How to Keep Your Team on Track When Your Market Shifts
Updated: Jan 23
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.
Every founder eventually faces it. The market shifts, your industry tightens, and the headlines turn pessimistic. Confidence wobbles, not just externally, but internally too. In those moments, the question isn’t whether your business will feel the pressure. It’s: how do you lead when it does? Because when industries go through turmoil, teams don’t look to the market for the answer; they look to you.
Why turbulence tests leadership more than strategy
When markets are stable, leadership often looks deceptively easy.
Your plans work, your forecasts are reliable, and your momentum masks any niggles. But turbulence has a way of stripping things back to the core. Suddenly, assumptions are challenged, and confidence feels fragile among your team.
This is where many founders unknowingly lose traction, not because their strategy is weak, but because ‘belief’ quietly erodes inside the business.
Here’s the thing, execution doesn’t tend to fail first; it’s your team’s belief in what’s possible. This is where we must focus our attention.
The invisible risk: Buying into the story
In every period of market uncertainty, there’s a dominant narrative:
“Everyone is down, flat is the new growth.”
“Everyone’s struggling.”
“We’ll pause until things settle down.”
It’s a seductive story, because it gives us permission to shrink.
Here’s the trap: If a founder emotionally buys into the story, the team will naturally follow them, and they start to believe the story.
Strong leadership during turmoil doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine. It means being honest with your team without being alarmist.
Your team doesn’t need sugar-coating; they just need you to give them context. That means openly addressing:
What you’re seeing in the market and what the key drivers are.
What’s genuinely challenging and your plan to move forward.
Your views on the opportunities that will be created.
Every major period of disruption creates opportunities. When markets tighten, some businesses retreat, reduce visibility, delay decisions, and sit on the sidelines.
Others do the opposite:
They sharpen their thinking.
They choose to move forward.
They gain market share while competitors hesitate.
The opportunity isn’t in denying the turbulence, it’s in refusing to let it define your trajectory.
The 2 stories you need to be all over to keep your team on track
During uncertain periods, there are always two stories in play:
The market story
Your team's story
You don’t control the first, yet you have absolute control over the second. As a founder, you are the guardian of that internal narrative of your team.
Not through bravado or motivational hype, but by being consistent, calm, and keeping your feet on the ground.
Psychologically, this matters more than most founders realize. At the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs sits safety and security, another word for this is certainty.
When people experience uncertainty, they instinctively look for something solid to hold onto. Your role as the leader is to provide that certainty for your team.
I often describe leadership during turbulent times as being like a lighthouse in a storm. A lighthouse doesn’t:
Move with the waves
Argue with the weather
Flicker on and off depending on conditions
It stays visible, predictable, and steady. That steadiness doesn’t eliminate the storm, but it gives others something to navigate by.
There’s an important distinction here: this isn’t about blind positivity or pretending everything will just magically work out. It’s delivering certainty through:
Your plan
Your priorities
Your confidence
Be calm and measured, not loud and reactive. When your team senses your confidence, they will pass this on to your customers.
While we are talking about customers
During market turmoil, customers don’t want more options.
They want reassurance (just like your team), and they will gravitate toward businesses that they feel are:
Clear
Confident
Have the solution
This is what’s known as the strategy of preeminence, being the only viable choice. Not because you say it, but because you demonstrate it time and time again.
To sum this up for you
You don’t keep your team on track by denying the storm. You do it by:
Calling it as it is.
Managing the internal story.
Refusing to let it dictate your team’s confidence.
All markets will change with time, all stories will shift, and all uncertainty will pass. What remains is the quality of your leadership when it mattered most.
So, just remember: "Be the lighthouse and choose to shine."
Read more from Paul Adamson
Paul Adamson, Trusted Advisor to Founders & Leadership Teams Under Pressure
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.
