it clear: being informed right away gave them the precious time they needed to contain the fallout. And from then on Petraus trusted McRaven because he knew he would keep him informed even if the news was bad.
Delays are deadly in a crisis. When bad news goes unspoken, it festers. Leaders lose the public’s trust, superiors lose confidence, and soon every step you take is questioned. History offers brutal examples of this. Take the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s. President Reagan at first denied selling arms to Iran to fund rebels in Nicaragua. Then, bit by bit, admissions trickled out. Public support plummeted. By trying to hide the truth, Reagan turned a crisis into a scandal that dragged on for years.
Being upfront, however painful, earns respect. When leaders admit mistakes, accept responsibility, and move quickly to fix the problem, they preserve their credibility – the one thing they can’t afford to lose when a crisis hits.
McRaven put this lesson into practice again in Afghanistan in 2010. After a successful airstrike against Taliban fighters, local reporters falsely accused his forces of killing civilians. Instead of dismissing the claims, McRaven did something unusual: he invited the skeptical journalists to his top-secret base. There, he showed them exactly how his team planned and executed missions – with painstaking care to avoid civilian casualties.
Transparency didn’t erase all suspicion overnight. But it did cool the worst criticism and opened lines of communication. It turned potential enemies in the press into cautious but fair-minded observers.
Transparency isn’t just good optics. It’s a powerful weapon against distrust. When organizations are honest and open, they show they’re acting in good faith. So take every opportunity to pull back the curtain, answer the hard questions directly, and show that you’re facing the truth – not hiding from it.
In the smoky, crowded War Rooms of 1942 London, Winston Churchill thumped his walking stick against a map and growled at his generals. The German battleship Tirpitz haunted him like a nightmare. If she broke free from Norway’s fjords, Britain could lose control of the seas – and maybe the war. Frustrated with excuses about impenetrable defenses, Churchill demanded not just one plan to deal with the threat, but multiple options. In Churchill’s mind, flexibility was more than a strategy – it was survival.
So his commanders hatched daring alternatives: they could ram a destroyer into the only dock that could repair the Tirpitz. They could deploy mini-submarines to plant explosives beneath the ship’s hull. Ultimately, they pushed both of these solutions forward simultaneously. Success didn’t come all at once, but Churchill eventually neutralized the threat. This was Containment in action – the third step in Admiral McRaven’s five-phase model for managing a crisis.
Fast forward to 1990. President George H. W. Bush faced a different kind of crisis when Saddam Hussein launched his surprise invasion of Kuwait. Caught off guard, Bush and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft knew instinctively that waiting for total clarity would only make things worse. Instead, they rapidly mobilized ships, planes, and diplomats, pushing military, economic, and political responses close to the crisis zone. They prepared for every possibility. By having forces and strategies in place early, Bush preserved his ability to choose the best path forward, rather than being boxed into a corner.
In crisis leadership, decision space – which is your range of viable actions – shrinks fast if you don’t seize it early. So you don’t wait for perfect information or certain success. You position yourself with multiple tools at the ready so you can shape events rather than react to them.
Containment isn’t just about having options, though – it’s about acting fast. Think of it through the lens of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that systems left alone move toward disorder. Crises are no different. Leaders often hesitate early, hoping a crisis will burn itself out. But the truth is that the longer you wait, the harder the decisions become, and the worse the crisis grows. Action carries risk – but inaction guarantees chaos.
This painful truth was clear in 2006, when McRaven’s team targeted Algerian terrorist Mokhtar Belmokhtar. Officials dismissed Belmokhtar as a “cigarette smuggler,” and bureaucratic hesitations delayed action. Left unchecked, Belmokhtar masterminded deadly attacks across Africa, killing over 150 people. As this example shows, hope is not a containment strategy.
Ultimately, containment is about expanding your decision space, moving swiftly to surround the crisis, and buying the time needed to shape a better outcome. Action, however imperfect, buys you another move.
Major Dick Meadows, with his broad shoulders, chiseled jaw, and crew cut, looked like he could still run through a brick wall at sixty years old. In 1991, this legendary Special Forces operator visited McRaven, then a Naval Postgraduate School student, to discuss Operation Eagle Claw. This was the failed 1980 mission to rescue American hostages held in Tehran. Over beers, Meadows revealed what he believed was the operation's fatal flaw. He said: “We should have kept going with the rehearsal. We should have done the rehearsal again and again and again if we needed to… We rushed everything.”
