The decisions being made in your organisation right now — on pricing, on people, on customers, on communication — are revealing the real quality of your leadership team in ways that a benign environment never could.
April 1 carries a particular weight this year. It is not just the start but the first day of the new financial year (FY) 2026-27 — in an operating environment that changed, quite suddenly, in the last month of previous FY.
The Iran war, which began on February 28, 2026, has introduced a layer of uncertainty that sits differently for different businesses. If your revenues are substantially domestic, your immediate exposure may be more limited than for companies with large export or import dependencies. India's domestic economy — as the data showed right through February — was in good health: manufacturing PMI at a four-month high, automobile sales up by 25 per cent and a good surge in the digital payment volumes. That foundation has not disappeared overnight.
The external environment, however, has shifted and its effects — even on domestic businesses — are beginning to travel inward.
How long the disruption lasts will determine how deep the impact travels. That uncertainty is itself the leadership challenge.
As leaders, the question is not whether you are affected. Rather it is by how much, through which channels, and how you lead your organisation through a period of genuine uncertainty.
First Leadership Task: Frame the FY Honestly
For many of you leading predominantly domestic businesses, FY 2026-27 may well turn out to be a good year.
The fundamentals that drove India's domestic consumption story — a growing middle class, digital infrastructure and rising credit penetration — have not reversed. The shock is real, but it is not uniformly distributed.
The leader's job at the start of FY is not to predict the year accurately. It is to frame it clearly — for themselves and for their organisation.
That framing has two parts.
First, an honest assessment of where your business is genuinely exposed — through energy costs, logistics, consumer sentiment, export markets or financing conditions.
Second, a clear articulation of what success looks like given that exposure. In some businesses, FY2026-27 can and should be a year of beating budget. In others, it will be a year of protecting the assets that power the recovery. Both are legitimate. What is not acceptable is operating without a point of view.
Second Leadership Task: Set Targets That Motivate, Not Demoralize
Across our collective careers, we have seen more value destroyed by mis-set targets than by bad strategy.
A target that a team can see is disconnected from reality — set in a world that no longer exists — does not stretch performance. It triggers one of two responses: gaming the number or quietly giving up on it.
The leaders should, therefore, work with two reference points alongside their budget in FY2026-27.
The first is, last month same financial year, the honest anchor of what this organisation can achieve in a more stable environment.
The second is a scenario framing of the budget: what you are aiming for if conditions stabilise by Q2, and what disciplined performance looks like if they do not. This is not soft target-setting. It is honest target-setting, and your best people will respect you for it.
Equally important: give every team metrics they can influence. In an uncertain macro-environment, a sales team staring at a revenue number that is partly hostage to consumer sentiment they cannot control becomes passive. But a sales team measured on price realization, customer retention and pipeline build — things within their reach — remains energized. The leader's job is to restore line of sight between effort and outcome.
Also, address variable pay in April itself. If your best performers do the mathematics in April and conclude the year, are lost for their incentives, you will feel the consequences in terms of attrition by Q3. It sends a clear signal now: that performance will be evaluated by separating external conditions from what teams can control. It costs nothing yet can retain more talent than any retention bonus.
Third Leadership Task: Communicate with Confident Realism
The leadership posture that works in uncertain times is neither optimism nor alarm. Your people, your customers and your vendors are all, right now, calibrating how much confidence to place in you as a partner.
What they are looking for — and what earns lasting trust — is a leader who sees the situation clearly and stays steady under pressure.
With your organization, this means naming the uncertainty plainly — without amplifying it. Tell them what you know, what you do not know, and what you are doing about both. Silence in a period of external disruption is almost always interpreted as concealment or confusion. Neither serves you.
With your customers, the instinct to communicate only when there is good news is understandable but dangerous. The leader who reaches out in the first week of April — not to negotiate, but simply to say “we know you are navigating the same environment, and we are here” — builds a depth of relationship that survives a crisis and endures for a decade.
With your vendors, resist the temptation to use the relationship as a buffer — extending payment, reducing orders or pushing back on costs without a conversation. Vendors who understand why you need flexibility and who are offered something in return, find solutions with you. Those who are squeezed silently remember and deprioritize you when conditions improve.
In a crisis, the quality of how you communicate is remembered long after the content of what you said.
Longer View: Why This Crisis is also an Opportunity
We want to close with a perspective that our collective experience has consistently reinforced: periods of external disruption, which are managed well, become one of the most powerful accelerators of leadership development.
The decisions being made in your organisation right now — on pricing, on people, on customers, on communication — are revealing the real quality of your leadership team in ways that a benign environment never could. Which managers hold their nerve and which default to short-termism? Who communicates with candour and who tells people what they want to hear? Which customer relationships are genuinely deep and which were merely transactional?
These are insights of enormous value — for your FY2026-27 planning, talent decisions and your understanding of where your competitive position is genuinely strong. The leader who uses the new FY not just as a year to navigate but as a year to observe and build will be materially better positioned when the environment normalizes.
And it will normalize. The Iran war is a disruption of uncertain duration, not a permanent restructuring of the Indian economy. The domestic fundamentals that made India's growth story compelling are intact.
Companies that protect their price integrity, their people and their customer relationships through this period will recover faster and stronger than those that did not.
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