How to Thrive in Difficult Situations
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts“I believe as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So if you don't have that consistent and significant sustainable growth, you've got some work to do.” — Mike Goldman
In this Mike on the Mic episode, I dive into the art of navigating tough times as a leader. Whether you're facing a business downturn or gearing up for inevitable challenges, I share frameworks and real-world strategies to help your leadership team stay strong and thrive.
Mastering Communication in Hard Times
As leaders, we must master communicating during adversity—not just more often, but more effectively.
The way we guide our teams through tough times can determine whether we collapse or emerge stronger.
The Stockdale Paradox
Introduced the Stockdale Paradox: confront brutal facts while maintaining unwavering faith in ultimate success.
Originates from Admiral Jim Stockdale’s experience as a POW in Vietnam.
Leaders must avoid both blind optimism and hopeless realism.
Real-World Application with Clients
Shared two client case studies where the Stockdale Paradox was applied.
Contexts included policy shifts and potential industry collapse.
Planning sessions shifted from growth strategies to survival and stabilization.
Step-by-Step Leadership Exercise
Start with Good News – Acknowledge wins to shift energy positively.
Identify Brutal Facts – Each leader lists 3 facts on post-its about the current situation.
Group Alignment – Discuss and align on the facts; some “facts” needed clarification or challenge.
Define Winning – Create a realistic, aligned vision of what success looks like in this climate.
Make a Plan – Develop one or multiple scenario-based action plans.
Assign Accountability – Determine priorities, timelines, and responsibilities.
Communicating Across the Company
Increase the frequency and honesty of communication across all levels.
Pay special attention to top performers—they're the most likely to leave during instability but also the most vital to survival.
Share the brutal facts and vision for success without sugarcoating, and without scaring people away.
Build the Right Culture—Before the Crisis
Create a culture of trust, vulnerability, and open feedback now, so it’s strong when times get tough.
Honest communication should be the norm, not a reaction.
Final Takeaways
Ask yourself: What brutal facts must I face today?
Define your version of “winning” during this time.
Create a realistic, hopeful plan.
Communicate clearly, honestly, and frequently—especially to your highest performers.
Thanks for listening!
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One of the most important skills we need to master as leaders is the skill to communicate during difficult times and, and how to get our mindset right in those times. How to help our team members. Get their mindsets right during difficult times. And uh, depending on when you're listening, you might be going through a difficult time or, or maybe you've got one coming up.
If we're running a business, we can't escape that. If we are trying to grow, trying to scale trying new things, things are not always gonna be perfect. But there are certainly times that are less perfect than others. It seems like. Decades ago, but it wasn't too long ago that we all had to deal with with COVID, and most leaders learned very quickly that they needed to communicate more with their teams and with their team members during those difficult times.
But it's not just important. You communicate more during a difficult time, it's gotta be the right communication.
So I wanna talk to you about, something called the Stockdale Paradox that I first learned, from through Jim Collins many years ago. And the Stockdale Paradox, I think is a wonderful example and a wonderful philosophy technique in, in how we should be.
Thinking and communicating as leaders during a difficult time. Let me tell you the story first of the Stockdale paradox.
So, that name Stockdale comes from Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest ranking US military officer that was held as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton, during the, the Vietnam War.
He was there from 1965 through 1973 an incredible amount of time, seven or eight years as a prisoner of war. Now some of you might know the name Admiral Jim Stockdale, because he was also the running mate, uh, of Ross Perot running as vice president in 1992. And at that point, you know, it was, uh, kind of amusing.
He was. Uh, he, he was in a three-way debate since Perot ran as an independent in a three-way debate, vice presidential debate, and he was getting kind of old and I think he forgot to put his hearing aid in or it wasn't working. So it was kind of ludicrous that Uh, he really couldn't hear anything that was being said.
But anyway, if that's the Admiral Stockdale, you remember, get that out of your mind. We're talking about Admiral Stockdale highest ranking member of the US military, uh, uh, war Hero POW in the Hanoi Hilton for seven or eight years, from 65 to 73 Now. When he was there, he was tortured repeatedly. He was denied medical care over those seven years or so of captivity, you know, unimaginable hardship, not knowing if we he would ever survive, not knowing if he would ever see his family again.
Now, despite those brutal circumstances, Stockdale maintained an absolute. Faith that he would prevail in the end, you know, even as he confronted a pretty harsh reality every single day. and one of the things he noticed is that many of his fellow prisoners clung to kind of a blind optimism that they would be out by Christmas.