The ambitious rescue plan required Special Forces to fly with a C-130 aircraft to a remote Iranian landing zone called Desert One, where they would link up with helicopters from the USS Nimitz. The combined force would move to a second staging area, drive into Tehran, assault the embassy, and extract the hostages. The mission collapsed when three helicopters turned back due to a sandstorm. Then, during refueling at Desert One, a helicopter collided with a C-130, killing eight servicemen. The subsequent Holloway investigation identified massive failures in planning, coordination, training, equipment, command and control, and intelligence – compounded by a sense of urgency from the Carter White House.
This experience encapsulates a critical principle of crisis management. While urgency matters, moving too quickly can lead to catastrophic failure. Once you’ve assessed the crisis, reported accurately, and contained the damage, it’s time to Shape – that is, to shape events before they shape you.
The English poet Alexander Pope once wrote: “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” The US military later adapted this to “Don't rush to failure.” McRaven remembered this lesson when planning the famous 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Despite enormous pressure to act quickly, the SEALs rehearsed every step again and again, planning for worst-case scenarios. So when the first helicopter crashed inside bin Laden’s courtyard, no one panicked. Everyone knew what to do, having trained extensively for this possibility.
The lesson is clear: in shaping your response to crisis, balance urgency with thorough preparation, and remember that sometimes slowing down is the fastest path to success.
Some crises explode in a single shocking moment. But many, especially the hardest ones, drag on like sieges. They don’t end with a press release or a battle won, and they can wear down even seasoned leaders. That’s why the final step in McRaven’s crisis playbook is to Manage the long haul, which means sustaining tempo and maintaining team morale over time.
Let’s rewind to 205 BCE. Rome was on the brink, its armies repeatedly outmaneuvered by Carthaginian general Hannibal. But the young Scipio Africanus had an audacious solution. Instead of reacting to Hannibal’s rapid advances in Italy, Rome would flip the script. They’d cross the sea and attack Carthage itself. This would force Hannibal to retreat and defend his homeland – weakening his forces and damaging morale.
The strategy worked. By the time he arrived home, Hannibal’s army was severely depleted. At the Battle of Zama, Scipio defeated him decisively, ending the Second Punic War.
The lesson? To manage a crisis, don’t just respond – choose the terms of engagement yourself. Crises have a pace and tempo all their own, and if you don’t control them, they’ll control you. The trick is to identify pressure points where you can act quickly and decisively, then reinforce your gains before the crisis regains momentum.
Of course, managing a crisis isn’t just about seizing tempo. It’s also about preserving your team’s strength. In 2017, as chancellor of the University of Texas System, McRaven faced public backlash when a high-profile initiative fell apart. After a difficult press conference, he retreated to his office, the weight of failure hitting him hard.
Then came a knock. Retired Army Major General Tony Cucolo burst in, shouting “Morale check!” – a military call to shake off despair and get back to work. This little boost helped McRaven personally, but he also recognized that his staff’s morale was equally important. If his staff lost faith, the organization’s recovery would stall.
So, for days after the press conference, McRaven walked the halls smiling and laughing. He talked about sports, cracked jokes, and made sure everyone knew they mattered. He publicly addressed the issue with employees and assured them he had a plan for moving forward. Morale, as Napoleon once said, is worth more than training or experience. And the tone he set helped stabilize the institution and restore a sense of shared purpose.
Tempo and morale are deeply linked. A leader who appears overwhelmed signals trouble. But one who projects calm sets a pace others can match. Even when a crisis stems from your own missteps, showing confidence and humility can keep the organization steady.
Managing a crisis comes down to pacing your resources, protecting your team’s spirit, and staying alert to new threats. You’ve shaped the outcome – now you must maintain it. It’s less glamorous than the firefight. But this final phase determines whether your success will hold or fall apart.
In this lesson to Conquering Crisis by Admiral William H McRaven, you’ve learned that conquering a crisis requires a deliberate five-phase approach. First, in the Assess stage, you’ll need to resist pressure to act immediately, verify facts, and seek honest feedback. Next, during the Report phase, communicate bad news promptly and transparently to preserve credibility and decision time. The Contain phase demands swift action to expand your decision space and prevent crisis spread. In Shape, you’ll need to avoid rushing to failure by balancing urgency with thorough preparation. Finally, the Manage phase requires you to dictate the tempo of events while maintaining team morale through visible leadership. While crises are inevitable, leaders who follow these five steps can navigate the storm with clarity, decisiveness, and strength – turning potential catastrophes into manageable challenges.
