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Are you prepared to lead with confidence when disruption strikes? In this episode, we share practical strategies for building leaders who can thrive in uncertain times. We explore why disruption is not a sign of failure, how vision and values provide stability, and the critical role of emotional intelligence in navigating change. You’ll also hear why creating safe opportunities for leaders to fail early builds resilience for high-pressure moments later. Whether you’re guiding a small team or an entire organization, this conversation delivers powerful insights to help you transform disruption into growth.

 

In this episode, Steve and Steve discuss:

  • The reality of disruption in today’s organizations and why it’s unavoidable
  • How dysfunctional communication and anxiety emerge during times of disruption
  • The importance of returning to vision and values to guide teams
  • Why developing emotional intelligence early prepares leaders for challenges
  • Practical strategies for giving leaders agency and opportunities to grow

Key Takeaways:

  • Disruption should never be viewed as failure; it’s an inevitable part of business evolution, and organizations that acknowledge this reality are better positioned to adapt.
  • When turbulence hits, leaders must rally their teams around a clear vision and core values, creating a stabilizing force that keeps everyone moving in the same direction.
  • Poor communication and unmet expectations are common byproducts of disruption, and if left unchecked, they quickly snowball into organizational dysfunction.
  • Emotional intelligence isn’t built overnight—leaders who cultivate it ahead of time are far more equipped to navigate uncertainty with calm and clarity.
  • Allowing leaders to experiment and even fail in low-stakes environments early on fosters resilience, making them stronger and more confident when high-pressure challenges arrive.

 

“There's nothing wrong with you. You are going through a disruption. Your organization going through a disruption does not mean, in and of itself, that you have done anything wrong as a leader in your organization. That's the nature of doing business in 2025 in the world. Disruption happens, and that's why some organizations, they'd rather be the disruptor than the disruptee. And that has its own problems, but you're going to be on either side of that equation. So that's just a natural byproduct of doing work in the world.”

 - Steve Longan

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Listen to the podcast here:


Steve and Steve- Leaders Who Can Lead

Hello everyone, and welcome to our LinkedIn Live. Really excited to be here with you today. When I say really excited, I mean, I'm really excited. I get to share today's LinkedIn Live with my colleague and good friend, Steve Longan. Steve, say hi to everyone at LinkedIn Live.

Hi everyone at LinkedIn Live.

There you go. Here we are. We get to talk about a topic today. First of all, before we get going, I think it'd be super cool if you threw out there on the chat button where are you coming in from? So, that would just be super cool if you threw that out there. Where are you coming in from?

I'm on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, on Mount Scott. That's where I'm coming in from.

That's funny. I'm on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, too, just on another skirt, another part of the skirt. So, just great that you're out there. It's just been wonderful to see you guys. And so, thank you for showing up for our LinkedIn Live. Great to be with you guys. So, we're going to dive in fairly quickly, like we always do. We know these things go very, very quickly, and this topic is so rich that it just sort of calls for us to dive into the topic quickly, because there's just so much to say about it, right, Steve?

Yeah.

In fact, you and I usually do some bit of paring down, like, oh my god, we had 20 bullet points, and we can't get to them all, so we kind of came up with the main three.

Yeah.

So today, we're gonna talk about disruption. We're gonna talk about what it means to lead in disruption. We're gonna talk about some best practices. We might get into a little bit of some, not that we would ever do worse practices, but how disruption disrupts us. And Steve, maybe you can help guide us into that. Help us define what it is, what we even mean by that.

Yeah, I think that's number one. That's not what we're doing today, but that would be a really funny exercise. Like, what are the worst practices when you're in the midst of disruption? Like one of the things you should really just not do? So, before we go, Steve and I both do coaching, and when we coach, we want to work with something real. So, we can talk about theories of disruption and ideas about disruption, but we'd like to work with something practical. So, if you can, after you've typed in where you're coming in from, could you put in the chat, what is a disruption that you are seeing in your organization now, or something that you see and it's on the horizon? I see it coming, and I think it's gonna mess some stuff up. So, if you can put in the chat, like, what's the disruption that you're seeing, and then that way, Steve and I, once we get closer to the end of our session today, we'll take up that real stuff so we can work with some real stuff. So, if you can put that in the chat, great. While that's coming in, Steve, could you share a story of a real disruption, like a client, maybe a coaching client, an organization that you've worked with that has had a disruption?

