A few years ago, when I was working as an administrator, my manager pulled me aside with some feedback from our CEO.
There was a lot going on at the time. The kind of stretch where everything feels urgent because, in fairness, a lot of it actually is. Clients need answers. Problems are moving. People are nervous. Nobody has enough time.
Apparently, one of the concerns was me.
More specifically, I did not seem concerned enough.
I was too relaxed, which made them wonder whether I understood the urgency of the moment. Maybe I was not moving fast enough. Maybe I was not doing very much at all.
I remember looking at my manager and saying something like, “First of all, I’ve got it.”
Then I asked, “What do you want me to do? Run around like a chicken with its head cut off?”
This was probably not the most executive-ready response.
But I meant it.
I understood that things were urgent. I knew what needed to get done. I was working on it. What I did not understand was why looking panicked would improve any of those things.
Did they want me to do the work, or did they want me to look like the work was difficult?
Those are not always the same thing.
I have thought about that conversation for years because, at the time, I believed I was obviously right. If the situation is under control, why perform anxiety? If everybody is already stressed, why contribute more stress? If I have done this kind of thing before and know what to do next, shouldn’t that be reassuring?
My answer was basically: trust me and let me work.
I still think there is something right about that.
I just no longer think it is the whole answer.
I ran into a version of the same thing recently at the company I work for now. Different company, different circumstances, same basic tension. I told my boss the old story and explained that I have received this feedback before. I tend to stay pretty calm when things get chaotic.
She understood immediately, but then she gave me a better answer than I had given myself years ago.
That is a good quality, she said. But not everybody works that way.
Some people need to see the urgency. Some people need more communication. Some people get nervous when everyone around them appears calm because, to them, calm can look a lot like nobody has noticed the building is on fire.
Well. Shit.
That was annoyingly reasonable.
I had spent years thinking the question was whether calm or panic was the better response.
Obviously calm. Thank you for attending my seminar.
But that was not really the problem.
The problem was whether the people around me could tell the difference between calm because I have it and calm because I have no idea what is happening.
Those can look remarkably similar from across the room.
That changed the question for me.
I do not think trustworthy people are the ones who create the appearance of urgency. I have worked with plenty of people who are extremely good at looking busy. There are entire careers built on walking quickly while holding a laptop.
But calm is not automatically reassuring either.
Calm without communication can become its own kind of uncertainty.
If somebody hands me something important and I say, “Got it,” then disappear for two days, I may know exactly what I am doing.
They do not know that.
They just know I disappeared.
I can resent that. I can tell myself they should trust me. I can point to my track record.
Or I can recognize that trust is not only what I know about myself.
It is what the other person has enough evidence to believe.
The people I trust most at work tend to have a particular effect on me.
They make me breathe easier.
Something is broken. Something changed. A client is upset. A deadline moved. The numbers are wrong. Nobody is completely sure what happens next.
Then a certain person joins the meeting, and the room changes.
Not because they immediately have the answer. Sometimes they do not.
It is because you know the problem has somewhere to go now.
They ask the right questions. They do not make the anxiety larger than the problem. They do not pretend things are fine when they are not. They establish what we know, what we do not know, who owns what, and what happens next.
You can almost feel everybody’s shoulders drop half an inch.
That, to me, is one of the highest forms of professional competence.
It is not about impressing the room or dominating it. It is not about being the loudest person saying, “This is urgent.”
It is about making the room feel more capable of handling what is urgent.
I think I misunderstood that when I was younger.
I thought calm was the gift. Maybe preparation was the gift. Maybe experience was the gift.
Those things certainly help. Preparation changes your relationship with uncertainty. Experience lets you recognize patterns faster. You have seen some version of this problem before, so you do not need to emotionally rediscover gravity every time something goes wrong.
But the real gift may be what your calm does for everybody else.
Calm that stays entirely inside you is not yet useful.
If I am relaxed because I know I have a plan, but everyone around me thinks I have missed the seriousness of the situation, then I have reduced my own uncertainty while leaving theirs untouched.
The job is partly to make the path visible.
“I’ve got it” works better when it is followed by some version of: here is what I am doing, here is what I am watching, here is what could still go wrong, and I will update you at three.
That is different from performing panic.
It is making calm legible.
There is a temptation, especially once you become experienced, to believe everyone should be able to read your internal state from your competence.
They cannot.
I cannot either.
I have worked with people who looked completely relaxed because they had everything handled, and I have worked with people who looked completely relaxed because they had not yet understood the assignment.
Experience teaches you not to confuse those two people.
Trust teaches you to help other people know which one you are.
That is probably the part I am still learning.
My instinct in a crisis is still not to run around looking alarmed. I do not think that helps, and I still do not believe urgency requires theater. I am not going to start sprinting between conference rooms carrying loose papers so everyone knows I care.
But I have become more aware that people experience pressure differently.
One person wants a plan. Another wants updates. Someone else wants to talk through every possibility. Another person wants you to take the thing away and come back when it is fixed.
Leadership, or really just working well with other human beings, means learning enough about the people around you to know what helps them carry uncertainty.
It does not mean becoming whatever everybody wants you to be.
It means recognizing that your natural way of handling pressure is not the universal setting.
And maybe that is what I was missing in that conversation years ago.
I was asking the wrong question.
Do you want me to panic, or do you want me to do my job?
Neither, really.
What people actually want is to know that someone competent sees the problem, understands what matters, and is doing something about it.
They want to stop spending attention wondering whether they should be worried about you too.
There is a difference between being calm and making people feel safe.
The first one is about you.
The second one is a service.
I think about the people I have worked with who could walk into a bad meeting and somehow make everybody breathe differently. They did not need a speech. They did not need to perform urgency. They certainly did not need to run around like a chicken with its head cut off.
Their presence simply made the problem feel as though it had somewhere to go.
Whatever happened next, we were not going to have to figure it out alone.
I would like to be that person.
Not the person who makes every problem disappear, but the person whose presence makes the problem feel more carryable.
The person who walks into the room and, before anything is even fixed, gives everybody permission to exhale.