When Survival Mode Becomes the Operating Model
How prolonged crisis management can erode leadership capacity and organisational resilience
By Jim Callaghan | Co founder of Wellnesstory
Aviation across the Gulf has shown remarkable operational resilience through regional instability, changing airspace restrictions and repeated disruption. The more difficult question is whether that resilience can be sustained without steadily depleting the leaders and teams delivering it.
The strength and the risk of crisis performance
People can perform exceptionally well in a crisis. During my time in some of the most challenging aviation environments I experienced how the urgency of the situation sharpens people’s priorities. The silo mentality gives way to the common cause. Decisions that might normally take weeks are made in hours – sometimes minutes. Teams work longer and solve problems that previously seemed impossible. In the aviation industry, where operational discipline is deeply embedded, this response can be particularly impressive.
During the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, much of northern European airspace was closed. Ryanair, like many other airlines, were forced to cancel thousands of flights. But it continued operating in unaffected parts of its network and rapidly adjusted schedules as airspace reopened. It also redeployed capacity to help clear the backlog of stranded passengers. The crisis demonstrated that resilience is not about preserving the original plan. It is about retaining enough organisational capacity to make good decisions, adapt quickly and keep a viable operation moving under severe constraint.
That kind of adaptability depends on more than aircraft, systems and contingency plans. It depends on leaders who can absorb new information, challenge assumptions and make clear decisions under sustained pressure.
But that kind of extraordinary effort has a natural limit. A crisis response draws on reserves of energy, attention and goodwill that must eventually be replenished. If the people at the centre of the response are already depleted, the organisation may have the operational tools to adapt but lack the human capacity to use them well.
My recent conversations with many aviation executives in the region suggest that this is becoming a serious concern. Their organisations continue to operate and, in many cases, grow. Yet the human cost of sustained crisis management is becoming harder to ignore.
The visible operation can conceal the real cost
The early warning signs rarely arrive as one dramatic failure. They appear gradually: shorter tempers, weaker collaboration, slower recovery after intense periods, reduced willingness to challenge senior colleagues and experienced people beginning to consider whether the job is still worth the cost.
Because flights continue to depart and immediate problems are still being solved, organisations can mistake continued output for continued capacity. But output can be maintained for a considerable period by drawing down the reserves of committed people. The balance sheet does not show that depletion until it begins to affect judgement, retention, safety, customer experience or the organisation’s ability to respond to the next disruption.
The wider evidence should give leaders pause for thought. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that global manager engagement fell from 31 percent in 2022 to just 22 percent in 2025. Gallup also attributes most (some 70%) of the recent decline in overall employee engagement - from 23% in 2022 to only 20% in 2025 - to the lower engagement among managers.[1] The finding is not aviation-specific, but it matters in an industry where the quality of decisions and behaviour under pressure can carry unusually high consequences.
The dashboard is only the beginning
Aviation understands fatigue better than most industries. Operators use duty limits, fatigue risk management systems and increasingly sophisticated data to identify human-performance risk. These systems are essential, but measurement alone cannot protect people.
A fatigue dashboard cannot protect people if the culture makes it difficult to respond to it.
The real test comes when the data conflicts with operational pressure. Can someone declare that they are no longer fit to perform without being regarded as weak or unreliable? Does a leader reduce workload when indicators turn red, even when the schedule is under strain? Are difficult patterns escalated, or repeatedly explained away because the operation must continue?
Recent US Federal Aviation Administration research illustrates why subjective confidence is not enough. A field study of 120 helicopter air ambulance pilots found that objective performance worsened as fatigue accumulated across a seven-day duty period even though pilots’ subjective fatigue and sleepiness ratings remained comparatively stable.[2] People may therefore feel that they are coping even after their performance has already begun to deteriorate.
Regional disruption increases the leadership burden
The current Middle East operating environment adds another layer. As of late September 2026, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) continued to identify high risks in parts of the airspace over the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. Its guidance called for current risk assessments, continuous monitoring and high levels of contingency planning.[3] Whatever the next revision says, the leadership burden created by rapidly changing routes, rosters, customer expectations and security assessments does not disappear immediately.
Nor is this challenge confined to the Gulf. After two significant UK air-traffic-management failures in September, the UK Civil Aviation Authority opened an independent review covering system renewal, business continuity, regulatory oversight and lessons from previous incidents.[4] That scope is revealing. Operational resilience is not merely a technology question. It is a leadership and governance question about whether organisations learn, invest and adapt before vulnerabilities become failures.
The iceberg beneath operational resilience
The visible crisis is the part of the iceberg everyone can see. Leaders naturally focus on cancelled flights, closed airspace, disrupted schedules and immediate commercial consequences.
Below the surface lie the risks that accumulate largely unnoticed: depleted leadership capacity, normalised poor behaviour, weaker psychological safety, experienced people leaving and important information no longer travelling upwards. An organisation in survival mode becomes highly attentive to the problem directly ahead while losing the capacity to see what is building further out.
This does not mean that every tired employee represents a safety failure, or that all pressure can be removed from aviation. Aviation will aways experience crises. It’s the nature of the business. As Herb Kelleher once famously noted, “there’s no such thing as a mid-life crisis in aviation, because every day is a crisis!” But that means that sustained pressure must be managed as an organisational exposure rather than left to individuals to solve through personal resilience.
A leadership team operating under prolonged pressure should ask:
Health Centric Leadership as an operating discipline
Health Centric Leadership starts from a practical premise: the health and capacity of leaders affect how they think, behave and lead, and those effects travel through teams and operations – ultimately determining the long-term success of the organization. It not some airy-fairy attempt to prioritise wellbeing over performance. It’s a recognition that leadership capacity is one of the conditions required for sustainable performance, and a leader’s physical and mental health is the main predictor of their capacity to lead.
· Where has emergency behaviour started to become the norm?
· Do our leaders still have the energy and clarity required for sound judgement?
· Can people speak honestly about fatigue, overload and damaging behaviour?
· What action follows when human-performance indicators turn red?
· Do we deliberately recover after disruption, or simply move on to the next crisis?
· Are we building resilience, or consuming it?
Those questions belong in executive discussions about strategy, risk, safety and performance. They should not be confined to some tick-box wellbeing programme or delegated solely to HR.
The leadership decision
The Gulf aviation sector has demonstrated extraordinary resilience in dealing with the current regional uncertainty. That achievement deserves much recognition. The next leadership challenge is to make sure the capability survives the crisis.
Operational resilience cannot be sustained indefinitely by drawing down the resilience of the people delivering it. Eventually, those reserves run out.
By then, the iceberg may be much closer than anyone realised.
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