Leading Through Uncertainty with Confidence and Candor

Your leadership capability and capacity continues to get tested by outside forces

Uncertainty is everywhere. If you dwell on it, it can be quite unsettling and paralyzing, actually. For you as an executive, manager, or founder, leading a team through turbulent times or times of uncertainty, must become a skill you master. Leading through uncertainty with the objective of achieving organizational focus and action, instead of your teams dwelling on the worst potential outcomes, has become one of the most critical skills we can hold as leaders.

External Factors

Recently with a recent global pandemic, climate crisis and events, social injustice, economic turbulence such as inflation to name one, recession (or pending recession) to name a second, or war, leaders must navigate a multitude of forks in the road where stockholders, stakeholders, customers, employees, partners, and suppliers, are watching, listening, and either judging or reacting to your communication and action, or lack thereof.

When things get tough in your business, with your team, community, or generally in your country, or across the world, how you respond, matters. The manner in which many leaders or companies respond is a great start to review what the natural reactions are and give you some perspective to consider on a more appropriate approach to responding or reacting to external forces.

Leadership Reaction

Typical responses often set off patterns of nervousness and anxiety, leaving increased concern and distraction, not putting people at ease. The natural reaction aligns with fear. Fear drives reduced productivity, performance, and upheaval. Creating fear or trying to squash fear by communicating around the topic, instead of addressing it head-on, must be handled with care. Companies and leaders also tend to overreact in the short-term, under-reacting in the long run.

While budgets, plans, and focus should already account for worst case scenarios to a point, they are often inflated with waste and overinflated numbers, including wasteful spending and wasteful time and effort, compounded by unrealistic expectations for margins and growth. This creates a perfect storm of over-hiring, underperforming, all exaggerated or misaligned by poor planning and a reactionary approach. What do companies often do when things get tough, they start managing their business differently.

Natural reaction when business turns south or uncertainty increases, creates the following:

• Tightening up the budget cost reduction

• Reducing headcount

• Closing up in positions hiring freezes

• Closing locations

• Getting out the microscope on operations

• Focusing on any noise that could be seen as adding value to the business

• In many cases, adding work that takes away from the bottom line

The Impact

The impact elevates employee anxiety on job, creating a decreased feeling of job security, hurting culture and reducing performance all to hit a number, which is driven by those same team members. Some would say the downside of the cycles allows for an opportunity to “right size”, others would say right sizing is a quick fix to a poor business model, poor strategy, or ineffective management. What comes to mind for you to consider as a leader or future leader, is the importance of true ongoing, consistent, performance management. Leadership, management, human resources, and talent management basics by managing the performance and development of your team. That’s management and leadership, and when proactive can prevent a lot of the aforementioned impacts, but it often gets pushed aside for distractions along the way which eventually causes reactionary moves when it’s too late. You’re right sizing, by managing over time, not in one artificial event, where the impact is amplified.

Yes, the organization should have been built to withstand typical business cycles in the first place. Typical cycles, not the apocalyptic event every 100 years, but to be able to survive and even thrive during or after an economic event.

This isn’t a shout at any one organization or even a group like those in the Fortune 500, rather, this is a call out to all of us as leaders to learn from these decision patters and the status quo. Let’s be different and squash the way business has always been done. There are some firms that have excelled at this - let’s learn from them. How can we handle uncertainty with communication? See below for a standard SOP.

Here’s the skeleton for the SOP on handing uncertainty:

1. Calm, concise, and communicative - bringing the calm and steady force is leadership your team needs

2. Be out in front of your team - no hiding in the shadows

3. Lay out the state-of-the-state, provide an overview

4. Tell them the truth - how you tell them requires some nuance for messaging properly, but tell them what they need to know and understand

5. Lay out the immediate impacts and plan forward

6. Make promises, but only ones you know you can keep

7. Do not make any promises you cannot deliver on

8. Tell them it’s going to be okay, only if it is

9. Communicate a follow-up as an email, video, or follow-up call as appropriate

10. Stay out in front of your team, finding the right opportunities to be in front of them to hold AMA’s, or other round table or fireside chat opportunities

11. Align your leaders or tenured team members to help disseminate the message and truth

12. Work through the problem or challenge - accept the truth, but don’t accept your fate. Navigate the waters and get through to the other side

Following these core steps will give you a little more of a playbook when leading through uncertainty.

Hopefully, this added a little value to your business or your career. Thank you for reading.

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