Yeah. And thank you, Steve. I think it was this story that led us to create this environment, right? But I recently had a client, we obviously, Steve, we're going to do our best to protect all the confidentiality, because that's a huge part of what coaching is, but let's just say that this client, she was in financial services and their organization had a really substantial position in their financial services business that was effectively disrupted, if you want to think of it like this, basically by interest rates. One could look at that and just go maybe it’s the overall economy, but they actually had a very solid plan last year that was good. Lot of investments, a lot of clients, investments went into a particular strategy, and as a result of what we'll just call the economic environment, the interest rates, and by the way, this was a really thought out plan by very smart people, the economy had something different to say about the whole thing.

Right.

And within a very short period of time, they realized what they were executing was literally disrupted by something that they couldn't foresee, and the economics, and she would come into coaching, and it was like, you know, you could feel the disruption that was reverberating through her and through her organization. And then I started to realize often, like we do, Steve, that's not the only story of this. We have a lot of clients in financial services, we have clients in retail, we have whatever and there's a ton of disruption going on right now, and that's just one of many stories where that was a real leader, and when we were coming into coaching, it was time after time of what do we do now with that disruption? What do we do now with that bit of news and this pivot that we have to make? Like, boy, we had to let go of some people and things, and just how it was disrupting the organization was very stark.

So, the first thing, and we haven't really gotten into the content yet, but I'll say this to everyone who's joining us, there's something that's in Steve's story that I'll just put out there for you all right now. If your organization is experiencing disruption right now, I just want you to hear this, there's nothing wrong with you. You going through a disruption, your organization going through a disruption does not mean, in and of itself, that any that you have done anything wrong as a leader in your organization. That's the nature of doing business in 2025. And world disruption happens, and that's why some organizations, they'd rather be the disruptor than the disruptee, and that has its own problems, but you're going to be on either side of that equation. That's just a natural byproduct of doing work in the world. Steve, can I ask you one quick question about your story, which is, what did disruption look like within the organization? What did it look like for that layer of leadership underneath your coaching client?

Oh, that's a really great question. I’ll tell you what came up over and over. What it looked like was it looked like a lot of dysfunction with regard to communication. It looked like a lot of unmet expectations. It looked and felt like to a lot of the people in leadership and that were underneath even the C suite and stuff like, there was a lot of anxiety and worry because they were following one thing, and then they weren't. I don't know any other word than to say Steve, but it looked like anxiety, and that turned into a lot of, like bickering and this and that and it looked like a communication breakdown was going on. And frankly, in our parlance, it turned into a thing about low emotional intelligence, right?

Yeah, yeah. And once you got the low emotional intelligence, going, oh man, there's all sorts of stuff that can happen. So, what I want to point out was just there was unmet expectations, there was dysfunctional communication and a lot of anxiety. This is something that we see when you go through disruption. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself. But what Steve is describing is basically dysfunction emerging from the disruption. And that's one of the things as an organization, we can't necessarily stop disruption, like in your story, interest rates, you got control over that? I don't. And so, the issue is there's a dysfunction that gets stacked on top of the disruption. And so, what we want to look at today is how do we respond to disruption in a way that doesn't stack dysfunction on top of it? So, we've got sort of three things that we're going to get into as we go to talk about that, but I just I want to highlight what's going on in Steve's story, because that's a very common occurrence. Dysfunction happens, disruption happens, and then there's sort of second order effects that sort of stack on from that.

Steve, I love that you drew that out, because in a lot of ways, you’re talking about stoicism. And some people know about stoic philosophy stoic, stoics are the people that get pretty good, by the way, at recognizing what they control and what they can't. And so, what I'm already hearing you're doing, for the people that are our listeners today is giving permission for disruption to be okay. It is what it is. And by the way, if people are like, maybe they came in here today to hear these guys talk about how we're not going to be disrupted and here you are going, you're not gonna not be disrupted.

Yeah.

But we can actually have some agency over the dysfunction, so that we don't pile on. All right. Well, Steve, can we dive in?

Yeah.

What you said is, if we want to have some span of something we can actually do during disruption, so as we mitigate, or maybe even eliminate the dysfunction, we've got three things for you. We had 20, and we pared it down to three.

