It’s 6:50 AM. You’re walking to your pre-shift planning meeting, rehearsing a few points you want to make, when one of your associates steps into your path.
“Hey, do you have a minute?”
She isn’t quite looking at you. She tells you things have been rough at home, she hasn’t slept, and she’s not sure she should be on equipment today.
Your meeting starts in six minutes. This conversation isn’t on your daily agenda. You didn’t rehearse it. But she’s waiting for you to say something.
Some of the moments that shape how your team sees you won’t be on a calendar. They show up mid-walk, mid-shift, mid-sentence. An injury. A tearful associate. A senior leader asking why a line is down. A peer challenging your call in front of your team.
In The Conversation You Keep Postponing, I wrote about the hard conversations you can see coming, the ones where you have time to plan your approach. This post is about the other kind: the ones that surprise you.
The spark for this was Josh Anderson’s piece, “You Can’t Script an Unscripted Moment,” at The Leadership Lighthouse. Josh argues that the moments that most define a leader never get scheduled, and that the steadiness to handle them grows out of earlier moments when you aren’t steady at all. I wanted to look at what that means for someone in their first year of leading a team.
My take? You can’t script an unscripted moment. But you can prepare yourself for when they inevitably arise.
The Script Was Never the Point
When we talk about “scripting” a conversation, we usually mean predicting it: guessing what will be said and lining up a reply. That works for the conversations you know are coming. It can’t work for those you don’t see coming, for obvious reasons.
Beside which, even when you do have the right answer somewhere in your head, surprise and pressure can make it hard to remember. Stress narrows your thinking. I learned that firsthand.
Early in my time as an Area Manager, one of my most tenured team leads stopped me in the middle of a pre-shift huddle and challenged a staffing call I’d just made, in front of the entire team.
He wasn’t wrong to ask. But I hadn’t prepared for being publicly challenged in that setting. I was caught off guard and my first instinct was to defend the decision point by point, right there, in front of everyone. I didn’t want to look like I didn’t know what I was doing in front of my entire team, so I floundered around for a half-baked answer. I was flustered and everyone could tell.
I didn’t yet have an instinct for how to keep my cool and respond in public, under pressure, without notice.
The information wasn’t the gap. I had a reason for the decision I’d made. But his challenge caught me by surprise and I responded poorly. That surprise is exactly the space an unscripted moment opens up.
If you’ve fumbled a situation like this, you’re not alone. Everyone goes through it. You can’t get better without being bad first.
What the Fire Commander Couldn’t Explain
In 1985, research psychologist Gary Klein set out to study how experienced fireground commanders make decisions under pressure.1 His team interviewed 26 commanders averaging 23 years of service and examined 156 decision points. They expected commanders to narrow their options down to a few, but in over 80% of those decisions, the commanders didn’t compare options at all. They recognized the situation and acted.
One incident from that research has stayed with me. A crew was fighting what looked like a routine kitchen fire, but the fire wasn’t behaving the way it should. The living room was hotter than expected and strangely quiet. The commander ordered everyone out, and moments later the floor they’d been standing on collapsed. The fire’s base was in the basement beneath them, which explained both the heat and the muffled sound.
The commander credited a sixth sense, even ESP. Klein was too much of a rationalist to accept that, and found instead that the commander’s expectations had been broken by cues so subtle he wasn’t consciously aware of them.
That’s the whole “secret,” and there’s nothing mystical about it. Experienced people decide faster because the situation matches something they’ve encountered before. That was the difference between me and the tenured team lead that challenged me. He’d absorbed years of exactly this kind of pressure. I hadn’t yet.
It also means the reason you feel slower than the veterans on your team isn’t because you aren’t capable. You just haven’t had the repetitions yet. You can’t skip them, and you can’t wait ten years for them either. But you can prepare in ways that help, and you can build your own pattern library faster than time alone otherwise would.
Prepare the Leader, Not the Script
There are three major things you can settle ahead of time, so that when a moment like this comes up, you’re at least partly prepared.
Your non-negotiables. Decide now what holds no matter how the moment unfolds. Safety comes before production. You tell the truth even when it’s uncomfortable. You don’t promise what you can’t deliver. You don’t make a permanent decision in a temporary state, unless safety is on the line. These aren’t scripts. They don’t tell you exactly what to say or how to respond. But having these guardrails clear now means that you don’t have to come up with them while under stress.
Your bridge phrases. A bridge phrase is a sentence that’s true no matter what just happened and buys you time to think. “Thank you for telling me.” “Give me a second to think about that.” “Here’s what I know, and here’s what I don’t.” “I don’t want to guess. Let me look into it and I’ll have an answer for you by end of shift.” These work upward too. When a senior leader asks why a line is down and you don’t know, “I don’t know yet, but I’ll follow up today” beats a confident guess every time.
