How to Become the Leader Your Team Will Follow Through Any Storm
- Brainz Magazine
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Paul Adamson is a global keynote speaker and leadership strategist who helps organisations navigate change, build resilient teams, and create breakthrough performance. His work blends real-world experience from being a professional sailor and pivoting into the business world.
In calm seas, almost anyone can look like a good leader. You see it when markets are strong, diaries are full, and nothing truly tests the culture. But when the storm hits, when staff leave, systems fail, or the economy turns, that’s when your team looks up and silently asks, “Who are we really following?”
In this article, I’ll show you how to become the kind of leader your team will follow through any storm by becoming more like a lighthouse: steady, visible, and endlessly reliable, no matter what the weather is doing.
What does it really mean to be a lighthouse leader?
Have you ever stood on a cliff at night and watched a lighthouse cut through the dark? The sea can be wild, the sky can be black, and the wind can be screaming. And yet that light just keeps turning and shining bright.
Calm, consistent, and unbothered by the chaos around it. That’s what your team is looking for. Not perfection or a hero who never feels fear. But a steady, grounded presence they can orient themselves against when things get uncertain.
Most leaders think leadership is about having all the answers. It isn’t.
In a storm, leadership is about three things:
Clarity, knowing where you’re going.
State, managing your own psychology and energy.
Connection, staying deeply connected to your people.
The good news? You don’t have to be born with any of this. You can build it, one decision at a time.
Why your team feels the storm more than you think
Let’s start with something most leaders underestimate, just how much uncertainty their team endures.
You might know what you’re building. You might lie awake at 3 a.m. thinking about the numbers, strategy, cash flow, or the next big move.
But if that vision lives only in your head, everyone else is working in fog. At best, they’re guessing your direction. At worst, they’re constantly bracing for impact.
Here’s the truth most owners or senior leaders don’t like to admit:
The number one reason teams feel anxious, resentful, or disengaged is not “the economy,” “the staff,” or “this generation.”
It’s a lack of clarity and communication from the top. When I walk into a business and start untangling what’s going on, it’s almost always the same pattern:
The leader has a direction in mind.
The team doesn’t fully understand it.
Everyone is doing their best from their own script.
Tension builds.
Then someone gets blamed.
If you want to be the leader your team will follow through any storm, you start here, turn on the light.
1. Set a vision your team can actually see
When I was skippering a yacht on long passages, one of the first things I learned was this, "You can’t sail with your eyes in the boat."
If you stare at your feet, your instruments, or the immediate waves, you drift. On the helm, you’re taught to keep your eyes out of the boat, on the horizon, on where you’re going.
Business is the same. You might think you have a vision because you have numbers in a spreadsheet, a target turnover, or a growth goal. But ask yourself:
Could every person on your team tell you, in simple language, where you’re going over the next 12 to 36 months?
Could they tell you what success looks like for the business and for them personally?
Have you painted that picture in colour, or just thrown out a few bullet points in a meeting and hoped it would stick?
If your vision is blurry, your team’s behaviour will be inconsistent. If your vision is crystal clear, your team can start to self-correct when you all go off course.
Quick tip:
Block one hour this week and write down, in plain language:
What you want this business or team to look like in three years.
What you want your life to look like because of it.
What that means for the people around you.
Then start talking about it. Not once every six months at an off-site. Regularly, casually, and energetically until people could repeat it back to you in their sleep.
That’s the beam of the lighthouse.
2. Own the three fingers pointing back at you
One exercise I often do whilst I’m running a session is have everyone point their finger outwards and say, “It’s your fault.”
Then I remind them of the three fingers that naturally point back at themselves and ask them what role they played in this. It’s a playful moment, but it cuts deep.
It’s easy to say:
“My team doesn’t care.”
“No one wants to work hard anymore.”
“I just can’t find good staff.”
But what if that’s not the whole truth?
What if:
You haven’t trained them properly, yet you expect excellence.
You haven’t set clear expectations, yet you punish wrong behaviour.
You haven’t asked what truly motivates them, yet you wonder why they’re not engaged.
At a recent keynote to a group of dentists, one guy in the room shared something powerful, “I’ve realised, Paul, that what lies between me and success is myself.”
That level of ownership is where lighthouse leadership begins.
Let’s apply this right now. Ask yourself:
Where am I in my own way right now?
Where am I blaming instead of leading?
What am I avoiding having an honest conversation about?
Lighthouse leaders are willing to do the inner work. They update and manage their own mindset first.
3. Protect your state like your life depends on it
Because it does. At least, your leadership life. Your team doesn’t follow your title. They follow your emotional state.
I often ask audiences to imagine how it would feel if I walked on stage with super low energy and said, “Morning. Yeah. Big sigh. We’ll do some stuff today that might help your life, I guess.”
Nobody is following that guy into a storm. Yet so many leaders walk into their office or team meeting in that exact state, exhausted, distracted, emotionally somewhere else, and then wonder why no one is on fire.
Your state is contagious. So you must learn how to manage it.
