Crisis Leadership: How Boards Worldwide Are Building Executive Readiness

Boards around the world have stopped trying to forecast the next disruption. The war in Ukraine and the Covid pandemic both arrived without a timetable, and the next shock will do the same. The more useful question now is whether they have the right leaders in place to deal with whatever comes next. Much of what follows draws on our work with Dutch and wider European boards, though the pattern is global. 

Which Global Forces Are Increasing Demand for Crisis-Ready Leaders?

Ask a board to name the pressures on its business and they come easily. Geopolitical conflict, technological change, cyber risk, and climate regulation are all visible from a distance, and none of them is a surprise. What no board can name in advance is which of these turns into a crisis, when it arrives, or how two of them combine to produce a third. 

Cyber risk is the clearest case. Every board knows it needs cyber resilience, and none can predict when the attack will land or what form it will take. That is why Jan-Bart Smits has argued across his cyber resilience series that the organizations ready for it are the ones whose leaders own the risk rather than leaving it to a technical function. Technological change works the same way. A board can see that AI will change how it competes long before it knows which capability or rival will force the move, and as we set out in our digital transformation leadership strategies, the readiness that matters is rarely a matter of the technology itself. 

Cyber and technology are only two fronts. The same gap between a visible pressure and an unpredictable event runs through the rest, and it leaves executives bracing for shocks they cannot time. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026, which gathers the views of more than 1,300 experts worldwide, names geoeconomic confrontation as the risk most likely to trigger a material global crisis this year, and half of its respondents expect a turbulent or stormy outlook over the next two years. Chief executives report the same. In PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey, which polled 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries and territories, only three in ten said they were confident about revenue growth over the coming year, the lowest reading in five years. 

The instinct is to respond with better forecasting, but that has a ceiling. A crisis will not arrive in time to be modeled, and the risk register will always be one line short. That limit is the reason the pressure keeps landing on the same place, and the rest of this article is about what has to be ready there when it does. 

What Does Crisis-Ready Leadership Look Like in Practice?

Crisis-ready leadership has a recognizable shape. It shows in how an executive behaves when the situation is unclear, the stakes are high, and the familiar playbook stops working. We assess for it directly rather than inferring it from a record built in calmer conditions. 

Our leadership assessment practice uses Hogan-based frameworks, applied by Stanton Chase teams in more than 45 countries and calibrated in our own work for the Dutch and wider European market. The method measures behavior under pressure against a defined profile, and the five attributes below carry most of the weight. 

• Adaptive intelligence. Demonstrated performance in ambiguous situations counts for more than the ability to describe ambiguity fluently in an interview, because the record shows how a leader behaves when the map runs out. 
• Psychological robustness. Leaders who perform through disruption absorb pressure without becoming rigid or reactive, and they maintain judgment and values under stress. 
• Authentic communication. Honesty, composure, and credibility determine whether a difficult narrative holds together and whether a complex set of stakeholders stays on side. 
• Team depth. The best crisis leaders build organizations with cross-functional capability that hold together when it matters most, because resilience that depends on one person is not resilience at all. 
• Speed to recalibrate. The willingness to change course without anchoring to sunk costs captures what it means to be ready to win another day. 

Why Do Investors Pay a Premium for Crisis-Ready Leadership?

Investors cannot forecast the future any better than the boards they back, and it has changed how they price a business. The numbers describe a company as it is today, while the value of what it becomes rests on the people who will run it when conditions change, so investors have learned to weigh leadership as heavily as the financials. Our publication on exit-ready leadership explores how experienced acquirers assess adaptability alongside the balance sheet, and McKinsey’s Global Private Markets Report reaches the same conclusion from the investor side, finding that CEO selection and development have become key drivers of portfolio company outperformance, an effect its authors call CEO Alpha. What they are really pricing is performance in the moments no model can predict, which is why a record built in calm markets tells them so little, and why the gap between that record and a leader’s adaptability has become one of the most decisive, and most underestimated, variables in any deal. 

Investors act on this, and the numbers show how much. Research by Dave Ulrich and colleagues at the RBL Group found that investors allocate roughly 30 percent of their decision-making to the quality of leadership, while related work published in Harvard Business Review showed that reported financial outcomes predict only about half of market value. The other half sits in the qualities that surface under pressure, and as we explored in Talent as a Value Driver, leadership is the measurable variable that fills much of that gap. Those findings match what we see in practice every day, in the Netherlands and far beyond it. 

The premium is difficult to fake and increasingly well documented. McKinsey’s research on organizational health finds that organizations emphasizing health deliver total shareholder returns three times greater than their peers, and the leadership practices described in this article sit at the center of that health. PwC’s analysis of reinvention points the same way, showing that companies that adapt their business and operating models well achieve a 71 percent performance premium on a combined measure of profit margin and revenue growth. What both findings measure is performance through change, the ability to hold value when the unpredictable arrives rather than only when conditions cooperate. 

