“My days are full of turnabouts. I have to go back on promises, reshuffle priorities, and I second-guess too much. It’s wearing on me, and I feel like I am spending hard-earned goodwill,” a member of an executive leadership team told me in one of our sessions. “I want to pause for a moment and talk about how I can be a good leader in a bad economy.”

On paper, this person was being a good leader by enacting tried-and-tested strategies to prepare for an economic downturn: becoming more hands-on and moving closer to their team, setting a faster pace, and asking people to handle bigger workloads. But instead of releasing energy and instilling confidence, these moves were wearing the leader down — and their employees, too. In their effort to build a fortress, they felt like they were about to burn down the house.

This feeling may be familiar to executives and managers who are anticipating a recession on top of the aftershocks of the pandemic. The common thinking is that each crisis makes people stronger and more able to cope. But this is not the reality. Compounding crises tend to make people more vulnerable — and more shaky.

This shakiness poses a formidable challenge. It means that some of the normal crisis responses people turn to won’t work as intended. Indeed, if leaders use the standard playbook as-written, much like our executive at the beginning of this article, they actually risk setting off a destructive spiral and making the crisis worse.

To succeed as a leader in this moment, I suggest three key balances people need to get right: moving closer without suffocating others; moving faster without turning frantic; and taking on or assigning a bigger workload without sacrificing relationships.

Moving Closer Without Suffocating Others

When there are rumblings of an economic downturn, the first response from leaders is often to move closer. More meetings are called, more reporting is required, more detail goes into every conversation. This is quite natural — leaders want to understand what is going on. They want to help find answers. They want to make sure their teams are on track and doing what they can to fix the situation.

Psychologically, however, the impetus to move closer is often a need to feel in control. Moving closer is a risky maneuver and a double-edged sword. On the back of the pandemic, where teams have learned to operate independently and with less oversight, a boss looking over their shoulder can feel like outright distrust and disenfranchisement. It also draws their attention away from doing their job and on to “managing upwards.” The outcome may be stifling instead of stimulating.

Further, if leaders move too close, they clog up their own bandwidth with details and micro-management. The worst-case scenario is when a leader formally takes over their subordinates’ role because they believe they can do better. At a financial institution I was observing, for example, a top leader was so frustrated about the prospect of losing a large client that he marched into a meeting his team was having with them and interrupted the dialogue. He was short of breath, sweating, and agitated, and stood behind his employees to watch and ask questions. He later explained that he was only there to “secure that you do your job right” and to “fire up the crew.” It didn’t work; the company lost the client, citing “a hostile, immature and frantic environment that made them uncomfortable.” The team eventually dissolved, and good people quit their jobs.

To be sure, there are some legitimate reasons to move closer, like when leaders want to ground their judgment in first-hand experience or signal support by showing up on the frontlines. But they must remember that the point of moving closer is to motivate, energize, and support; not control, disengage, or sow doubt. A balanced approach is “touch and go,” engaging with teams on the issues they face, but also not taking the weight off their shoulders and onto your own. A good test is to make sure you don’t end up with a laundry list of things you need to fix for the team, but rather that your team knows their laundry list and understand that they now have control of the steering wheel again.

Move closer — but don’t hover — and have a clear exit strategy. Once you have seen enough, give the power back to your employees.

Moving Faster Without Turning Frantic

The second typical response is a healthy bias for action. In times of crisis, leaders cannot sit on their hands; time is of the essence. You can almost feel it in the jittery pace of meetings, as well as in a leader’s tone of voice or restless demeanor.

However, there is a fine line between urgent and frantic. Leaders must remember that the pandemic has made many people more brittle, not more resilient. Stress and mental health issues have skyrocketed. As a result, while most people understand the need of speed in a crisis, their tolerance for “pushy” leadership is much lower than it might have been prior to 2020.

To address this, leaders should examine the psychological traps they tend to fall into when economic times get tough. One common one is that people think they have less time than they actually do, so they come up with imaginary and self-imposed deadlines. “We need a solution by the end of the month” may create urgency, but if the better solution is another few months away, imaginary deadlines can sacrifice value in exchange for the illusion of speed.

Add to this the fact that leaders often exhibit less tolerance for dissent when things get difficult. They tend to become more ego-centric, so when others object to an idea or proposal, it’s quickly interpreted as resistance and obstruction, not as reflection or constructive feedback. Sooner or later, this pattern of behavior will lead to disengagement from the team and a sense of “false consensus” on ideas. While this might result in faster decisions, it can also hamper independent thinking and prevent better solutions from coming to the fore.