You know, they just assume the war's gonna be over soon. You know, we're gonna be out by Christmas, and. A lot of those folks, the folks that had that optimism, which you think would be a good thing, those folks often broke down mentally and physically, which meant in a brutal place like the Hanoi Hilton, it meant many of those folks didn't survive because when they had this blind optimism and their hopes were dashed, that.
Christmas came and went and they weren't freed again from this POW camp. They just kind of broke again mentally and physically. And Stockdale credited his ability to last those seven years. Uh, he credit his ability to balance this realistic acceptance of the brutal facts that. They may not get out by Christmas that they were gonna have to deal with this every day, that they may be in there for years.
It was this realistic acceptance of the brutal facts with an unwavering hope for ultimate victory. The balance of those two conflicting thoughts. Was he believed the key reason that he survived and later actually thrived. and it formed what we call the Stockdale Paradox. And again, the Stockdale paradox is in any situation is this,this combination of confronting the brutal facts, being open and honest about the brutal facts with yourself.
And with your people, combining that with this balancing thought of an unwavering faith that somehow we will be victorious in the end. And, and those two thoughts together, almost competing thoughts together are so important because if we just have one of those. Things are gonna fall apart. You know, if we just have this, uh, you know, if we're confronting the brutal facts and that's all we have, and we believe that COVID is gonna last forever and, and we're never gonna break out of it, you know, or we're gonna be prisoners of war forever and, and, you know, we're just gonna die here and there's no, uh, there's no other meaning.
There's no victory at the end if it's just about the brutal facts. we die. We die. A slow death or we die a quick death. and if it's just about unwavering faith, but we don't confront the brutal facts, that's you going back and telling your team. Don't worry, we'll be fine. Don't worry, we'll be fine.
You know, I promise this is the last layoff and then we'll be fine. Or don't worry, you know, everybody, you know, we'll, we'll all be back to work, you know, in two weeks. It's gonna be fine at some point. People stop believing you. At some point you stop believing yourself and that unwavering faith rings hollow.
So we need that balance.
Now, again, depending on when you are listening to this, you may be going through something right now, or maybe this is about prepare, preparing you for something in the future. But I will tell you as I am recording this, there's. So much going on in the world and in our country with, you know, internationally, you know, war in the Ukraine, uh, you know, problems in the Middle East.
There is, you know, issues at home around. Tariffs around this big, beautiful bill that, depending on when you're listening to this, you, you know, more than I do, whether, whether that's been passed and what it looks like or, or it hasn't been passed. But between tariffs and that bill, there are a lot of companies that, you know, at best.
Are confused right now and they're having a difficult time making decisions. Um, at worst, maybe they're going through a downturn while we change into whatever we're changing into as a company and as a global economy. and I wanna take you through, depending on whether you're going through something now or, or you will go through something I wanna walk through.
An exercise that I actually just did with a couple of my clients that are going through a difficult time and you know, I learned that these clients were having a difficult time a little bit before the meeting and I had to think pretty quickly, what would, what would we do, how I was going for a quarterly planning session, and normally our quarterly planning is all about growth.
You know, what are we gonna do to grow moving forward? And given what was going on? And I'll pick one company, uh, in particular, and I won't share too much about them to kind of protect their privacy. But this is a company, who, depending on how this big, beautiful bill, whether, you know, how, if it's, if it becomes law and how it becomes law, there's a chance their whole industry.
Will, you know at best struggle. You know, at worst it may really decimate the industry. So I knew going into this session that we were not necessarily talking about growth. We were talking about survival. And I also knew if we went in and we made this a bellyaching session all about all the things going wrong and all the bad things that could happen, if that's what we did, we would not very, we wouldn't accomplish very much.
and I think the CEO would've lost the heart and soul of his leadership team. On the other hand, if we went into that meeting believing everything was okay. Then people would've called bullshit and we would've created some typical quarterly priorities and plans for growth. But everybody would've left that meeting saying that was a waste of time because we didn't deal with reality.
So we changed up, uh, the way we did things and, and the first thing I did. With this group now, I always start out with good news in every meeting. Even though, initially the feeling was there's not a lot of good news. There's just a lot of fear and bad news. Uh, we started off with good news because,
as soft and fuzzy as this sounds, you get more of what you focus on. Whatever you give energy to is gonna expand. So there are always good things going on. So we started with good news and, and even that just kind of. Lightened the mood a little bit, but, but I very quickly shifted gears and we started with the brutal facts.
