Finding Your Superpower in the Storm
Storms have a way of revealing who we really are.
In leadership, storms rarely arrive with warning. They appear in boardrooms, during product launches, inside organizations facing uncertainty, or in moments when pressure suddenly intensifies and expectations rise overnight.
The question every leader eventually faces is simple: Will you run from the storm… or turn and face it? This is the heart of the Be the Bison philosophy.
Finding Your Superpower in the Storm
In 2014, SpaceX was pushing toward a breakthrough milestone: landing a reusable rocket on a drone ship. The pressure across the organization was intense because success required accelerating engineering, production, and hiring simultaneously.
Tyler Townes had just joined SpaceX as a contract recruiter, responsible for helping hire the engineers needed to support the company’s ambitious goals.
The Storm
Three weeks into Tyler’s role, the organization experienced a sudden internal shake-up.
The VP of HR, three directors, and roughly half of the recruiting team were dismissed. Leadership determined the organization had become “too much noise and not enough signal.” At the same time, Elon Musk set a new operational challenge for the company:
Reduce rocket build time from 22 days to 18 days within three months.
To reinforce focus, Musk issued a directive:
Any meeting that did not directly contribute to achieving the 18-day rocket build target should be exited immediately. The recruiting team suddenly faced enormous pressure. Hiring the right engineers quickly was essential to achieving the new production timeline.
Then another challenge surfaced.
The Applicant Tracking System (ATS) was slow and inefficient. Candidates often waited three weeks just to receive a response, slowing down hiring during a moment when speed mattered most.
Leadership issued a clear mandate: Fix the ATS within one week. If the system could not be improved quickly, the remaining recruiting team risked being replaced.
The storm had arrived.
The Response
Instead of reacting with fear or simply working harder at recruiting, Tyler stepped back and asked a deeper question:
“Where can I contribute most to the mission?”
Tyler understood that one of his natural strengths is systems thinking. As an intuitive, strategic thinker, he tends to see patterns, workflows, and inefficiencies that others overlook.
Rather than focusing only on filling roles, he focused on the system that enabled hiring.
He analyzed the ATS workflow and identified unnecessary steps, delays, and bottlenecks. By reconfiguring the process and simplifying how candidates moved through the pipeline, he dramatically improved response times.
Within the one-week window, the system was optimized and the hiring process accelerated.
The team stayed intact, and recruiting became a stronger contributor to the company’s broader production goal.
The Leadership Insight
The lesson from this storm was not just about fixing a system. It was about understanding your superpower.
In high-pressure situations, many people default to survival mode—trying to do more, react faster, or simply stay out of trouble. But the leaders who make the biggest impact pause long enough to ask: “What unique strength do I bring to this moment?”
For Tyler, the answer was systems thinking. By applying that strength, he was able to connect a tactical problem (an inefficient ATS) to a strategic outcome (accelerating engineering hiring and helping SpaceX move faster toward its mission).
Finding Your Superpower in the Storm
Storms are inevitable in leadership. The difference between surviving and leading through them often comes down to clarity about who you are. Finding your superpower involves three steps:
1. Know your wiring.
Understand how you naturally think and solve problems—whether through systems thinking, relationship building, creativity, execution, or vision.
2. Connect your strength to the mission.
Ask how your natural ability can help solve the problem the organization is trying to overcome.
3. Focus your energy where it matters most.
In a storm, the goal isn’t to do everything. It’s to do the right thing that moves the mission forward.
The Be the Bison Lesson
Storms will always test leaders. But when you know your identity and your superpower, storms stop being paralyzing moments of fear.
They become opportunities to step forward, contribute meaningfully, and help the organization move through the storm faster.
Because the strongest leaders don’t run from pressure. They turn toward it. And in doing so, they discover the strength that was inside them all along.