Conquering Crisis (2025) draws on Admiral William H. McRaven’s experience leading through global conflicts to offer a blueprint for navigating turbulent times with courage, clarity, and resilience. It distills lessons from history, military strategy, and personal leadership into a guide for individuals and institutions facing unprecedented challenges. Emphasizing adaptability and moral fortitude, it encourages readers to prepare, act decisively, and inspire others in moments of crisis.
How do you stay calm when the world around you is falling apart? How do you lead a team, a company, or even just yourself when uncertainty clouds every decision? When disaster strikes – whether on the battlefield, in business, or in daily life – success depends on mastering the chaos. Without the right tools, even great leaders can falter.
Drawing from decades spent commanding special operations forces, Admiral William H. McRaven shares a clear message: crisis is inevitable, but catastrophe is not. His five-phase model – Assess, Report, Contain, Shape, and Manage – offers a clear path to navigating any crisis situation.
This lesson will show you what McRaven’s method is all about. You’ll learn why first reports are often wrong, how transparency can be the key to success, and what it takes to shape situations to your advantage. Whether you’re a seasoned leader, an entrepreneur, or simply determined to stay strong in hard times, the lessons ahead will equip you to confront any crisis with clarity, decisiveness, and strength.
Leadership in everyday life demands confidence, hard work, ethics, and good communication. But crisis leadership is something different altogether. It adds weight to every decision. It exposes every crack in your character. It stretches your team to the breaking point and dares you to act before you’re ready.
The author Admiral William McRaven has lived through nearly every kind of crisis, from personal failure to public scandal and battlefield disaster. Out of those experiences, he’s forged a five-step model for navigating the storm. Step one is always Assessment: slow down, survey the damage, and figure out what’s actually going on. Everything that follows depends on getting this first step right.
It’s easy to skip over assessment. There’s even an old saying that in war, the first casualty is truth. In December 1944, for example, American generals were confidently predicting an easy path to victory. Pamphlets described Belgian towns as “quiet places” for resting soldiers. Meanwhile, deep in the Ardennes Forest, the German army was amassing a major offensive that would become the devastating Battle of the Bulge. It took massive casualties and a near-collapse before leaders accepted the full scale of the crisis.
First reports are often inaccurate for a simple reason: people believe what they want to believe, even in the face of warning signs. Intelligence officers dismissed the German buildup, and commanders wagered on the war ending by Christmas. Though the Allies ultimately won the Battle of the Bulge, it came at a terrible cost.
Today, leaders – military, political, and corporate – face a flood of information. Drones, satellites, sensors, news cycles, Twitter feeds – leaders are buried in data. But information is not knowledge. And action without understanding is just flailing. The pressure to act fast is immense, but leaders must resist. They must verify every report, interrogate every assumption, and push back against their own biases.
That also means listening to dissenting voices. In Afghanistan, McRaven was confronted by an ambassador who warned him that night raids were turning locals against the US. Furious but determined to be thorough, McRaven assembled a “Council of Colonels” to assess the situation independently. Their verdict was tough: the ambassador was right.
Instead of doubling down, McRaven reformed operations. He gave Afghan leaders veto power, strengthened coordination with regional commanders, and ensured that every mission was vetted through Afghan channels. These changes built trust, enhanced legitimacy, and allowed the task force to resume operations with a clearer, stronger strategy. Listening to uncomfortable feedback – and acting on it – helped avert a slow defeat masked by short-term wins.
Step one is never optional. Whether you’re in a firefight, a diplomatic crisis, or a boardroom meltdown, you must pause and assess before you act. A flawed report passed on too quickly becomes a flawed decision. And the cost, as history shows, can be enormous.
There’s a saying in the military: bad news doesn’t get better with age. And during step two of a crisis – the Report stage – that truth is especially critical. After assessing the situation, a leader’s next duty is to communicate the facts – clearly, honestly, and quickly.
In Iraq, 2008, Admiral McRaven learned this lesson firsthand. Just hours after arriving to take command, he was woken up in the middle of the night with devastating news. A security guard, who was also a relative of Iraq’s prime minister at the time, had been accidentally killed during a raid. Instead of waiting until morning, McRaven called General Petraeus immediately to deliver the bad news. Petraeus wasn’t pleased, but he made it clear: being informed right away gave them the precious time they needed to contain the fallout. And from then on Petraus trusted McRaven because he knew he would keep him informed even if the news was bad.
