Good crisis management is a part of good leadership. I don’t think you can have one without the other – and I think in that sense, leadership has two halves.

Crisis management is half the game. You need to be a leader to manage a crisis – just try a crisis without leadership and you will see what I mean.

The textbook definition is that crisis management is a strategic and tactical response to a specific situation. But really, it’s about courage. It’s the courage to make incomplete decisions at speed. It’s having the stamina to keep going, to at least appear to keep a cool head under fire, to make fine-line calls rather than clear decisions and to stay the course irrespective of the harsh judgements. And they will be harsh.

Crisis management is no mean feat. It’s a tough job, and you need to be a good leader to get it done – let alone to get it done well. It’s still only one half of the job of a leader – no matter how admirable it is.

The better leader you are, the better prepared your team is for a crisis. In fact, sometimes the true test of leadership is the quiet times – when there isn’t the adrenaline but you still have to have the drive to build something dynamic, robust and crisis proof. This is the second half of the leadership equation.

Painting a picture for the future sounds fabulously positive and indulgent. I’ve often heard cynics say that anyone can be a visionary. I really don’t think that’s true. It’s quite frightening to take on the responsibility for building vision – but you absolutely cannot lead without it.

I was always taught to keep my eyes on the hills and my feet on the ground. In a crisis, too many leaders do neither, and some only keep their feet on the ground…but they take their eyes off the hills.

Right now I appreciate that keeping your feet on the ground is essential, and it’s hard work. I’m just urging you to look up once in a while.

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By the end of the day we were exhausted. Which is fitting – because our concluding discussion revealed a sense of fatigue.

It seems our leaders might be caught in a spiral. They’re over stretched. They’re not dealing with much positive news. They’re stressed. The fatigue is impacting on teams, who are then not ‘speaking out’ on how they can innovate. So how do you break the cycle?

Think about the rest

Leaders are tired – and they have been for a while. They have been making very tough calls all year. Some of these calls have been about other people’s lives – especially if you have had to make a call on redundancies. And at this time, when nothing feels stable or clear, and your colleagues want you to be visible and positive – even if you don’t feel like being so at all.

This whole year has been about facing realities – or ‘naming the beast’, as I pointed out to the Birmingham Post in May last year.

You have probably been having less sleep and leaders are working harder to achieve less. And then you come home, were you may have kids, and they know they’re not going to find jobs easily. Or you might have a partner, and they may be facing the same issues at work. Or you have both.

What are you going to do? Here are some top tips that emerged from our Leaders’ Questions event:

• You need to get enough sleep.
• Don’t load it all on yourself – it’s the leaders who share some of the burden with their teams who will keep going.
• Remember that everyone is frightened – and there’s nothing wrong with being frightened unless it freezes you.
• Resist the temptation to share all the load and try to keep positive. You can feel the fear, but if you reveal all the burden, you might just unsettle your colleagues  - and that really will load the burden on you.
• Take a step away. If you don’t look outwards you won’t see the next thing coming – and you never know, it could be an unbelievable opportunity.
• Focus on strengths and shelve the distractions. It’s not ‘getting back to basics’, it is doing what you do best as a priority.

Many also felt that there was a positive change in old boundaries disappearing. Unlikely conversations are taking place – and that’s great. It is also important that leaders ask different people in their organisations for perspective or suggestions on innovations. People you think are leaders and those other people look to as leaders are not necessarily the same people.

This is no time to be timid. But to be brave, you need to sustain your strength.

I shared with our participants at Leaders’ Questions that it had been suggested to me that it would take a cataclysmic event to provide the springboard for positive change and new ways of leading. I’m thinking economic collapse and a complete shift in international relations is a fairly big signpost.

Here’s hoping our 2,500 world leaders at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, which starts today, are brave. As they look to ‘Improve the State of the World: Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild’ – they will need to be.