Remember, Stockdale paradox is confronting the brutal facts, and at the same time, this unwavering faith that we will be victorious somehow in the end. But we started with the brutal facts and. We had a group discussion that frankly lasted a good part of the morning talking about those brutal facts.
Now, we didn't just talk about it, uh, we didn't just bellyache about it and complain about it. What I had everyone do, and I'm gonna get very specific here, so if this is an exercise you could use, I'm kind of giving you a, a step-by-step approach is, uh, if you know me, you know, I'm very big on post-it notes and flip charts.
And rather than just talk about the brutal facts, bellyache about the brutal facts, having certain members of the team dominate the conversation and others sit back and listen. I had everybody write on three different post-it notes, what were, what did they believe the three most important brutal facts of the situation were.
Brutal facts about the world, brutal facts about the economy, brutal facts about the tariffs and the big beautiful bill. brutal facts about where they were as a company right now. Brutal facts about where they were as a leadership team right now. So it wasn't just about the outside world and things they had no control over.
They focused on the brutal facts that they had control over. And we got all of those things and it was super important. Uh, and some of the brutal facts surprised me. There were brutal facts there that talked about the fact that as a leadership team, they had been. Very slow to make decisions from time to time.
Brutal facts about the quality of, of some of what was going on with their clients. so. What we did for each of those brutal facts. And, and by the way, what I'm doing here is I actually did this work with two different clients. I'm blending the two of them to kind of protect, again, protect their anonymity.
and also to give you some helpful examples. but what we did is we put those brutal facts up on a wall, up on the flip chart, and then we talk through each one of them. To get a sense as to whether they agreed and aligned on the brutal facts. They didn't all align on all the brutal facts. Some of what one member of the leadership team thought was a quote unquote fact.
Another member of the leadership team thought was just flat out wrong. So we had to discuss some of those and agree with what those facts were. Some of them were just facts and that was. You know? Yes. That's a good, that's a good piece of information that we need to take into account. And others, like the team who said, we've been really slow to make decisions, that became something we needed to dig into.
What was behind that? How did they create that situation? What created that situation? What were some options for them in. Adding some more velocity to their decision making because in difficult times, slow decision making is death. So what could they do to speed it up? So we had this group discussion with no hiding everything in the open, engagement from everybody on the leadership team.
and. You know, super important insights from the team, and we did not speed that conversation. Like I said, that wasn't a 20 or a 30 minute conversation that took up most of the morning of this. In one case, it was a two day session, and another case, it was a one day session. But in both cases, it took up a good, a good part of the morning.
So, number one, we started with confronting the brutal facts. Now we've got the other side of the Stockdale paradox, which is this unwavering faith that we will be victorious in the end. So how do you handle that? It's a little more straightforward to say, get, say let's get the brutal facts on post-its up on a flip chart.
how do you deal with this unwavering faith of being victorious at the end? And what we did I is we actually broke it into a few different pieces.
Number one is we needed to define, in this case, in this situation, in the world we are currently living in, we needed to define what does winning even look like.
You know, and, and frankly, in, in one case, and again, I'm combining two clients here, and the example, in one case, winning looked like, what could we do? As if a tornado was coming through your town, uh, what could we do to, you know, batten down the hatches, keep our heads down and survive this to live another day that was winning.
And the other case it was, you know, what can we do to right now? Totally turn this situation around and use it to grow. The company. So while one situation was certainly significantly more optimistic than the other, given the realities of of, of those, of the brutal facts for them, in both cases, we need to clarify.
We needed to clarify what winning looked like, what was their North star. We needed to remind ourselves in, in what the purpose of the company was. What's their big why so we don't lose it during difficult times. What will it look like? What will it feel like to actually come out stronger in the end? and through that definition of what winning looked like short term and long term, and even for that one battening down the hatches there, there was potentially something very positive in the long term.
We started to encourage hope. In that team that frankly, both those teams that may not have had all that much hope going in, we started to encourage hope without a sense of false optimism because we had talked about those brutal facts at the beginning, and defining what winning looked like, took those brutal facts into, you know, into the situation.
It wasn't, you know, we're gonna be out by Christmas. It was winning with a large dose of reality. Now, once we understood what winning looked like, and again, I did that in the same way, what, what does winning look like? Write that down on two or three or four different Post-it notes, put it on the wall and let's talk through it, and let's align on what winning looks like.
