What the military concept of tactical patience can teach executive teams about making sound decisions under pressure.

Chaos Doesn’t Destroy All In Adaptive Leaders. It Reveals Them.

I recently joined Frank Zaccari on the Bounce Back in Business and Life podcast, and the conversation took me somewhere I find myself returning to often: what separates leaders who steady their organizations under pressure from those who amplify the fear around them.

The short answer is clarity. Not speed, not data, not the next technology platform. Clarity.

We are living in a time of incredible volatility. Economic pressure is shrinking margins. Business models that worked five years ago are being disrupted faster than most leadership teams can adapt. And fear, as I’ve seen in both my military experience and the boardroom, moves faster than fact. When the pressure rises, the instinct for many executives is to push harder, move faster, and make their teams feel the urgency. That instinct is understandable. It is also frequently the wrong approach.

Before any leader can steady an organization, they have to steady themselves. The most important lesson I took away from the Army and into my corporate life is this: you cannot lead others until you lead yourself. That means knowing who you are, what you represent, and what you will not compromise. It means having a written Personal Leadership Philosophy, signed and dated, that your team can hold you accountable to. When you have that kind of personal clarity, you become the calm in the chaos rather than another source of it.

From that foundation, you Set the Azimuth for your organization. The Azimuth is your True North: your Mission, your Intent, your shared Values, and the cultural behaviors you expect every person on the team to represent every day. When it is written, shared, and revisited regularly, it gives people a framework for making decisions without waiting for permission. Without it, teams chase every new disruption and call it a strategy. It’s not.

One of the principles Frank and I spent time on was tactical patience. General Martin Dempsey, our 18th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, put it well: “move quickly, but never hurry.” Tactical patience is not hesitation. It is the discipline to develop situational understanding before you act, to see yourself, your environment, and your competition clearly, and then to recognize the decisive point, the moment you have enough information to commit, knowing that waiting for perfect will cost you more than acting on good enough.

The same discipline applies to how leaders manage their assumptions. In the military, we understood clearly that if the assumptions change, the plan must change. Too many executive teams build a strategic plan and then execute it faithfully long after the conditions that justified it have shifted. Reviewing your foundational assumptions is not a sign of weakness. It is how you protect the people and resources you are responsible for.

Building the kind of organization that handles all of this well comes down to culture. Moving from a Culture of Compliance to the Level Five Culture of Commitment requires genuine trust and empowerment. You can delegate authority, but you cannot delegate responsibility. When something goes wrong, the difference between a learning organization and a blame organization often comes down to one question. Not “What were you thinking?” but “What did we learn?” The second question changes everything.

And perhaps more than anything else, the Culture of Commitment requires listening. Leaders who speak last in meetings, who practice the two-second pause before responding, who ask Power Questions rather than small talk, gather information that informs making sound decisions. People share what they see, what they know, and what they are worried about when they feel the leader is genuinely paying attention. You cannot buy that kind of intelligence, or generate it from AI.

The journey of All In Adaptive Leadership is never finished. You audit, you adjust, you bring it again the next day. That is not a burden. It is the work.

If you want to hear more of my conversation with Frank Zaccari on the Bounce Back in Business and Life podcast, here’s the link. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Enjoy the journey!