Your bench. Every new leader is surrounded by people who have seen what they haven’t. Know ahead of time who you can call for equipment problems, who for people problems, who for safety, and who for “I don’t even know what I’m looking at.” Your own team belongs on that list. As I wrote in You’re the New Manager. They’ve Been Here for Years. Now What?, your veterans are watching to see who you are when things get hard. Learning to ask “What does your experience tell you?” before launching into your own analysis is one of the fastest upgrades a new leader can make.
The First Ten Seconds
When the moment arrives, you don’t need a speech. You just need about ten seconds and three moves.
Safe. Is anyone at physical or emotional risk right now? If yes, that comes first and everything else waits.
Slow. Your body goes first: one breath, a lower voice, stop rushing. As I wrote in You Set the Weather, your team reads your emotional state before they process your words, and when you’re surprised it’s especially important to stay calm.
Say the next true thing. Not the whole answer. Just what you heard, what you’re going to do next, and when.
Back to the associate from the opening example. Safe: you ask whether she’s okay around equipment right now. She isn’t sure, so she’s not operating today. Slow: you step out of the traffic flow and lower your voice. Say the next true thing: “Thank you for telling me. I’m glad you did. Let’s get you on something safe for now, and after huddle I’ll come find you so we can talk about what you need.”
Notice what you shouldn’t do. You don’t try to solve her life in six minutes. You can’t promise to keep everything between the two of you. If something has to go to HR or your own manager, tell her that up front. And you now owe her a conversation after huddle, because a bridge phrase is a promise. Pick ones you can keep.
Building Your Pattern Library Faster
You can’t skip the reps, but you can get more out of each one.
Debrief every surprise, however small. Within a day, ask yourself three questions: What did I notice? What did I do? What would I do next time? Two minutes in a notebook counts. The Debrief That Builds Leaders covers the team-lead version, and the same questions work on yourself.
Practice with “what ifs.” Practitioners who train decision-makers in high-pressure fields argue that pattern recognition is built through realistic scenarios, not by studying theory. So take five minutes at the end of a shift and ask a team lead: What would you do if a forklift hit a rack right now? If someone told you they didn’t feel safe on equipment? If the GM asked why we were down? Let them answer first.
Collect other people’s moments. Ask a veteran to tell you about the worst surprise they ever handled. This is one of my favorite questions to ask when I meet someone new. You get to borrow years of pattern library in a ten-minute story.
Steadiness under pressure doesn’t develop on it’s own. It gets built out of earlier moments - as long as you actually learn from them.
After the Moment
You’re going to handle some of these badly. Everyone does. What separates good leaders isn’t a clean record, it’s whether they go back.
If you were short with someone, missed something, or made a call you’d like back, return within a day. “I’ve been thinking about yesterday. Here’s what I got wrong, and here’s what I’m going to do.” Short. No over-explaining, no beating yourself up. You Made a Mistake in Front of Your Team covers how to do this without turning it into a performance about you.
The follow-through on what you promised in the moment matters just as much. People forget your exact words. They remember whether you came back.
You can’t script the moments that test you as a new leader. But you can decide ahead of time what you stand for, keep a few phrases in your back pocket, and know who to call. In the moment, be safe, slow, and say the next true thing. Afterward, learn from it, and go back if you need to.
From Theory to Action
Write your non-negotiables. Take ten minutes and write three to five lines that hold no matter what happens. Safety before production. Tell the truth. No promises you can’t keep. No permanent decisions in a temporary state. Put them somewhere you’ll see them.
Choose three bridge phrases and say them out loud. Pick sentences that are true in any situation, like “Thank you for telling me” or “I don’t know yet, and I’ll follow up by end of shift.” Say them aloud a few times so they live in your mouth, not just your notes.
Build your bench. List who you’d call for equipment issues, people issues, safety questions, and “I don’t know what I’m looking at.” Introduce yourself to anyone on the list you haven’t met.
Ask “What does your experience tell you?” this week. Try it with a tenured team lead on a real, low-stakes question, before you offer your own analysis. Notice what they see that you don’t.
Run one “what if” a week. Five minutes at the end of a shift with a team lead. Rotate scenarios: an injury, an upset associate, an unexpected question from a senior leader. Let them answer first.
Debrief your next surprise within 24 hours. What did I notice? What did I do? What would I do next time? Write it down. Over a few months, that notebook becomes your own pattern library.
Go back. If you promised a follow-up, deliver it on time. If you handled something badly, return within a day and say so plainly.
Klein, Gary. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. MIT Press, 1998. Study summarized in “The Recognition-Primed Decision Model: How Experts Make Decisions And Why Your Scenarios Aren’t Teaching It,” idtips.substack.com, https://idtips.substack.com/p/the-recognition-primed-decision-model