Leadership Resilience Under Pressure: The Season Everything Went Wrong
Leadership resilience under pressure gets tested hardest when you've prepared well and something outside your control changes everything anyway. You can show up prepared, with a great plan, feeling confident in the truck. Then equipment breaks, track conditions change, or your schedule gets disrupted. Suddenly you're dealing with a completely different situation than the one you prepared for.
That's incredibly frustrating, because high performers are usually wired to believe that if they work hard enough, they can influence the result. But sometimes you genuinely cannot control the circumstances. I've had moments in my career where I was angry about that. You start thinking about how much preparation went into that opportunity, how much you wanted the result, and how unfair it feels when something you could not control gets in the way.
When the industry shut down, all the "what" I did as a driver and brand ambassador went away. In my book, Geared for Life, I put it in four words: COVID-19 killed my "what."
When live events came back, here's what the 2021 season looked like from inside the truck:
Monster Jam kept six drivers onboard to run a limited event schedule, down from fifty-five before the pandemic. I was one of them.
The company went from eight tours before the pandemic to a single tour for 2021.
A normal season meant one or two stadium competitions per weekend. That year, we did three to four in a single weekend.
A few months in, the physical battering turned into mental fatigue. A Monster Jam driver's body can only take so much abuse from backflips and crashes, and the longer weekends pulled me away from home more than normal. I was battling stuff both on and off the track, getting my butt kicked in the process, and I felt extremely lost.
I even questioned whether I wanted to renew my contract. Then I felt extremely guilty for considering it, because I was one of the few who still got to drive and provide for my family during so much loss and uncertainty.
None of that was my doing. The danger in a season like that is how much energy you can waste fighting reality. I can spend an entire weekend frustrated about the conditions, or I can start figuring out how to perform in the conditions I've got, and that's a decision leaders face all the time.
What Leaders Control in a Crisis: The Controllables Audit
What leaders control in a crisis is narrower than they'd like, but it's never nothing. What's happening to you and what you're going to do about it are two very different conversations.
What I can't control:
The weather
Track conditions
A mechanical failure
What another driver does
What I can control:
How prepared I am
How I communicate with my team
What adjustments we're willing to make
How quickly I respond when the plan changes
I'll admit, that's so much easier to say than it is to do. When something feels unfair, there's a part of all of us that wants to keep arguing with the circumstances. But every minute I spend doing that is a minute I'm unavailable to make the next good decision.
The counterintuitive part is that wanting the result more doesn't help. In Geared for Life, I wrote that anxiety forms when we try to force an outcome we can't control, and it prevents us from obtaining that desired outcome. The more I want to win in a Monster Jam truck, the worse I drive.
The shutdown forced me to live that. I sat in my office and came up with an idea: what if I recorded motivational videos for Great Clips franchisees to use with their salon teams? It was a risk: money for equipment and a studio build-out at my home, plus the time to record and edit every video.
I worked with the Monster Jam and Great Clips teams to develop a request form for franchisees, and I produced well over one hundred videos, each three to ten minutes long. Most were played at team training sessions and banquets during the few moments those teams could get together that year. Two years later, I was still receiving video requests from Great Clips franchisees.
If I had been focused on what I couldn't do when COVID-19 hit, I never would have pushed myself into creating that type of value. That's what shifting gears looks like in practice. You look at the conditions you're actually facing, figure out what the next gear requires, and make that adjustment:
Sometimes that means changing the plan.
Sometimes it means slowing down long enough to find traction.
Sometimes it means recognizing that the goal hasn't changed, but the way you're going to reach it absolutely has.
The question I come back to all the time is this: given what I know right now, what's the best decision still available to me? That's where momentum starts coming back.
How to Lead a Team Through Hard Times: What to Say, and What Never to Say
If you want to know how to lead a team through hard times, start with what not to do. One of the worst things a leader can do in real adversity is pretend that everything's fine. People already know when the market is struggling, when budgets are shrinking, or when the business is feeling pressure.