Delays are deadly in a crisis. When bad news goes unspoken, it festers. Leaders lose the public’s trust, superiors lose confidence, and soon every step you take is questioned. History offers brutal examples of this. Take the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s. President Reagan at first denied selling arms to Iran to fund rebels in Nicaragua. Then, bit by bit, admissions trickled out. Public support plummeted. By trying to hide the truth, Reagan turned a crisis into a scandal that dragged on for years.
Being upfront, however painful, earns respect. When leaders admit mistakes, accept responsibility, and move quickly to fix the problem, they preserve their credibility – the one thing they can’t afford to lose when a crisis hits.
McRaven put this lesson into practice again in Afghanistan in 2010. After a successful airstrike against Taliban fighters, local reporters falsely accused his forces of killing civilians. Instead of dismissing the claims, McRaven did something unusual: he invited the skeptical journalists to his top-secret base. There, he showed them exactly how his team planned and executed missions – with painstaking care to avoid civilian casualties.
Transparency didn’t erase all suspicion overnight. But it did cool the worst criticism and opened lines of communication. It turned potential enemies in the press into cautious but fair-minded observers.
Transparency isn’t just good optics. It’s a powerful weapon against distrust. When organizations are honest and open, they show they’re acting in good faith. So take every opportunity to pull back the curtain, answer the hard questions directly, and show that you’re facing the truth – not hiding from it.
In the smoky, crowded War Rooms of 1942 London, Winston Churchill thumped his walking stick against a map and growled at his generals. The German battleship Tirpitz haunted him like a nightmare. If she broke free from Norway’s fjords, Britain could lose control of the seas – and maybe the war. Frustrated with excuses about impenetrable defenses, Churchill demanded not just one plan to deal with the threat, but multiple options. In Churchill’s mind, flexibility was more than a strategy – it was survival.
So his commanders hatched daring alternatives: they could ram a destroyer into the only dock that could repair the Tirpitz. They could deploy mini-submarines to plant explosives beneath the ship’s hull. Ultimately, they pushed both of these solutions forward simultaneously. Success didn’t come all at once, but Churchill eventually neutralized the threat. This was Containment in action – the third step in Admiral McRaven’s five-phase model for managing a crisis.
Fast forward to 1990. President George H. W. Bush faced a different kind of crisis when Saddam Hussein launched his surprise invasion of Kuwait. Caught off guard, Bush and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft knew instinctively that waiting for total clarity would only make things worse. Instead, they rapidly mobilized ships, planes, and diplomats, pushing military, economic, and political responses close to the crisis zone. They prepared for every possibility. By having forces and strategies in place early, Bush preserved his ability to choose the best path forward, rather than being boxed into a corner.
In crisis leadership, decision space – which is your range of viable actions – shrinks fast if you don’t seize it early. So you don’t wait for perfect information or certain success. You position yourself with multiple tools at the ready so you can shape events rather than react to them.
Containment isn’t just about having options, though – it’s about acting fast. Think of it through the lens of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that systems left alone move toward disorder. Crises are no different. Leaders often hesitate early, hoping a crisis will burn itself out. But the truth is that the longer you wait, the harder the decisions become, and the worse the crisis grows. Action carries risk – but inaction guarantees chaos.
This painful truth was clear in 2006, when McRaven’s team targeted Algerian terrorist Mokhtar Belmokhtar. Officials dismissed Belmokhtar as a “cigarette smuggler,” and bureaucratic hesitations delayed action. Left unchecked, Belmokhtar masterminded deadly attacks across Africa, killing over 150 people. As this example shows, hope is not a containment strategy.
Ultimately, containment is about expanding your decision space, moving swiftly to surround the crisis, and buying the time needed to shape a better outcome. Action, however imperfect, buys you another move.
Major Dick Meadows, with his broad shoulders, chiseled jaw, and crew cut, looked like he could still run through a brick wall at sixty years old. In 1991, this legendary Special Forces operator visited McRaven, then a Naval Postgraduate School student, to discuss Operation Eagle Claw. This was the failed 1980 mission to rescue American hostages held in Tehran. Over beers, Meadows revealed what he believed was the operation's fatal flaw. He said: “We should have kept going with the rehearsal. We should have done the rehearsal again and again and again if we needed to… We rushed everything.”