A balanced approach is to create a deliberate delay between ideas, decisions, and actions. Think of it as impulse control by design: Create structures and processes where you allow others (the board, external advisors, peers, or good colleagues) to vet and question your plans. You don’t have time or patience for endless bureaucracy, so design these processes to be fast and informal. Sometimes they can be as short as a quick phone call where you spell out what you want to do and test the immediate reaction of someone you trust.

Increasing Workloads Without Sacrificing Relationships

The third typical response to economic downturns is that leaders become more task-oriented and less mindful of relationships. Just like the frustrated executive earlier in this article, many leaders will ask their teams to take on a bigger workload. To-do list gets longer and longer because “more” feels better and “more” feels like responsible leadership. You might also hear versions of the statement, “We need to fix problems now, not coddle people.” As a result, off-sites are canceled, talent programs are put on hold, perks are cut, and courteousness and empathy go down the drain.

However, relationship work is not coddling; it is hard-core performance management. We have learned from the aftermath of the pandemic that good people rarely quit or “quiet quit” because their job becomes more difficult or because times turn harder. They quit because they lose faith in their leaders, their colleagues, or the future of the company. They withdraw because they feel unfairly treated or neglected. Yes, people go to work to complete the mission and finish their tasks, but more than anything they go to work because of the connection and community they feel they have with their colleagues. So, continue to invest in relationship-building. Maybe downgrade on the luxury, but still spend the time investing in creating connections. Go for five-star content, impact, and interaction, but in a three-star setting.

Part of doing this involves maintaining a balanced approach around relationship and task priorities. Be transparent with your team: What’s the nature and quality of work relationships you expect to see during a tough period? What kind of challenges and supports do you expect of each other? What kind of relationship compromises are you not willing to make, even if they would deliver short-term results? Ultimately, if you find yourself in an extended downturn, take a step back with the team and redefine what success looks like – and not only for the work tasks themselves.

. . .

Being a good leader in a bad economy has always been challenging. This time around is even more so because the usual burden of a bad economy may be compounded by the emotional disruptions of the pandemic. This means that leaders must turn the pages of the standard crisis playbook with care and moderation.

Leaders cannot stand still in the face of an economic downturn, but their bias for action and their instinctive responses — moving closer, moving faster, and increasing workload — must be harnessed. If these natural and legitimate leadership moves are not made in a balanced way, leaders may actually amplify the crisis.

In the age of knowledge, ideas are the foundation of success in almost every field. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t persuade anyone else to follow your vision, your influence and impact will be greatly diminished. And that’s why communication is no longer considered a “soft skill” among the world’s top business leaders. Leaders who reach the top do not simply pay lip service to the importance of effective communication. Instead, they study the art in all its forms — writing, speaking, presenting — and constantly strive to improve on those skills.

For example, while Jeff Bezos was building Amazon, he put a premium on writing skills. In the summer of 2004, he surprised his leadership team and banned PowerPoint. He replaced slides with “narratively structured memos” that contained titles and full sentences with verbs and nouns.

Bezos is not alone among top leaders. “You cannot over-invest in communication skills — written and oral skills,” says former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, who now serves on Amazon’s board. “If you cannot simplify a message and communicate it compellingly, believe me, you cannot get the masses to follow you.”

During my research for The Bezos Blueprint, I found a number of common tactics top leaders use when communicating with their teams. Here are four to try:

1. Use short words to talk about hard things.

Long, complicated sentences make written ideas hard to understand — they’re mentally draining and demand more concentration. You’ll win more fans if you replace long words and sentences with short ones.

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do,” writes Nobel prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He argues that persuasive speakers and writers do everything they can to reduce “cognitive strain.”

Software tools like Grammarly assess writing quality by generating a numerical readability score. The score assigns a grade level to writing samples. For example, a document written for a person with at least an eighth-grade education (the average 13-year-old in the U.S.) is considered “very easy to read.” It does not imply that your writing sounds like an eighth grader wrote it. It simply means that your sophisticated arguments are easy to grasp — and ideas that are easy to understand are more persuasive.

Since writing is a skill, you can sharpen it with practice. Bezos improved as a writer over time. His first Amazon shareholder letter in 1997 registered at a tenth-grade level (comparable to The New York Times). Over the next decade, 85% of his letters were written for an eighth- or ninth-grade level.

For example, in 2007, Bezos explained the benefits of Amazon’s newly introduced Kindle in a paragraph a seventh grader could understand:

If you come across a word you don’t recognize, you can look it up easily. You can search your books. Your margin notes and underlinings are stored on the server-side in the “cloud,” where they can’t be lost. Kindle keeps your place in each of the books you’re reading, automatically. If your eyes are tired, you can change the font size. Our vision for Kindle is every book ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.

