What is crisis leadership?
Crisis leadership is the work of interpreting a consequential threat, organising a proportionate response, communicating under uncertainty, and helping people learn and recover.
Reflect on how well you create clarity, coordinate action, and preserve trust when normal assumptions break down.
Answer as you are today
Choose the answer that best describes your recent behaviour at work. No email required.
What does crisis leadership mean?
Crisis leadership is the work of interpreting a consequential threat, organising a proportionate response, communicating under uncertainty, and helping people learn and recover.
Why it matters at work
A crisis compresses time while information remains incomplete. Leaders need to act without pretending to know everything, connect operational and stakeholder needs, and continually revise the response as evidence changes.
What this assessment measures
Sensemaking & priorities
Building a shared picture and identifying what matters before activity multiplies.
Coordination & decisions
Creating clear roles, escalation paths, and decision rhythms under pressure.
Communication & recovery
Communicating uncertainty honestly while protecting people and learning from the response.
How to interpret your score
Your overall result is normalised to a 0–100 scale. Use it to choose a practice area, not to compare your worth with somebody else.
Build your crisis leadership foundation
Your answers point to a few situations where a simple routine could make this behavior more reliable.
A developing crisis leadership pattern
You use this skill in some situations. Strengthen the dimension that becomes least dependable under pressure.
A strong crisis leadership pattern
Your answers suggest a reliable pattern. Keep testing it in harder situations and compare your view with outside evidence.
Designed for reflection, not diagnosis
The ten behaviour-based statements cover 3 practical dimensions. Responses run from “Never” to “Almost always”; negatively worded items are reverse-scored. Overall and dimension results are converted to a 0–100 scale. The assessment is educational and has not been psychometrically validated.
Read the full assessment methodology and editorial standards.
Research that informed this page
Jonathan Bundy, Michael D. Pfarrer, Cole E. Short, and W. Timothy Coombs (2017), “Crises and Crisis Management: Integration, Interpretation, and Research Development”, Journal of Management.