Disruption shakes up routines, roles, and expectations. As people struggle to regain their footing, stress levels rise. It’s normal for conflict and tension to emerge. In fact, conflict during disruption is often a sign that people still care enough to advocate for their ideas, values, and contributions.

Take, for example, a senior leadership team I worked with last year during a large-scale restructuring. Their organization was merging product lines and laying off nearly 20% of staff. Tensions were high, and conflict spiked among team members who had once collaborated smoothly. Disagreements over resource allocation, turf boundaries, and strategic priorities created daily friction. At first, the CEO saw this conflict as a threat, worried that it would derail execution. But by naming the stress everyone was under and creating structured opportunities to surface concerns, the team began to see conflict as a healthy signal of what mattered most. Over time, they transformed those heated debates into constructive decisions — ultimately emerging with a stronger, more cohesive strategy.

Change puts people on edge. Disruption scrambles assumptions. In these moments, even small phrases can have outsized impacts. As a leader, you’re not just sharing information—you’re shaping the emotional climate of your team. Words can soothe or inflame, clarify or confuse, unite or divide.

At Tenacious Leadership Institute, we often remind clients that language is not just a delivery mechanism for facts — it’s a mirror of your mindset and a signal of your leadership presence. In the pressure cooker of disruption, people listen more closely to your words than ever before. They will replay them, share them, and build their own meaning around them. One moment of careless phrasing can damage months of trust-building, while one moment of courageous, intentional language can inspire people to rise together.

Disruption shakes our sense of security. When the environment feels chaotic, the brain’s threat detection systems go into overdrive, activating the amygdala and flooding the body with stress hormones like cortisol. This stress response can shrink our mental bandwidth, narrow our attention, and leave us with tunnel vision focused only on survival. Over time, repeated activation of these systems can make us — and our teams — feel stuck, powerless, and reactive rather than strategic.

That’s why cultivating agency is so powerful. When people experience a sense of choice, influence, and meaningful action, the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for reasoning, perspective-taking, and planning — comes back online.

When things go sideways during complex change, leaders often fall into the trap of firefighting instead of facilitating. But the most effective executives pause to ask—not assume. These five questions aren’t soft—they’re strategic. They help your team reconnect, realign, and rebuild momentum when the pressure is high and uncertainty is growing.

At Tenacious Leadership Institute, we’ve worked with senior leaders in global companies who’ve watched their best teams start to unravel—despite their talent, dedication, and shared purpose. The common thread? When disruption strikes, even high performers can lose their rhythm. Priorities blur. Tension builds. Energy gets wasted in the gaps between people, not just systems.

Most leaders today say they’re open to change. But when disruption actually hits—through market volatility, organizational restructuring, technological shifts, or rising team tension—the cracks start to show.

Take our client David, a Senior Vice President at a global tech company. When a major internal reorganization was announced alongside a shifting product roadmap, many of his peers scrambled—overloading their teams with new initiatives, retreating into isolated decision-making, and defaulting to short-term thinking. David took a different approach. He paused. He brought his core leadership team together to realign on priorities, got clear on what could be paused or dropped, and led with direct, transparent communication—even when he didn’t have all the answers.

Disruption sends your nervous system into overdrive. It narrows your attention, floods your body with stress hormones, and cues your brain to default to old habits and reactive behaviors. This response might be helpful in a short-term crisis—but it’s unsustainable in long-term complexity.

Relaxation isn’t disengagement—it’s recalibration. It’s how you reset your system so you can access your full executive intelligence: strategic thinking, emotional regulation, intuition, and creativity. These aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re the core capabilities you need in moments of volatility.

In the face of disruption, resistance is natural. The nervous system is wired to seek safety and familiarity—so it’s no surprise that change can trigger unconscious pushback.

But resistance doesn’t always look like refusal or rebellion. It’s often much more nuanced. Especially in professional environments, it wears disguises that seem reasonable—even productive. A team that suddenly “needs more data.” A leader who doubles down on minor tasks. A project that keeps shifting but never seems to move forward.

You don’t need a culture survey to know how your team is doing. Disruption reveals it.

The way people show up under pressure—how they speak (or don’t), how they respond to feedback, how they collaborate or retreat—tells the truth about your culture. Not the aspirational version, but the lived one.

Resilience gets a lot of credit in times of disruption—and rightly so. It helps us absorb shocks, recover from setbacks, and find our footing again.

But here’s the truth: resilience is only part of the story. In a landscape that keeps changing, leaders don’t just need to bounce back. They need to move forward.

That’s where tenacity comes in.

When the stakes are high and the pace is fast, strong leadership matters more than ever.

But what if some of your default leadership instincts—especially during disruption—are based on outdated assumptions?

Let’s reframe five common myths that keep leaders stuck during change, and explore new ways of thinking that build clarity, trust, and traction.