The CEO walked into the war room, listened for about ninety seconds, and started issuing instructions. Legal holds. Holding statement. Who calls the chairman. By minute four he had a plan. By minute six the room had gone quiet. By minute nine his head of operations, the one person who actually knew what had failed on the factory floor, stopped trying to interrupt.
This was a simulation. No dramatic consequences came out of this one-sided meeting. But in the debrief, the operations lead said, “I had the answer. I just couldn’t get it into the room.”
I thought about that moment again reading Amii Barnard-Bahn’s recent piece in HBR, When Executive Presence Backfires. She names three traps senior leaders fall into: the Expertise Trap, the Unshakeable Confidence Paradox, and the Value-Add Trap. Her argument is that the very instincts that got you promoted: having the answers, projecting confidence, improving every idea, weaken your team once your role gets bigger.
The Expertise Trap: When Pattern Recognition Becomes a Blindfold
The Expertise Trap in a crisis is the quiet confidence that you already know the shape of the problem. It makes senior leaders skip the questions that would reveal what is actually different this time. And in my experience it is worst among the very best operators, the ones whose instincts have been reliable for twenty years.
Barnard-Bahn’s shift is from being the answer person to being the leader who builds other experts. In a crisis, the translation is simpler. Your first job is not to diagnose, it is to make sure the person who actually knows what happened can speak without being overridden.
The Unshakeable Confidence Paradox: Calm Is Not the Same as Certain
Crisis communication coaches spend a lot of time teaching leaders to project calm. That is still right. Markets, employees, and regulators read the CEO’s face before they read the statement. But there is a version that’s more dangerous: the impression that the leader has already decided.
Once the room reads you as decided, the debate ends. Wiley’s research found executives are roughly 43% more likely than individual contributors to feel psychologically safe at work. The boss almost always thinks the room is safer than it is. The cultural weight of face that operates in most APAC boardrooms makes the gap between what the CEO thinks is being said and what is actually being said, a chasm.
Barnard-Bahn calls for confidence paired with humility, what she terms radical listening. In a live incident that looks like two small habits. The first is saying out loud, early, “I don’t know yet, and I want to hear what you are seeing before I land anywhere.” The second is watching who has not spoken and going to them by name. Not “any other views?” That question, in my experience, reliably returns silence across every market I have worked in. The prompt that works is, “Priya, you were closest to the vendor audit last quarter. What are we missing?”
The Value-Add Trap: The Senior Leader Who Improves the Plan to Death
This is the one I see most often, and it is usually invisible to the person doing it. The CEO listens, nods, and then adds one more angle. A tweak to the statement. or a name to add to the stakeholder map. Each addition is reasonable on its own. Collectively they rewrite the work the team just did, and send a signal that nothing gets out the door until it has been improved by the top of the house.
Barnard-Bahn’s prescription is the discipline to speak last, ask more than you tell, and recognise that your job is to make other people’s thinking better, not replace it. In our simulations, I sometimes ask the most senior person in the room to hold their additions until the team has gone through one full pass. This is occasionally uncomfortable for senior leaders.
A few things I would ask yourself or your executive team this week, before the next incident actually arrives: In your last real incident, who spoke first, and for how long? If it was you, and for more than two minutes, you were probably the Expertise Trap in action.
When was the last time someone junior changed your mind mid-crisis? If you cannot remember, the room has probably stopped trying.
Look at the final approved statement from your last incident. How many of the edits in the last two hours were substantive, and how many were stylistic preferences from the top? Stylistic edits under time pressure are usually the Value-Add Trap wearing a suit.
None of this is about dimming your presence. But at the top, presence is not what you project. It is what you make possible in the people around you.
The most effective crisis leader I have ever watched in a live incident said almost nothing for the first thirty minutes. She asked three questions, took notes, and then said, “Okay. Here’s what I’m hearing. Correct me if I am wrong.” The room rearranged itself around her. She did not need to announce her authority. The room already knew it.