Two things I'd never say to a team facing headwinds:
"Everything is going great." When people can see the pressure for themselves, that line makes them ask what else leadership isn't telling them. I've seen how quickly that uncertainty can erode a team's confidence.
Another explanation of why things are so difficult. When a team is under pressure, it's easy for every conversation to turn into one. Eventually your people start feeling like nothing they do matters.
The strongest leaders I've worked with acknowledge the reality of the organization's situation, then give people something meaningful to own. It sounds like this:
"We're facing a tougher market than we expected, and some of these conditions are outside of our control. But here's what we know. Here's what matters most right now. And here's where we still have an opportunity to make a difference."
That last part is incredibly important, because people need to understand how their decisions still matter when the circumstances are really difficult. The leader's job is to help people see the next decision they can own, even when nobody can guarantee the final outcome.
That's where my G.E.A.R. Framework becomes really useful. G.E.A.R. stands for Growth, Engagement, Acceleration, and Risk, and in a hard season, each gear asks a question your team can still answer:
Growth asks what we need to learn.
Engagement asks where we need greater commitment.
Acceleration asks what decisions need to happen today.
Risk asks what changes if we don't solve this issue.
Adversity doesn't eliminate any of those questions. It just makes answering them more important.
Leading When Things Go Wrong: The Two-List Meeting to Run This Week
If you're leading through adversity right now, I'd start by getting your team together for one meeting with two lists:
On one side, write down the circumstances you cannot control.
On the other side, write down the decisions and behaviors you can still influence right now.
Spend the rest of the meeting on the second list.
Then pick one meaningful action your team can own this week. It could be:
Improving customer retention
Reducing response times
Eliminating a recurring mistake that everyone's been making
Finding a better way to serve the customers you still have
Then track that behavior for 30 days.
The 30-Day Test: What to Measure When You're Leading Through Adversity
When the conditions are working against you, you might not see revenue recover right away. So for the first 30 days, watch what your people are doing:
Are they making decisions faster?
Are they starting to solve problems they were previously avoiding?
Are they creating better customer experiences?
Are they identifying opportunities they couldn't see a month ago?
Those are all signs that momentum is returning, even before the numbers show it. I wrote more about why momentum is a decision, not a feeling.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the best way to lead a team through hard times?
Acknowledge the reality honestly, then give people something meaningful to own. Monster Jam driver and keynote speaker Bryce Kenny recommends a two-list meeting: what the team can't control, and what it still can, with the rest of the meeting spent on the second list. Then pick one action to own this week and track it for 30 days.
How do you stay motivated when nothing is working?
Stop measuring only the results you can't move yet, and start watching the behaviors you can. Faster decisions, problems finally getting solved, and better customer experiences are all signs momentum is returning. The conditions may not change for a while, but how you compete in them is still yours.
What should leaders never say when things are going wrong?
Never tell your team everything is going great when they can see it isn't. People already know when the market is struggling or budgets are shrinking, and false positivity makes them wonder what else leadership isn't telling them. Say this instead: here's what we know, here's what matters most right now, and here's where we can still make a difference.
Finding Your Next Gear in Conditions You Didn't Choose
Leading through adversity means refusing to spend your energy on the part you can't change. For any leader who feels like nothing they do matters right now, here's my answer:
You may not control the conditions that you're competing in, but you still have a tremendous amount of influence over how your team competes.
The goal may not have changed, but the way you're going to reach it has, and that's what finding your next gear looks like in a hard season. It's the same idea behind the G.E.A.R. Framework: helping teams find the next gear they never even knew they had.
Bring Leading Through Adversity to Your Next Conference
Bryce Kenny delivers the G.E.A.R. Framework keynote to franchise conventions, corporate conferences, and association events. If your team is doing the work and the market keeps moving against them anyway, this keynote helps them stop arguing with conditions they can't control and find their next gear in the decisions they still own.