Some of the biggest incidents I have handled in my career were not small ones. Datacenter power failures, full server cluster outages, and situations where everything was broken at once and people were watching. What I learned early is that calm, collected leadership matters more than any tool during a crisis.
Panic spreads fast in IT. When leaders rush, raise their voice, or jump from idea to idea, the team mirrors that behavior and mistakes multiply. Calm leadership takes intention and practice, and it is something I had to learn over time. Helping others slow down, take a breath, and focus does not happen by accident, it takes finesse.
I was often told by peers and leadership how calm I stayed during outages. That calm was not passive, it was focused. I would remind the team that we have handled worse, that we will get through this, and that clarity beats speed in the first moments of a crisis. Almost every time, we resolved incidents faster than teams led by panic.
Panic driven leaders rarely go far in this industry. Calm leaders build trust, think clearly under pressure, and give their teams space to do their best work. In IT and cybersecurity, the person who stays calm when everything breaks is the person others remember and follow.