And I also just want to highlight that term that you're using, because it comes up in coaching. Agency. That word that you used when you can think about yourself as a leader and the people inside your organization as agents of change, as having agency that will reframe your relationship to disruption. So, we'll get into three things, we don't want to dance around it. I do want to say quick and dirty definition of disruption, what we mean when we talk about disruption is that there was a way of producing results and effectiveness at your organization which is no longer working. That's our quick and dirty definition of disruption. There was a way of effectiveness and because of changes, usually external, sometimes internal, it creates this dynamic where the old way no longer works. Good. Okay?

Great.

And Steve, I can't see the chat, so if people have questions about that definition, or they hate that definition, bring them my way, and we'll take it up. So, thing number one, when you are going through disruption, you want to go back to vision. And there's a second thing. I'm going to give you number one and two, just because of the time, I'm going to give them close together. You also want to orient around values. So let me unpack what I mean by that. The temptation when your organization is going through disruption, is to say, nothing works anymore, nothing applies anymore, because you had this old way of effectiveness that isn't working currently. Well, that old pattern of effectiveness may not be working currently, but that doesn't mean in and of itself, that your vision for your organization or the values that make your organization tick no longer apply. And so, what I would offer is that your vision and your values are actually tools of navigating disruption. And so, if you can orient your people around vision, and maybe you go through disruption, and maybe you have to develop a new vision. That's great, too. You can use that opportunity. Winston Churchill, I'm going to butcher this quote, but “never waste a good crisis”. So, if you are going through disruption, that might be an opportunity to think about your vision. Does this vision still apply? If so, that's great. It becomes this thing that we can hold on to. So, not everything is changing. If you do reformat your vision, that's still going to be extremely important for your organization. So, when Steve is talking in his story about the layer underneath his client and it looking like a lot of chaos, a lot of anxiety, when people have a vision to orient around, it tends to calm that, which then allows emotional intelligence to come back to the surface and reestablish agency. So, vision and then values, those are the things that kind of make you tick. That's what makes your organization what it is. And so, in the chat, you folks following along at home, if you want to put in, like, what are some key values for your organization? And if you were to reinvigorate those, talk about those, insert those into your organizational life, what might that look like? That's one way of navigating disruption is essentially to empower and orient your people around vision and values.

You know, Steve, as you were saying that, first of all, I think number one, just so that we're clear, there will be people who are going, they said three things and Steve gave us one and two. I love how you did that together. Very cool, very creative. I was sitting there listening to you going, you know, I told a story about someone who was being disrupted, but I missed the fact that I probably just should have told the Rewire story.

Sure.

We've been disrupted recently. Like, we've had a disruption to our business and I probably could have easily just told that story, and one of the first things that we did is we flew people in, like literally, and sat down as a group of people and went through where are we going, what's the vision for this organization, where did we say we were going, where are we not going anymore? And we lived that out, and we did change some things about where we were going.

Yeah.

And we all reminded ourselves, and you know this better than anybody, it was the great Hebrew proverb that states, where there is no vision-

People go sideways.

That's right. And so, orienting yourself, even if you know there are some people listening, maybe that go, oh, we show that vision stuff all the time, but they might not. You might think you are, but really coming back, especially during disruption and galvanizing, If I heard you right, Steve, if I heard you correctly around where we are going, let's remind each other. Let's even get re excited about where we're going. And I will just offer that sometimes that's hard to do in disruption, because that's a very strategic thing, and disruption sort of forces us to be tactical. There might even be some leaders on the call going, we don't have time for that, right? We're too busy trying to get through disruption, and I respect that. There are some hands on deck, whatever, but if all the hands on deck aren't pointed somewhere, that's what I started to feel in that other organization was like, I gotta go do this, and I gotta do that and it started to be fairly chaotic. And, you know, being able to sit back and go, no, let's point in the same direction through a vision, is really, really, really important. And then, like you talked about the values. That was also something that we reminded ourselves about.

Sure.

Like, what’s meaningful to us?

