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. There is a category of thing that arrives at a company from outside it, that has nothing to do with your roadmap, that you have no authority over and no expertise in, and that you are nonetheless expected to lead people through: 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
The first thing an operator reaches for is a plan, because producing plans is the competence we were selected for and, I suspect, because writing one is soothing.
In week one it is worthless. You do not know the shape of the thing yet, the situation is changing faster than the document, and every version you publish has to be walked back, which spends the credibility you will 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 more boring: to know that someone knows, to know what is not changing, and to know 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
The sentiment is free and everybody produces it. What people read is what you actually did.
In 2020 we ran a team dinner as an asynchronous event, because we had people across San Francisco and Kyiv, people with small children, and people who had 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), with an explicit ask to order from independent restaurants rather than 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 asked managers to set expectations with people's partners in advance so that the time was actually theirs rather than a day of childcare. That last detail is the only part of it that mattered. A day off that a person spends absorbing the work they were doing instead of their partner is not a day off, and if you do not deal with that explicitly you have given people a scheduling problem and called it a benefit.
Every unit of care you cannot express as a logistical decision is a unit of care the person has to take on faith.
None of this is generous. It is cheap. The reason to name it is that the generous-sounding alternative, an all-hands where leadership says we see you and we are here for you, costs the same hour and lands as nothing, because it asks the audience to supply the evidence themselves.
Time zones become a moral question
In ordinary conditions a time zone is a scheduling inconvenience. 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 team in Kyiv was on eastern European time (ten hours ahead of the Bay Area). The company's center of gravity, and most of its 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.
The fix is not sophisticated: write things down before you say them, publish to the whole team at once rather than cascading through managers, and accept that some announcements have to be made at an hour that is inconvenient for the people with the most power rather than the people with 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 offering a statement on a subject you have no standing in, which reads as an appropriation of 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.
The work that 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 and the thing they are responsible for is the load-bearing wall of the week, and taking it away in the name of compassion removes 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. The role is close and trusted, and it is very 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.
The 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 that this is hard and here is what I am still able to do this week costs you no authority at all, and it is the only version of the sentence anybody believes.
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 went on to face conditions after I had left that make everything described here look like an administrative exercise, and I am not writing about that. The counter-argument I take seriously: much of this is unfalsifiable. Nobody runs the control group where they handled it differently, so a leader's account of a crisis they led is the least reliable account available, including this one.
© 2026 Renato Valdés-Olmos