Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Philippe Borremans:
Why comms professionals build the machinery that makes good crisis leadership possible — even when nobody calls it that.
Ask ten CEOs what crisis leadership takes, and nine will describe themselves. Confidence. Instinct. A calm head when everyone else is losing theirs. It’s a flattering story. It’s also mostly wrong.
Crisis leadership research keeps circling back to something less comfortable. The executives who handle disruption well share a trait less flattering than raw confidence: they know when to stop being who they usually are. Researchers call this dynamic differentiation — knowing the room needs a different version of you, even when you’re still the one standing in it.
That distinction matters to anyone in communications. It points straight at where we sit in this story — closer to the centre than the org chart admits. We’re often the first to notice a shift is needed, well before the executive is.
The soft-skill side of crisis leadership doesn’t reward a fixed style. It rewards paradox. Effective leaders hold strategic vision and immediate execution in the same hand. They stay optimistic without losing their grip on realism, and empathetic without losing the emotional distance that brutal resourcing decisions demand. None of that comes naturally. It has to be practised, and it has to be practised in public, under conditions where practice looks a lot like performance.
Dynamic differentiation asks even more. A leader who is superb at directive, transactional command in the opening hours of a crisis can become a real liability if they hold that same posture through the rebuilding months. What stabilises a room on day one can suffocate it by month two. Few executives make that switch on instinct alone. Most need someone close enough to read the phase and blunt enough to say so, before the tone curdles into a liability nobody names until it’s too late.
That someone is usually comms. It should be, anyway.
Communication shows up in the research as both the single biggest strength and the single most common failure point of C-suite crisis leadership. Both things are true for the same reason. The skill, done well, is rare enough to decide outcomes. Done badly, it’s common enough to sink a leader regardless of everything else they get right. Adaptive, transparent communication — addressing the sub-crises nested inside the main one, not just the headline event — sits closer to our job description than theirs. We should stop lending it out.
Underneath the soft-skill engine sits something less glamorous and arguably more decisive: hard infrastructure. Geopolitical IQ. Scenario planning that stress-tests a diversified, open-trade world against a fragmented, restriction-heavy one. Cross-functional “nerve centres” built to catch weak signals before they become headlines.
Most organisations still build that infrastructure without a communication seat at the table. Risk owns it. Legal reviews it. Comms gets briefed once the scenario document exists, usually right before it needs translating into something a stakeholder can actually read. That sequencing is backwards, and it costs more than anyone budgets for. A nerve centre that scans for geopolitical risk but has no narrative-ready output sitting alongside it is only half built. It sees the wave coming and has nothing prepared to say about it.
Comms leaders who ask for a seat inside that scanning function, rather than downstream of it, are closing a gap the infrastructure was never designed to close on its own.
The external-shaping layer is where the CEO’s advantage is most real, and most perishable. Executives generally carry more public trust than governments do, which hands them genuine standing to shape a regulatory debate rather than simply react to wherever it lands. Few use it early. Most save it, the way people save good wine, until the occasion has already passed them by.
Shaping that agenda well means engaging policymakers before the rules are finished, not after. It means building coalitions with partners who wouldn’t normally sit at the same table — labour unions, emerging-market cooperatives, groups a traditional stakeholder map would never surface. It means treating a new tariff regime or investment restriction as a competitive signal to move on early, using a proper cross-functional playbook, rather than a cost to absorb once it’s already law.
None of that happens without someone mapping which relationships matter before the pressure arrives, and building the case for why the CEO should speak now rather than later. That’s a communication function wearing a policy hat. Most organisations just haven’t given it the job title yet.
Crisis leadership isn’t a personality trait some executives happen to have and others don’t. It’s an assembled capability, built from a soft-skill engine, a hard-skill infrastructure, and an external-shaping layer that has to work in concert rather than in sequence. Take away any one piece and the other two strain to compensate, usually in public, usually at the worst possible moment.
Communication professionals already build and maintain more of that machinery than most job descriptions admit. We coach the phase-switch. We carry the sub-crisis narrative nobody else is watching. We’re the ones who should be inside the nerve centre instead of waiting for its output, and the ones best placed to say when a CEO’s credibility is sitting idle and ought to be spent.
Stop waiting to be invited into that work. Start acting like it was always yours.
+++
About the Author
Philippe Borremans is a Crisis, Risk & Emergency Communication Consultant and Managing Director of RiskComms FZCO, a Dubai-registered consultancy. With more than 25 years of field experience across 50-plus countries, including a decade at IBM in corporate and crisis communications, he advises organisations including the WHO, IAEA, ICRC and ECDC on crisis, risk, and disinformation preparedness. He is a former President of the International Public Relations Association, produces the Wag The Dog newsletter, and is the author of two books on crisis communication planning and artificial intelligence.
Email: phil@riskcomms.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippeborremans/
AI Disclosure: As English is not the author’s first language, this article was developed with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) for drafting and language refinement. The analysis, judgement, and conclusions are the author’s own.
© 2026 Stratpair Ltd., trading as Strategic. Registered in Ireland: 747736