Yeah. So, the thing I want to say is the temptation, and for leaders going through disruption right now, the temptation is to say, no, I want you to tell me what to do. Tell me what to do. There are specific things, tell me what to do. What I have seen in working with organizations is that there is a danger in that. When actions are essentially instinctual, what do I do? When they are instinctual, you run the risk of actually intensifying the disruption, because when you respond that way, just what are we going to do, without organic connections to vision and values, it tends not to be sustainable, and it runs the risk of actually further splintering and causing dysfunction within the organization. And so, the things that we're offering today, the first two, are vision and values, yeah, there needs to be some practical, tangible, tactical, hey, what are we going to do? But what I'm suggesting is that those are going to emerge more organically, they're going to have better staying power, and they're going to work better if they are connected to vision and values.

Yeah, perfect. So, by the way, we're going to show you this at the end of this, we built a little workbook for people that might actually help you ask some questions to get back to those things. And so, we're not going to just leave you with vision and values, like, we actually created a little workbook that can actually, you know, get you through working through some of that stuff, which I'll show folks here in a few minutes as we get close to the end. Okay, Steve, we promised three.

Yeah, yeah.

Let’s go. Number three.

 

Okay, so I'm gonna give you three and a half. And here's why.

You’re disrupting our show, dude.

I'm sorry.

No, we got to recast vision and values.

Yeah, well, we'll get there. I just, I always want the people to feel like they have gotten their money's worth out of this. So, there's one and a half things I'm going to give you. The first one is, start now. Start before you're ready. The thing about, and you mentioned this, when people feel like they're going through disruption, they feel like, well, we don't have time provision and values. And so, one thing I want to say is, when you think about disruption, think about it in the future tense. So, when you think about your people and developing your people, what are the skills that you will want them to have once you are in disruption? So, the first thing is to start now, start even before you're ready, because if you wait until you're in the midst of disruption, it's going to be harder. And so, there's that old adage, when the best time to plant a tree is?

Yeah, 75 years ago.

Yeah, it's that. So, the first thing I would offer is to start now thinking about the skill set that you want your leaders to have and then start working on that now.

Really quickly, because you're going to give a half lesson, right? But before you do, in the story that I gave, my client in coaching literally said, really what I need my people to do right now is possess high emotional intelligence. And again, we could work on some things, but in my mind, I was thinking, what a cool thing to have been working on that long before emotional intelligence was needed. Now, can we do some things and train that? We could, but to your point, what if we were working on that? What if we were working on how would we respond and, you know, etc, etc, now and that's what you're talking about, about planning for that right now. So, yeah, perfect, yeah.

And so, for the last thing, do you want a sports metaphor or do you want a space metaphor?

I don't know. I'm trying to look at who's on the call. Would they appreciate space or sports like, I don't know, dude. Do sports.

Okay, All right, sports metaphor. So, I get to coach soccer. I coach a lot of little kids’ soccer, and I also coach like, 17- 18, year old, 19 year old boys. I mean, like men, you know? And there's a developmental trajectory, and when you're coaching little kids, one of the worst things you can do is critique them too much, is slap their wrists, so to speak, when they do the wrong thing, because what you need when kids are learning how to play is they need to have fun, they need to try stuff., they need to see what works and they need to fail. When they're 5, 6, 7, years old, they just go around and have fun and they're just mimicking what they see on the TV. That's fine. When kids are learning to play, they need chances, they need opportunities. And when a kid is playing, when they're five or six, what are the stakes? What are the stakes of a kid if he kicks it into his own goal? When he's five or six, who cares? If he trips over his own shoelaces when he's five or six, who cares? The worst thing, and I've seen this from coaching, is parents will come in and they will really correct, because they feel like that college scholarship is riding on what their kid does when they're five or six. They come down too hard on the kid, and the kid doesn't enjoy the game, and the kid stops trying stuff. And so paradoxically, the kid is actually a worse player later on for not having been given the opportunity to fail early. Okay? So, if we want our people to be better later, if we want them to have the skills, because when I'm coaching these 18, 19-year-old kids, it's intense, it's fast, it's physical, and if you trip over your own shoelaces, or you kick the ball into your own goal, there are stakes. There are stakes there. And some of these kids feel like they have college scholarships riding on this stuff. So, that skill in that moment of high pressure is built on a lot of opportunities to try stuff and it being okay to fail. And so, the thing I would throw out, and this goes into that whole that the best time to plant a tree is, when we think about building leaders who can lead through disruption, we need to start early in their tenure. When we are bringing people into our organizations, we need to give them opportunities to try and solve things, to try and fix things. We need to give them problems that we are seeing as leaders and see what they make of them. Because if we can give them opportunities to solve those things for themselves early in their tenure at our organizations, it becomes much more likely that they will possess those skills later on in the midst of disruption, when we actually need them to operate more autonomously, to solve things within the organization as it comes up. So, that's the thing I throw out.