You don’t need to be a motivational speaker. But you do need two things:
A daily priming routine that starts your day on the right level.
A pattern interrupt, something that changes your state fast when you’re spiralling the wrong way.
Try this:
Stop sleeping with your phone by the bed.
For the first 30 minutes of the day, don’t touch a screen.
Stretch, breathe, play one piece of music that you love.
Ask yourself one powerful question, “Who needs me to be at my best today?”
That’s you turning up the lighthouse lamp before anyone else even arrives.
4. Align the crew with simple, consistent rituals
A lighthouse doesn’t decide randomly when to shine. It has a rhythm. Your team needs rhythm too.
One of the simplest, most powerful tools you can use as a leader is a daily or regular huddle:
10 to 15 minutes.
Same time.
Same structure.
Short, energetic, focused.
You don’t need to overcomplicate it. In fact, please don’t. As Tony Robbins says, “Complexity is the enemy of execution.”
Your huddle might include:
What’s happening today?
One win from yesterday we can celebrate.
Any bottlenecks or problems to solve?
One clear focus for the day.
That last one is important. The brain loves clarity, and it also loves celebration. In other words, a dopamine hit.
We cannot lead humans like machines. Humans are driven by emotion, meaning, and progress. Many teams never hear from their leader unless something’s gone wrong. That slowly kills morale.
Lighthouse leaders:
Catch people doing things right or nearly right.
Support their team no matter what.
Celebrate wins, no matter how small they are.
Even something as simple as, “Hey, the way you handled that upset client yesterday was brilliant. Thank you.”, can shift the entire tone of the day.
That’s what culture really is, those tiny moments repeated over and over.
5. Measure what matters, not everything
When you’re sailing, you have endless data available. Wind speed, wind angle, depth, speed over ground, course over ground, currents, charts, radar, AIS, the list goes on.
But when you’re crossing oceans, only a handful of numbers truly matter. The rest is just noise.
Leaders often drown their teams in noise:
27 different KPIs.
14 dashboards.
Constant shifting priorities.
Remember this, Our brains can only handle “one, two, three, too many.”
If you want to stay on course through a storm, choose no more than three key metrics that tell you if you’re:
On track.
Off track.
Or drifting.
For example:
Where are we relative to our outcome?
New client flow and conversion.
Key revenue or project milestones.
Then talk about those regularly in your huddles and meetings. Make them visible and simple. Make them a shared game, not a private spreadsheet. You don’t need more data. You need more focus.
6. Be the light, not the lightning
Here’s the part that hurts a little. In a storm, your team will look up and pattern match your behaviour.
If you:
Panic.
Blame.
Withdraw.
Or disappear into your office with your door shut.
They feel it, mirror it, and the storm then feels ten times worse than it needs to be. Being a lighthouse leader doesn’t mean you never feel fear or frustration. It means you don’t live there.
You choose, again and again, to:
Stand still instead of scattering.
Communicate instead of going silent.
Take ownership instead of pointing fingers.
Be present instead of hiding in your phone or your next big idea.
You become the person in the room who says, “Okay. This is hard. But we’re not going anywhere. Here’s where we’re going. Here’s what we know. Here’s our next step.”
You don’t control the storm. You control the light.
Your next move: Start leading like a lighthouse
If you take nothing else from this article, take this, "Your team is not looking for you to be perfect."
They’re looking for you to be predictable in your values, your energy, and your presence.
To become the leader your team will follow through any storm:
Clarify the vision, make it simple and visible.
Own your part, drop the blame, do the inner work.
Protect your state, start each day like it matters, because it does.
Create rhythm, use huddles, celebrations, and simple rituals.
Measure what matters, and let the rest go.
And remember, one life. Live it and lead like it counts.
Would you like help to improve your leadership team?
If you’re reading this and thinking, “That’s exactly the leader I want to be or my team to be, but I or they are not there yet,” that’s okay.
Every great leader started in the gap between who they were and who they wanted to become. If you’d like support closing that gap, for yourself or for your whole team, I’d love to help.
Consider this your invitation to:
Reflect on where you are leading from right now.
Share this article with someone on your leadership team.
And, if it resonates, reach out and let’s have a conversation so we can explore how to build a lighthouse culture in your organisation.
Your team is ready for a leader they can follow through any storm. The question is, are you ready to become that leader?
Read more from Paul Adamson
Paul Adamson, Global Leadership Keynote Speaker
Paul Adamson is an international keynote speaker and leadership strategist known for helping organisations navigate change, build resilient teams, and unlock high-performance cultures. His journey began at sea, where he skippered a 27,000-mile global circumnavigation before leading the commercial turnaround of Oyster Yachts from administration to a £185M order book. Paul’s work blends high-stakes decision-making with practical leadership tools that drive real-world results. A cancer survivor, he speaks powerfully about resilience, purpose, and optimistic leadership. Today, he works with entrepreneurs, founders, and executive teams worldwide, helping them create breakthroughs that move them from where they are to where they want to be.
