Earlier this month, I wrote a Fast Company article for teams that are trying to stay steady while everything around them feels urgent, chaotic, or on fire.

So, pretty much every team out there right now.

There’s a deeply ingrained belief that the ability to stay calm is a personality trait. But in reality, high-performing teams are able to stay calm because of their habits.

In a world that’s always changing, teams must develop a system that allows them to roll with the punches.

Instead of gripping tighter—adding more meetings, working longer hours, demanding more updates—the best teams have already developed simple ways of working that help keep momentum alive when conditions get messy.

The article covers five habits that can radically shift the way your team responds under pressure. When all these simple, repeatable micro-behaviors stack up, they have a truly major impact.

Here’s a preview of Habit #3…

Choose your trade-offs before the crisis chooses for you

One reason teams get frantic is that they try to optimize for everything at once: speed and perfection, quality and scale, consensus and velocity, innovation and risk. In calm periods that fantasy is inefficient. In turbulent periods it becomes fatal.

Strong teams make explicit trade-offs early. They decide what matters most when good values collide. A few years ago, I coached a leadership team that got stuck during a crisis moment because nobody wanted to say out loud what they were optimizing for. They kept trying to do two things at once: gather broad input and move quickly enough to give the organization clear direction. The result was predictable. They stalled. Once they named the trade-off, the work got easier. In that moment, they decided inclusion mattered more than speed. They made space for broader input, adjusted the timeline to reflect that choice, and stopped pretending they could move fast while also bringing everyone meaningfully into the process.

This discipline matters because chaos does not eliminate trade-offs; it just hides them until they become painful. Teams that stay calm are not pretending every priority can coexist. They set guardrails that help people make coherent choices without waiting for top-down permission every time reality shifts.

Key takeaway: Ask your team: What are we prioritizing when the pressure is on? If you have not named the trade-offs, your team is probably arguing about them already.

This habit is just one of several that stitch together the safety net your team needs when 💩 hits the fan.

Read the full article to learn about the other four, and when you’re done, share it with your team!

The best time to start developing these habits is now. That way, when the fires hit, your team will be ready to fight them with confidence and calm.

Karina Mangu-Ward

Partner, August Public

P.S. If you’d like more road-tested practices to help your team meet this uncertain moment, grab a copy of Teams That Meet The Moment!