Then once we understood what winning looked like, now we needed to create a plan. To make that happen, and we needed to set some priority actions, and in one case, there was one plan. Here's what we're gonna do. In another case where there was a little bit more uncertainty, we actually created two different scenarios and created a plan.
For each of those scenarios and a timeline for when we would know which scenario based on some outside circumstances, when we would know which scenario was the right scenario to execute on. So we pivoted from facts to focus. What do we need to do to move the needle? What are the specific actions? Who is accountable?
And we needed to create an ambitious plan , but base it in reality. Now, in both cases, we created plans that the team felt great about, but. there was another very critical piece to this. Now, very often when you're going through difficult times, as these two companies were there, there are some difficult decisions you've gotta make about your team.
In some cases, there may need to be some layoffs. In some cases, there may even need to be things like salary decreases. And what that means is, in the case of, of both of those things, it doesn't just impact the folks that may be getting left, laid off, but what about the other folks? What about the rest of the team and what about the rest of the team that's watching the news or they see what's going on?
Or they see that you just lost a big client or they see that tariffs are impacting us, or the big beautiful bill might be impacting us, or COVID is impacting us, or whatever you have going on.
So what I did with both of these teams is, is talk through with them very specifically what they needed to do to share the situation.
With the entire team, how can they share the brutal facts with the entire team without scaring the crap out of everybody and sending them running, and also share and, and impart this unwavering faith of being victorious in the end
when you do that, when we did this. When I did this and, and coached and facilitated these two teams through it, we paid very, very specific attention to their highest performers. When you're going through a difficult time impacting business, impacting opportunity, impacting job security, maybe impacting compensation, the people that have.
the largest ability to dust off their resume and find a different opportunity quickly are your highest performers. The obvious problem with that is without your highest performers, you may not get through this. The way you hope to without your highest performers when that tornado finishes going through your town.
When when we're back to work from COVID or when, you figure the world out from tariffs, big, beautiful bill war in the Ukraine, war in the Middle East, whatever's going on after that, tornado rips through the town and you get out from underground and look around. You may have a much weaker team if you haven't done the right thing to prepare and, and take care of your top performers.
So we spend a lot of time talking about specific communications, very often one-on-one communications to those folks how we. Talk to those folks. How we, what should we do? You know, there was discussions about, you know, salary reductions and do we include those folks and what happens with bonuses and, and all these different things.
But we need to pay close, very close attention to our top performers and we need to figure out whether it's our top performers of the rest of the team. How do we message kind of authentic hope without. sugarcoating it. How do we maintain trust, morale, and buy-in through all this adversity that we're going through?
And all of this means a greater frequency communication on the leadership team to make sure you are. Adapting as you need to, as the situation changes out in the world or within your company. As you are messaging folks and you're hearing messaging back, how does that impact you? So a greater frequency of, of communication, a greater quality of conversation, and all of this means that openness and honesty is more important.
And what that means is.
If you are not going through a difficult situation now, get ahead of the game and start working with your team. Your immediate team. Your team, as you cascade down, do what you need to do to create a more open, honest, vulnerable culture. A culture where you can give and receive honest feedback without fear of retribution.
A culture where people aren't afraid to say, I screwed up. I'm sorry I made a mistake. I don't know how to do this. The more open and honest you can be before you've got some crazy difficult situation you're going through. The more open and honest you could be before that, the better conversations you'll be able to have when you're going through a difficult time.
When that difficult time happens, it may be too late at that point to say, we are gonna start having open, honest communication with everybody and. You know, go back and look at previous episodes of my podcast. There are a number that I've done as solo episodes or that I've done with guests that talk about trust and openness and honesty on the leadership team.
So in wrapping up, where are you? In need of facing a brutal fact right now or, or helping your team face brutal facts. It doesn't have to be this giant problem like a couple of my clients are going through. Could be something smaller, but where are you in need of facing a brutal fact yourself or helping your team or your company face a brutal fact and start there and run a similar process again, it doesn't have to be a.
You know, business threatening situation. But any situation, what are the brutal facts? Number one. Second, what does winning look like? Third, what's our plan to go get that win? What's our plan of action? Who's accountable? And then what do we need to communicate out there? How do we cascade that communication down?
What do we need to do with and for? Our top performers. I always say you can't build a great company without a great leadership team, and you can't lead others unless you're honest with yourself first. So it starts there, but again, You can't build a great company without a great leadership team.
I hope I got you closer there today. Thanks. I'll talk to you soon.