How Are Forward-Looking Organizations Investing in Leadership Readiness?

The clearest way to see the argument is in the decisions boards make. Each appointment below answers a pressure the board could name but could not time, and each places the leader it needs in the seat before the event rather than after it. All three come from the markets we know best. 

Edwin van Bommel, Partner and AI co-leader, PwC Europe. A firm cannot know which capability or competitor will force its hand on AI, only that the moment will come, so PwC moved early. Edwin van Bommel joined PwC Netherlands in October 2024 with one of the most accomplished AI and digital leadership profiles in the European market. He co-founded Digital McKinsey during a 17-year tenure at McKinsey & Company in Amsterdam, went on to serve as CEO of Amelia (IPsoft) in New York, a global provider of enterprise conversational AI, and most recently led strategy, innovation, and AI at ABN AMRO as Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer. His mandate at PwC is to develop and scale AI-driven transformation across clients and the firm itself, which is the readiness the earlier section described, command of the technology joined to the leadership that puts it to work. 

Ewout Stoops, Partner, Cyber, Forensics & Privacy, PwC Netherlands. Cyber sharpens the point. The need is certain and the timing is not, so the capability has to be in place before the attack. Ewout Stoops started at PwC Netherlands on 1 May 2026 and was named among the firm’s nineteen new partners effective July 2026. He arrived after a career of more than twenty years at the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD), most recently as deputy head of the Joint Sigint Cyber Unit, which the AIVD operates together with the Dutch military intelligence service, the MIVD. He brings the private market an intelligence-community perspective few firms can access, and his move shows how seriously professional services now treat cyber leadership. 

Cara Williams, Non-Executive Director, ESG and DEI, NEQSOL Holding Advisory Board. At governance level the pressure is sustainability, and its shocks keep their own schedule, from tightening regulation to the physical costs of climate change. Cara Williams is one of the most recognized voices in ESG, climate, and sustainability leadership, and is Senior Partner and Global Head of ESG, Climate and Sustainability at Mercer, part of the Marsh McLennan group, where she leads the firm’s sustainability proposition for institutional investors and asset owners worldwide. Her appointment to the advisory board of NEQSOL Holding, an international group operating across energy, telecommunications, hi-tech, construction, and mining with over 25 million customers, puts board-level sustainability leadership into a portfolio that spans multiple regions and regulatory regimes, well before any of them forces the question. 

Across all three, the move is identical. A board names a pressure it cannot forecast and appoints a leader who can hold the organization steady when that pressure turns into a crisis. That is the question worth putting to any executive team. Can it adapt and keep its people aligned under a shock it did not schedule, rather than only in steady state? From our vantage point in Amsterdam, working with clients across EMEA and with Stanton Chase colleagues in more than 45 countries, that question sits at the heart of every search and assessment we run, and the organizations that answer it honestly are the ones ready to win another day. 

About the Authors 

Kevin Bradbury joined Stanton Chase in 2012 and is a Partner based in Amsterdam, where he has settled in the Netherlands. He began his career in the technology search industry in 2005 in Toronto, Canada. Kevin manages and delivers leadership search assignments across all functions for SaaS/PaaS/IDaaS businesses, telecommunications platform service providers, and technology consultancy firms. He specializes in searches for Director and Partner roles in the Professional Services sector, spanning Strategy and Operations, Management Consulting, Audit and Assurance, and Deals Advisory. Kevin collaborates closely with colleagues and investors across EMEA to identify, assess, and appoint seasoned executives for C-suite and Non-Executive Board Member positions within portfolio companies, with a hands-on approach ensuring each search yields candidates uniquely qualified to create substantial value for investors and support successful exits. He is the author of Exit-Ready Leadership, Our Top 7 Strategies, and Talent as a Value Driver, and is producer and host of the Stanton Chase podcast. 

He holds a B.A. in Law and Political Science from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, is certified by Hogan Systems for Leadership and Team Assessments, and is a certified practitioner in Culture and Executive Search from Hofstede Insights. 

Jan-Bart Smits began his career in executive search in 1990 and joined Stanton Chase after more than a decade at another global search firm, where he led the Technology and Professional Services Practice for the Netherlands, ran the European e-Business Practice, and later led the Technology and Professional Services Practice for the Middle East and North Africa from the Dubai office. At Stanton Chase, Jan-Bart serves as Managing Partner for the Amsterdam office and runs the Global Semiconductor Practice and Global Technology Practice, having previously held the roles of Global Practice Leader for Professional Services, and Global Chair. He specializes in high-level executive search across Technology, Professional Services, and Semiconductors, conducting CxO and non-executive board assignments across the Netherlands and internationally. Jan-Bart is the author of the Stanton Chase cyber resilience series, including Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3, and is a recognized voice on board governance, AI leadership, and organizational resilience. 

He holds an MSc in Astrophysics from Leiden University.