Resilient Leadership: Strong Through Every Season
- Jun 7
- 3 min read
By Mateusz Zabierowski
CEO and Co-Founder of Admind Agency
When I founded Admind Agency, I thought growth would be the hardest part. I was wrong. Growth turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was learning how to lead through it.
Admind is a global branding and communications agency. We work with some of the world’s most recognizable brands, helping them tell their stories across markets, cultures, and channels. Over the years, we’ve grown from a small studio in Kraków, Poland to a team of hundreds of specialists operating across continents.
That journey taught me more about leadership than any book or course ever could.
Lead With Clarity, Not Certainty
The first lesson scaling taught me: people don’t need their leader to have all the answers. They need their leader to be clear about what matters.
When Admind began expanding rapidly, new clients, new geographies, new services, the temptation was to project confidence by pretending I knew exactly how things would unfold. But uncertainty is the natural habitat of growth. The more honest move was to be transparent about what we knew, what we didn’t, and what principles would guide us regardless.
I started holding what I call “North Star sessions” with the leadership team, not to plan every detail, but to realign on our core values and priorities. When the road is foggy, the North Star keeps you oriented. That practice gave us the stability to keep making good decisions even when the external environment was unpredictable.
Decision-Making Under Pressure: Trust the Framework
The biggest enemy of good decision-making under pressure isn’t lack of information. It’s rather the emotional noise that comes with high stakes.
I learned to distinguish between decisions that need to be made fast and decisions that merely feel urgent. At Admind, we built a simple decision framework: How reversible is this? How many people does it affect? What’s our confidence level? That structure takes decision-making out of the emotional fog and grounds it in something repeatable.
I also learned the value of diverse voices in the room. As Co-CEO, I’m the last person who should be making every call alone. Some of my best decisions at Admind happened when I slowed down, asked the team, and listened to someone who saw something I’d missed. Pressure wants you to go faster. Sometimes the most resilient thing you can do is pause.
Stability While Scaling: Protect the Culture
Here’s something counterintuitive I learned about scaling: the bigger you get, the more intentional you have to be about staying small in your culture.
When Admind was twenty people, culture was ambient. Iit lived in the room, in the conversations, in the daily proximity. As we grew, I realized culture doesn’t scale automatically. It needs to be actively tended.
We invested heavily in leadership development at every level, not just at the top. We created rituals, regular team gatherings, transparent communication practices, ways for people to stay connected to the agency’s mission. Scaling tests everything, but a strong culture is the shock absorber that keeps the organization intact when the road gets rough.
What Resilience Really Means
After years of building Admind, I’ve come to believe that resilience isn’t about being unbreakable. It’s about having the structures, the people, and the clarity to keep moving forward, even when things break.
Leadership through change isn’t a special skill you deploy in a crisis. It’s a practice you build every day, in the ordinary moments, so that when the extraordinary ones arrive, you’re ready.
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