Is just that you're half lesson? Steve, that's beautiful, and it's a great metaphor. In that metaphor, were the five-year-old kids, right? Like, it's okay. You know, I was sitting there as you were telling that story, I can hear failure is not an option, with regard to being even in disruption, and as a leader, this is going to sound radical to some people, but we've learned it as coaches. You ready? Failure is an option, in fact, a requirement for growth. Now, do we want people to fail? Are we intentionally doing that? But to your point, when we get in disruption, if we get into that, we can't fail, you're actually making people worse.

Yeah, yeah.

So, all right, the three and a half lessons. Vision. As we go through this, maybe you're going to come out of here and go, whoa. I need to reevaluate, reestablish, rejuvenate, or otherwise rewrite and really rethink and re communicate where we're going.

Yeah, that's a big thing is communicating it, right?

Cascading it and talking about it. Number two, our values, what are the things that are meaningful for us? How do we get back to that? Because if, by the way, Steve, we didn't go too deeply into that one, I got to imagine when people are going through disruption and it’s just all hands-on deck, and there's all this stress and anxiety, they're going to operate closer to Maslow's lowest Hierarchy of Needs, right? You're in survival mode.

Sure, sure.

And we're not being creative, and we're not doing things. So, it's interesting, not that we're going to let all our values go, but by re-establishing values, we get off that survival. No. This is what we're about. Don't forget that. And it brings us through disruption, and it's really helpful not to get into dysfunction.

Yeah, yeah.

Number three, start early. I loved what you said. Project forward of what you want those things to be and start investing in them now.

Yeah.

Well, what does that investment look like? And then lastly, you can summarize your half one.

Yeah, well, it's, it's connected to that idea of starting early is to give people opportunities to try things, so that they can experience what works and what doesn't, so that it becomes more likely that once you are in a season of disruption, or even if you're in one right now, they will already have those skill sets and mindsets and ways of thinking about their role and about disruption, that they can just practice them organically, and that results in less work for you as the leader and a growing sense of agency for the people at that layer underneath you.

Well, as you mentioned, you and I are both executive coaches. We've been up this game for a really long time. We want to make this as practical as possible. So, one of the things that we've done, and you can click on our little QR code, or you can go to Rewire.com, post event workbook, because we created a little workbook that's got some cool ways to walk through something and ask some questions. You could do this as a team, but certainly doing it as a leader, and it's free. We just built the workbook. Take it, have it, grow with it. Obviously, if there's a way that we can help you through that, we'd love to do that, but go out, get your workbook, because again, Steve, anything you'd say about that? I mean, some of the questions in there I just thought were super cool.

Yeah, it's a place to capture your thoughts, so you can make the content from today a little more individual to you and start to make it a little more tactical. And so, it's to give you some prompts to make that transition.

Yeah, absolutely cool. All right. Well, and then I would say, lastly, look, if we can help, that's what we do. If there's a way that you think we can work with your organization, we like to do these things because we believe that helping leaders grow in this way helps the world in huge ways. So, if you can reach out, again, there's a little QR code to get a hold of us, and we do everything in our powers in this world to not be hard to get, so if there's a way that we can be helpful to you, please let us know. So, Steve, final comments.

Well, just one thing is, we kind of teased the audience a little bit. We said, hey, give us your examples of disruption, we want to work with real stuff, and then we've got, like, a minute left, and we haven't talked about anybody's responses. And so, I just want to say, I acknowledge that we did that, I apologize for it, and I would gladly take up anything that anyone wrote in those comments, and I'll reach out to them, and we'll talk about.

Yeah, Adam made some comments. Bill Grassell, my friend, my buddy, Bill, made some comments. He actually listed off a couple of ways that his industry is being disrupted around design changes and labor shortages. Really awesome one. So, Bill, maybe you and I'll work offline, and we can talk about those things.

Let's do it.

You guys, thank you so very much. Again, anyway that we can be helpful to you, we'd love to you can reach us here and again, Steve, thanks so much for joining us, and we'll do it again here soon. So go be great in disruption, folks. Thanks for being with us.

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