Bezos chose short words to talk about hard things. When you make things simple, you’re not dumbing down the content. You’re outsmarting the competition.

2. Choose sticky metaphors to reinforce key concepts. 

A metaphor is a powerful tool that compares abstract ideas to familiar concepts. Metaphors bring people on a journey without ever leaving their seats. Chris Hadfield, a famous Canadian astronaut, is a talented speaker and TED Talks star who tapped into the power of metaphor to describe an indescribable event:

Six seconds before launch, suddenly, this beast starts roaring like a dragon starting to breathe fire. You’re like a little leaf in a hurricane…As those engines light, you feel like you’re in the jaws of an enormous dog that is shaking you and physically pummeling you with power.

Roaring beasts, leaves in a hurricane, the jaws of a dog — these are all concrete ideas to describe an event that few of us will ever experience.

In business, metaphors are shortcuts to communicating complex information in short, catchy phrases. Warren Buffett understands the power of metaphor. If you watch business news or follow the stock market, you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “moats and castles” attributed to companies that dominate an industry that’s difficult for competitors to enter. Buffett popularized the phrase at a 1995 Berkshire Hathaway meeting when he said, “The most important thing we do is to find a business with a wide and long-lasting moat around it, protecting a terrific economic castle with an honest lord in charge of the castle.”

The castle metaphor is a concise shortcut, a vivid explanation for a complex system of data and information that Buffett and his team use to evaluate potential investments.

When you introduce a new or abstract idea, your audience will automatically search for something familiar to help them make sense of it. Introduce a novel metaphor and beat them to the punch.

3. Humanize data to create value.

The trick to reducing cognitive load and making any data point interesting is to humanize it by placing the number in perspective. Showing them PowerPoint slides with statistics and charts only adds cognitive weight, draining their mental energy.

Any time you introduce numbers, take the extra step to make them engaging, memorable, and, ultimately, persuasive.

For example, by 2025 scientists expect humans to produce 175 zettabytes of data annually, or one trillion gigabytes. It’s simply too big a number for most people to wrap their minds around. But what if I said that if you could store 175 zettabytes of data on DVDs, the disks would circle the earth 222 times? It’s still a big number, but the description is more engaging because it paints a vivid image in your mind’s eye.

Famed astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson once told me that the secret to science communication is to “embed the concept in familiar ground.” In other words, turn data into language mere humans can understand.

One of Tyson’s famous examples of humanizing data occurred in 1997 when NASA launched the Cassini space probe to explore Saturn. Skeptics questioned its $3 billion price tag, and so Tyson appeared on television talk shows to educate the public on the benefits of the mission. But first, he had to deal with the price shock, so he pulled a data comparison out of his rhetorical toolbelt. He explained that the $3 billion would be spread over eight years. He added that Americans spend more on lip balm every year than NASA would spend on the mission over that timeline.

To demonstrate the value of your idea, humanize data and make it relevant to your listeners.

4. Make mission your mantra to align teams.

In 1957, a power outage knocked out electricity to large parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Earl Bakken, a medical device repairman working in his garage, saw an opportunity to create innovations in the field. So he built the first battery-powered pacemaker that kept working even when the power went out.

At that moment, Bakken’s life took on a purpose beyond just fixing things. He was on a mission to “alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life.”

Bakken passed away in 2018, more than 50 years after founding Medtronic. The company has changed considerably since then. Its 90,000 employees work across 150 countries and its therapies touch the lives of two patients every second. But while much has changed, one thing has stayed the same: Medtronic’s employees are driven by the same six words that inspired Bakken: alleviate pain, restore health, extend life.

Bakken was a “repeater in chief,” constantly keeping the company’s mission front and center. Shortly before Bakken passed away at the age of 94, he recorded a video for employees. He repeated the company’s mission and made one request: “I ask you to live by it every day.”

A mission statement that’s tucked in a drawer and largely forgotten does little to align teams around a common purpose. Harvard Business School professor John Kotter found that most leaders under-communicate their vision by a factor of 10. “Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices,” Kotter writes.

Transformational leaders overcommunicate. They repeat the mission so often, it becomes a mantra. A mantra is a statement or slogan that builds in strength as it’s repeated. Overcommunication fuels its impact. Your mission should take center stage. Shine a spotlight on your company’s purpose across communication channels: memos, emails, presentations, social media, and marketing material. If your mission stands for something, then stand up for it.

. . .

Anything worth accomplishing takes the work of a team, a group of people dedicated to the passionate pursuit of a dream, a common vision. While some teams follow leaders who are granted power through sheer title alone, the most successful teams follow leaders because they are inspired to do so.