The ambitious rescue plan required Special Forces to fly with a C-130 aircraft to a remote Iranian landing zone called Desert One, where they would link up with helicopters from the USS Nimitz. The combined force would move to a second staging area, drive into Tehran, assault the embassy, and extract the hostages. The mission collapsed when three helicopters turned back due to a sandstorm. Then, during refueling at Desert One, a helicopter collided with a C-130, killing eight servicemen. The subsequent Holloway investigation identified massive failures in planning, coordination, training, equipment, command and control, and intelligence – compounded by a sense of urgency from the Carter White House.
This experience encapsulates a critical principle of crisis management. While urgency matters, moving too quickly can lead to catastrophic failure. Once you’ve assessed the crisis, reported accurately, and contained the damage, it’s time to Shape – that is, to shape events before they shape you.
The English poet Alexander Pope once wrote: “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” The US military later adapted this to “Don't rush to failure.” McRaven remembered this lesson when planning the famous 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Despite enormous pressure to act quickly, the SEALs rehearsed every step again and again, planning for worst-case scenarios. So when the first helicopter crashed inside bin Laden’s courtyard, no one panicked. Everyone knew what to do, having trained extensively for this possibility.
The lesson is clear: in shaping your response to crisis, balance urgency with thorough preparation, and remember that sometimes slowing down is the fastest path to success.
Some crises explode in a single shocking moment. But many, especially the hardest ones, drag on like sieges. They don’t end with a press release or a battle won, and they can wear down even seasoned leaders. That’s why the final step in McRaven’s crisis playbook is to Manage the long haul, which means sustaining tempo and maintaining team morale over time.
Let’s rewind to 205 BCE. Rome was on the brink, its armies repeatedly outmaneuvered by Carthaginian general Hannibal. But the young Scipio Africanus had an audacious solution. Instead of reacting to Hannibal’s rapid advances in Italy, Rome would flip the script. They’d cross the sea and attack Carthage itself. This would force Hannibal to retreat and defend his homeland – weakening his forces and damaging morale.
The strategy worked. By the time he arrived home, Hannibal’s army was severely depleted. At the Battle of Zama, Scipio defeated him decisively, ending the Second Punic War.
The lesson? To manage a crisis, don’t just respond – choose the terms of engagement yourself. Crises have a pace and tempo all their own, and if you don’t control them, they’ll control you. The trick is to identify pressure points where you can act quickly and decisively, then reinforce your gains before the crisis regains momentum.
Of course, managing a crisis isn’t just about seizing tempo. It’s also about preserving your team’s strength. In 2017, as chancellor of the University of Texas System, McRaven faced public backlash when a high-profile initiative fell apart. After a difficult press conference, he retreated to his office, the weight of failure hitting him hard.
Then came a knock. Retired Army Major General Tony Cucolo burst in, shouting “Morale check!” – a military call to shake off despair and get back to work. This little boost helped McRaven personally, but he also recognized that his staff’s morale was equally important. If his staff lost faith, the organization’s recovery would stall.
So, for days after the press conference, McRaven walked the halls smiling and laughing. He talked about sports, cracked jokes, and made sure everyone knew they mattered. He publicly addressed the issue with employees and assured them he had a plan for moving forward. Morale, as Napoleon once said, is worth more than training or experience. And the tone he set helped stabilize the institution and restore a sense of shared purpose.
Tempo and morale are deeply linked. A leader who appears overwhelmed signals trouble. But one who projects calm sets a pace others can match. Even when a crisis stems from your own missteps, showing confidence and humility can keep the organization steady.
Managing a crisis comes down to pacing your resources, protecting your team’s spirit, and staying alert to new threats. You’ve shaped the outcome – now you must maintain it. It’s less glamorous than the firefight. But this final phase determines whether your success will hold or fall apart.
In this lesson to Conquering Crisis by Admiral William H McRaven, you’ve learned that conquering a crisis requires a deliberate five-phase approach. First, in the Assess stage, you’ll need to resist pressure to act immediately, verify facts, and seek honest feedback. Next, during the Report phase, communicate bad news promptly and transparently to preserve credibility and decision time. The Contain phase demands swift action to expand your decision space and prevent crisis spread. In Shape, you’ll need to avoid rushing to failure by balancing urgency with thorough preparation. Finally, the Manage phase requires you to dictate the tempo of events while maintaining team morale through visible leadership. While crises are inevitable, leaders who follow these five steps can navigate the storm with clarity, decisiveness, and strength – turning potential catastrophes into manageable challenges.
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