Events nobody trained you for.

In March 2020 I was running a design team split between San Francisco and Kyiv, and every hour of management training I had ever received was about product.

None of it applied. Some things arrive at a company from outside it. They have nothing to do with your roadmap. You have no authority over them and no expertise in them, and you are expected to lead people through them anyway. A pandemic. A war. A market that closes. An election that changes what half your team can say to the other half. A death in someone's family.

I have handled some of these adequately and at least one badly, and what follows is what I think transfers.

The instinct to produce a plan is wrong

An operator reaches for a plan first. Producing plans is the competence we were selected for, and I suspect writing one is soothing.

In week one it is worthless. You do not know the shape of the thing yet. Things change faster than the document does. Every version you publish has to be walked back, and that spends the credibility you need in month three. I published a plan in March 2020 that had a reasonable relationship with reality for about nine days.

What people need in week one is smaller and duller. That someone knows. What is not changing. When they will next hear from anyone. That last one is the whole thing. An unpredictable leader in a crisis makes everyone else's week unpredictable too, and people who cannot predict you spend energy on modeling you that they need for their own lives.

So: say what you know, admit what you do not, and name the time you will next say more. Then meet that date even if the update is that nothing has changed.

Care is expressed in logistics

Warm words are free and everybody produces them. What people read is what you actually did.

In 2020 we ran a team dinner as an asynchronous event. We had people across San Francisco and Kyiv, people with small children, and people with no interest in being social after a full day on video. Everybody got a gift card to a local delivery service. Caviar in SF, UberEats in Kyiv. We asked people to order from independent restaurants, not chains, because those were the businesses going under that month. You ate on your own time. You posted a photograph if you wanted to. There was a prize for the best one, which was a way of making participation optional without making it invisible.

Later that year we gave everyone the rest of a day off after a virtual get-together. Friday for the Kyiv team, so the boundary landed on a weekend edge for them too. And we asked managers to set expectations with people's partners in advance, so the time was actually theirs and not a day of childcare. That last detail is the only part of it that mattered. A day off spent absorbing your partner's work is not a day off. Deal with that explicitly or you have handed people a scheduling problem and called it a benefit.

Any care you cannot turn into a practical decision is care the other person has to take on faith.

None of this is generous. It is cheap. Name it, because the generous-sounding alternative costs the same hour and lands as nothing. An all-hands where leadership says we see you and we are here for you asks the room to supply the evidence themselves.

Time zones become a moral question

Normally a time zone is a scheduling nuisance. In a crisis it becomes a question of who gets information first and who gets it after they have already read it somewhere else.

The split was older than the crisis, and not a remote-work concession: the Kyiv office had its own levels and its own hiring, and the team was built that way. It was also on eastern European time, ten hours ahead of the Bay Area. Our center of gravity, and most of our executives, were in the Pacific. Which meant that any decision made in a Bay Area afternoon reached Kyiv the next morning, after a night in which it had circulated in Slack. Do that a few times and one half of your team learns that they find out about their own company second.

No cleverness in the fix. Write things down before you say them. Publish to the whole team at once instead of cascading through managers. And accept that some announcements have to happen at an hour inconvenient for the people with the most power, not the least. That last one is the only part that requires anything of you, and it is the one most companies decline.

You will get the tone wrong

2020 also brought a run of events that were not operational at all, and where the failure mode was different. Say nothing and you look absent. Say something and you are a design leader issuing a statement on a subject you have no standing in, which reads as borrowing somebody else's week.

What I settled on: be specific about your own scope and honest about its limits. I could talk about what our team was doing about sourcing and about who got hired, because that was mine and it was measurable. I could not usefully issue a position on behalf of a design organization, and the attempts I saw at that, mine included, mostly served the person making them.

What did land was made by people closer to it than I was. Our brand illustrator in Kyiv spent that year balancing delightful work with subjects that were not delightful at all, and did it better than any statement would have.

Where the line is

Two things I believe and would defend.

Work is a structure, and sometimes it is the only one standing. There is a strand of thinking that says the humane response to a crisis is to reduce expectations to nothing. For some people that is right. For others the meeting at ten is the load-bearing wall of the week. Take it away in the name of compassion and you remove the last predictable thing they have. You cannot know which person you are dealing with without asking, so ask, individually, and do not generalize from your own response.

You are not their therapist, and the manager who forgets it does real damage. That role is close and trusted. It is easy to slide into a counseling relationship you are not qualified for and cannot be neutral in, because you also decide their pay. Know what your company actually provides, name it early and concretely, and be the person who books the appointment rather than the person who takes the session.

One last thing, and it took me too long. Your own state is a fact about the team, not a private matter. A leader white-knuckling through a crisis while insisting everything is fine produces a team that has to guess, and people guess badly and pessimistically. Saying this is hard, and here is what I am still able to do this week, costs you no authority at all. It is also the only version anybody believes.

This essay is dedicated to Pasha. Rock on, my friend. Pavlo Lukin, 1989 to 2025.

I led design at Grammarly through 2020 and 2021, with the team split between San Francisco and Kyiv, and later ran product at Pitch. I want to be careful about the frame. Colleagues of mine faced conditions after I left that make everything here look like an administrative exercise.