Grace Without Pressure: A Story of Urgency, Empathy, and Lessons in Leadership

It was a Friday afternoon—one of those times you hope will be calm as you wrap up the week. That hope was shattered when a user reached out directly to say they were turning off their service due to an issue they believed was caused by our platform.

When someone says they have to shut things down, instincts kick in. Even without any alerts or indications on our side, you feel the urgency. You know it’s time to act—if not for the system, then for the people depending on it.

Diagnosing the Undeclared

Despite the surprise, I responded quickly. Though it was a direct message—something I might have otherwise waited to follow up on the next business day—I chose to lean in. The user was clearly stressed, and whether the issue was ours or theirs didn’t matter yet. What mattered was showing up.

I took notes that afternoon and shared every bit of information I uncovered in an internal channel—not requiring anyone to act on it immediately (thanks to async communication), but so that we could follow up with clarity and context during our weekly product call.

As I dug in alongside a coworker the next business day, the situation evolved into a classic XY Problem (shoutout to xyproblem.info). The "outage" wasn’t what it seemed—it was a misconfiguration deep inside their own integration with our platform. But it took careful combing through our data to help them uncover that. Even though the issue didn’t originate from our side, we stayed engaged because their pain was real.

The Work Beneath the Surface

The experience was both challenging and exhausting. It required calm, clarity, and above all, empathy. By the end of that week, we had unraveled the mystery, helped the user stabilize their situation, and even identified a few improvements—both for their implementation and our own product.

Internally, I made sure to thank every teammate involved. The way we carried ourselves under pressure—methodical, empathetic, and focused—was something I was proud of. We didn’t sound alarms. We didn’t throw blame. We simply did the work.

When Feedback Feels Like a Collision

But come my next 1:1, I was given feedback that felt… off. Not bad, not unkind—but eh, jarring.

My manager likened the situation to an aviation mayday, saying that in such emergencies, we should be fully “on-call” to respond, just like a flight crew. It made sense on paper. If a customer is declaring an outage, shouldn’t we escalate immediately?

Yet in that moment, the feedback felt like a boat trying to bump into me—as if I, a vessel doing its job steadily through the current, should have veered course more dramatically.

What wasn’t seen is what I was trying to protect: the bandwidth of our on-call engineers, who were not scheduled for this kind of support, especially when the “outage” was user-declared, not system-validated. I had no visibility into what kind of week they had. My decision wasn’t to avoid urgency, but to filter it, with care.

Grace Without Pressure

This experience taught me something subtle but powerful: grace doesn't require panic. We can respond with care, composure, and urgency without triggering alarms unnecessarily. True grace under pressure isn’t about sprinting the loudest—it’s about listening, thinking, and acting with purpose.

While leadership saw one version of the story—perhaps one where we could have been faster—I saw another: a story of how we chose to be present, not reactive. Of how empathy, not escalation, helped us diagnose the problem. Of how we strengthened both our user’s integration and our own internal processes. So perhaps the TLDR of this would be, “Let them, and let me.”

Final Thoughts

For someone to summarize the situation from a distance—without being the first responder—and offer critique that it “wasn’t solved fast enough” may be a fair judgment on paper. But when that critique is followed by “you did nothing wrong,” it walks a fine line. Professionally, that phrasing feels diplomatic—but in reality, it can be a subtle way of implying that I did fall short, just without saying it outright.

It’s a kind of feedback that can make you question yourself, even when your instincts were sound.

But here's what I’ve come to realize: I know myself, and I stand by how I handled it. I acted with integrity, clarity, and empathy. I weighed the situation carefully. I communicated transparently and involved others only when it made sense. That’s not a failure to escalate—it’s a conscious choice to act with care for both the customer and my team.

Yes, we can always reflect and improve. And yes, others may hold different standards or expectations. But understanding why I made the decisions I did—and standing by those decisions—matters. That’s not being stubborn. That’s knowing your values and your worth.

So I’ll take the feedback, I’ll think about the expectations, and I’ll continue to grow. But I won’t let the implication that I wasn’t “fast enough” override the fact that I showed up fully, thoughtfully, and with grace—even without pressure.