There is a specific moment in a crisis that tells you everything you need to know about the organization you are inside.
It is not the moment the crisis begins.
It is the moment a decision has to be made — and the leader who is supposed to make it turns to look over their shoulder.
I have watched this moment repeat across more than twenty years in federal emergency management, through hurricane response and wildfire operations and public health emergencies that required someone, somewhere in the chain, to make a call without the luxury of consensus. The organizations that survived their worst moments well were not always the ones with the best resources or the best plans. They were the ones with leaders who could act when the approval they normally relied on was unavailable.
The organizations that compounded their crises almost always had the same problem: the person at the top of the response chain had spent their entire career learning to look upward before moving. And when the people above them were gone, wrong, or unreachable, the organization froze.
The Problem Is Not Incompetence
This is the first thing to understand about the leader who fails you in a crisis: they are usually not incompetent.
They often have strong records. They manage their relationships well. They understand the institution. They are skilled at reading what their superiors want and delivering it with precision and consistency.
That is exactly the problem.
The skill set that gets leaders promoted inside most large organizations is not the skill set required to lead under pressure. It is the skill set required to make their superiors feel good about promoting them. And those two things are not the same.
The leader who checks in before deciding, who builds consensus before acting, who makes sure the person above them knows and approves before anything moves — that leader looks, in normal conditions, like a collaborative, conscientious team player. They look like someone who values alignment and does not act unilaterally. They look safe.
Under pressure, they look like paralysis.
How the Selection Works
Organizations, whether they know it or not, build their promotion criteria around the behaviors that make the organization feel stable from the top down. Leaders who keep their superiors informed, who do not surprise them, who produce results without requiring their superiors to manage friction — these leaders advance.
What organizations frequently fail to test, at any point in that selection process, is whether those leaders can make an independent decision in the absence of approval.
After two decades inside federal institutions and years of working with organizational leaders across sectors, I have watched this pattern build silently into leadership pipelines. The approval-seeker is not screened out. They are often screened in. By the time a crisis arrives, the organization has built its leadership bench around people who have never been required to act alone — and who, in many cases, have been quietly penalized when they did.
The crisis does not create this leader. The organization does.
How to Recognize One
The diagnostic is not complicated. It shows up in behavior patterns that are visible long before the crisis arrives.
They wait in ambiguity. When a situation is unclear, they gather information. They call it due diligence. What they are actually doing is waiting for someone above them to signal what the right answer is.
They take positions after the room. In a meeting, they read what their superior thinks before they say what they think. If you want to test this, watch their body language in the moment when a superior expresses a view. The approval-seeker aligns. Not always immediately — sometimes they wait a beat — but they align.
They credit upward and blame downward. When a decision succeeds, the leader or the team gets credited. When it fails, someone below them carries the accountability.
Their team does not trust them. This one is often the most visible and the least examined. The people who work for an approval-seeking leader frequently sense the dynamic before they can name it. They know their leader will not protect them from above if the protection becomes costly. They are not wrong.
They are accessible to their superiors and unavailable to their people. The calendar tells the story. Who gets the response? Who gets the meeting? The approval-seeker invests relationship capital upward, because that is where their outcomes live.
They have no record of unpopular decisions they stood behind. Ask for an example of a time this leader made a call that cost them something, held their position, and moved forward anyway. If the example does not come quickly, that is information.
What the Crisis Reveals
Under ordinary operating conditions, the approval-seeker’s behavior is survivable. The structures that require them to look upward before acting are still intact. The person above them is available. The process is functioning. The dependency is hidden inside the appearance of collaboration.
Crisis removes those structures.
The superior is unavailable. The process has broken down. The decision cannot wait. And the leader who has spent their career looking upward for permission finds themselves looking upward at nothing.
This is the reveal. Not a revelation of cowardice exactly — though it can look like that from the outside. It is a revelation of structural dependency. The leader has never built the internal capacity to act on their own authority, because they were never required to, and in some cases were actively discouraged from doing so.
They do not freeze because they do not care. They freeze because they genuinely do not know how to move without the signal they are waiting for.
If You Work for One
The first thing to do is stop waiting for them to become a different leader under pressure. They will not. What you are seeing is not a temporary lapse — it is the actual shape of their leadership, finally visible.
What you can do:
Know your own authority precisely. What decisions can you make within your role without their sign-off? Most people in these situations underestimate this. Map it. Act within it. Do not wait for permission you do not actually need.
Bring decisions with a recommendation and a deadline. “I need your direction by Tuesday. If I do not hear from you, I am proceeding with Option B, and here is my reasoning.” This moves the paralysis from a block to a record.
Build horizontally. Your relationships with peers across the organization are your real infrastructure when the vertical line fails. Know who can move alongside you when your leader cannot move at all.
Document the absence of decisions. When a leader will not act, that is a decision. Name it. Record it. Protect yourself.
If You Lead One
You cannot coach someone into a courage practice they have never built. What you can do is change the conditions.
Stop letting escalation be the path of least resistance. When a leader brings you a decision that belongs in their lane, push it back. Ask them what they recommend and why. Require them to hold the answer.
Give them decisions to own before the crisis arrives. Small calls first. Watch how they handle accountability when the outcome is visible. That is the performance data you actually need.
When you are unavailable, watch what happens. That is the real picture of their leadership capacity. If the answer is that the organization pauses until you return, the dependency is already built.
If You Are Not Sure About Yourself
This is the audit that matters most.
When is the last time you made a decision that your superior did not know you were making? Not a rogue decision — a decision within your authority that you made without checking first?
When is the last time you were wrong about a call you made, said so plainly, and moved on without lingering in the apology?
In your last crisis moment: were you gathering information or moving with it?
Do the people below you trust that you will protect them if protecting them costs you something?
Courage in leadership is not the absence of fear. It is not boldness for its own sake. It is the practice of making the best decision available with the information at hand, standing behind it, adjusting as conditions change, and not requiring permission to move when movement is what the situation needs.
That practice is built in ordinary moments, not crisis ones. The crisis is only the reveal.
The most expensive question you can ask is the one you are asking at the worst possible moment: who in this organization will actually step up?
You should know the answer before you need it. And if you are a leader, the answer should include you.
Brandi Richard Thompson is a leadership coach and strategic communications executive with more than twenty years in federal emergency management, including as the official responsible for communication across FEMA Region 9, a jurisdiction of more than 51 million people. She is the founder of Operation Growth® Institute and the creator of the Operation Growth Method.
Operation Growth Institute works with high-achieving leaders who are ready to close the gap between the leader they are and the leader their organization needs. If this piece named something you have been carrying, the next step is a conversation. Start with the free Discovery Call at operationgrowth.com/coaching/.
If your organization is rebuilding after a leadership failure or a high-pressure stretch that cost your team more than it should have, AfterAction — the six-week coaching cohort for high-performing leaders in the rebuilding phase — opens August 4. Enrollment closes July 31. operationgrowth.com/afteraction/