Every plant has a version of this morning somewhere in its history.
A key supervisor calls in sick thirteen minutes before the shift starts. No warning, no backup already in motion — just a phone call and a room full of people waiting to hear what happens next.
Somewhere in your operation, two different people have taken a version of that same call. One of them froze. One of them didn’t. It’s tempting to explain that away in a single sentence: some people just handle pressure better than others. That sentence sounds true. It’s also one of the most expensive assumptions in frontline leadership, because it lets every organization off the hook for building the readiness its supervisors actually need before that phone rings.
Crisis readiness isn’t a trait. It’s infrastructure. And most organizations have never built it on purpose.
The Miracle That Wasn’t
On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport and struck a flock of Canadian geese less than two minutes into the flight. Both engines lost thrust almost completely. Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles were now flying a powerless aircraft over one of the most densely populated cities on earth with 155 people on board. Less than four minutes after the bird strike, that aircraft was floating safely on the Hudson River. Every single person survived.
The story is remembered as the Miracle on the Hudson. But that framing gets something important backwards: a miracle is something that happens to you. What happened in that cockpit happened because of thousands of hours that came before it.
Sullenberger didn’t discover in that moment that he was calm under pressure. He’d been rehearsing that exact category of decision for decades — in simulators, in recurrent training, in checklists run so many times they stopped being something he had to think about and became something he simply did. By the time both engines went silent, the response wasn’t a decision being made in real time. It had already been made. He was executing it.
What Training Actually Builds
Military flight training runs on this exact logic. In Apache flight school, and in any program where an engine failure could put a crew in the ground, a significant share of training time has nothing to do with the parts of flying that go right. It’s entirely built around what happens when something goes wrong.
Instructors fail your engines, your systems, your instruments — on purpose, over and over — until your response to a specific emergency stops being a decision and becomes a rehearsed sequence. That’s not natural giftedness showing up under pressure. It’s habit-forming infrastructure, built deliberately and drilled repeatedly, long before the day it’s actually needed.
There isn’t a naturally calm version of any pilot. Adrenaline spikes hit everyone the same way. What training provides isn’t the absence of nerves — it’s a rehearsed next step to move toward instead of a blank space to freeze in. That’s the actual difference between the two supervisors in the story above. It was never about who’s wired for chaos and who isn’t. It’s about who had the next step already built into them.
What an Unrehearsed Crisis Actually Costs
Most organizations never name this gap on purpose because they never think to ask the question. Crisis response gets filed under personality and talent instead — something a person either has or doesn’t, discovered only in the moment it’s tested, usually in front of the entire team when the stakes are highest.
That’s not a fair test, and it isn’t free.
When a supervisor freezes or improvises badly under real pressure, the cost shows up in three places at once.
It costs trust — the team is watching how their leader responds to chaos, and that response either builds confidence or quietly erodes it.
It costs production — in operations where a bad, improvised call has real downstream consequences, those consequences land regardless of how well-intentioned the call was.
And it costs your own time, because unprepared supervisors escalate. Problems that should have stayed three layers below you land back on your desk, and you become the bottleneck — solving things that should never have made it that far up the chain.
None of this is a knock on the supervisor standing frozen in the middle of the floor. They aren’t failing because they’re weak or unprepared as a person. They’re failing because nobody ever installed the infrastructure that professional aviators train into their nervous systems for exactly this moment. Nobody ran the simulator failures. Nobody named the emergency, built the action plan, and rehearsed it with them in advance. The absence of that system is the actual problem — not the person standing in front of it with no idea what to do.
If you’ve watched a good supervisor freeze at exactly the wrong moment and quietly wondered whether it was a hiring problem, it’s worth sitting with a harder possibility: it may be a system your organization never got around to building, not a person your organization got wrong.
Building the System: Four Steps
If crisis readiness isn’t a trait, it has to be something you can build. The bad news is you cannot avoid crises and emegencies. But the good news is you can copy exactly how the aviation industry approaches them, and it comes down to four steps.
Step one: identify the emergency situations your team may actually face. Not hypothetical disasters — the real, predictable situations your operation runs into. A key operator calling in sick at the worst possible moment. A quality issue surfacing mid-shift. An equipment failure. A conflict between two team members in front of the group. If you’ve run this operation for any length of time, you already know what these look like. Most leaders have simply never sat down and named them on purpose.
Step two: identify how to recognize each one early. This is the step almost every organization skips. A supervisor trained to recognize a quality flag the moment it appears responds completely differently than one who gets blindsided by it two hours later after it’s already compounded. Recognition isn’t automatic. It’s taught.
Step three: create an executable action plan for each situation. Not a vague instruction to “stay calm and figure it out” — a specific, concrete sequence. Who gets notified first? What’s the immediate stop? What decision belongs to the supervisor in the moment, and what has to be escalated? This is precisely what a simulator failure trains into a pilot: not composure, but sequenced action.
Step four: distribute and communicate the plan before it’s ever needed. This is the step that separates a real system from a good idea that lived in someone’s head. A plan does nothing sitting in a document nobody’s read. Supervisors need to know the plan exists, know their specific role inside it, and ideally have walked through it more than once before the morning it actually matters.
Go back to the supervisor from the opening of this article — the one already moving instead of frozen. She wasn’t improvising. She was executing something that had already been decided. That’s not talent. That’s preparation, built on purpose, before it was needed.
What Readiness Looks Like on an Ordinary Tuesday
Picture the same plant, six months after that list gets written down.
The 6:47 a.m. call still comes in — it always will. But now the assistant supervisor taking it isn’t building a response from nothing. He’s pulling one off the shelf. He knows who to call first, what to stop, and what’s his to decide versus what needs to go up the chain. The team watches him move with the same calm they’d expect from someone running a routine — because for him, at this point, it is one.
Upstairs, the senior leader isn’t fielding that call. It never reached their desk, because it never needed to. That’s not luck, and it’s not a personality some people are born with. It’s four steps somebody wrote down and rehearsed before the morning that mattered.
Where to Start
Stop asking whether your supervisors have what it takes. Crises aren’t an if, they’re a when. Building the readiness for that when is your job, not something they’re expected to figure out alone. Start asking whether the leaders on your floor have a rehearsed next step waiting for them or a blank space.
Emergency Actions is one of five components inside The Leader’s Preflight Checklist, available free at operationlead.com/checklist. It’s a starting framework for naming the emergency situations your supervisors are most likely to face — and building the response before you need it.
If you’re a senior leader thinking about what it actually takes to install this kind of proactive readiness across an entire organization, not just a single checklist, you can learn about our system and process at operationlead.kit.com/requestcall.
Readiness isn’t luck, and it isn’t something a person either has or doesn’t. It’s built deliberately, long before it’s ever tested.
Let’s Lead,
Craig
