3 tactics for leading a team through uncertainty

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Last year, I woke up to some unexpected news: our company had been acquired.

Up until then, our team had been working on a multi-year project. We were just a few months away from our first alpha release. But seemingly overnight, everything changed.

Everyone on the team had questions, myself included. Was our big, ambitious project even relevant anymore? What parts of the business would our new owners invest in, and which parts would they cut? How soon would they take over? And when they did, would they choose to keep any of us around?

The biggest question on my mind though was: how do I support my team during this strange and uncertain time? 

In the months that followed, I adopted some practices to help me navigate these uncharted waters. 

Process and prepare

Leading through uncertainty requires you to be calm, collected, and composed. However, you can only be these things if you give yourself the chance to process the upcoming changes yourself. 

I felt a mix of grief, anger, frustration, disappointment, and shock. It’s important to allow yourself to work through these feelings individually so that you can come to a place of acceptance. In doing so, you will have a deeper understanding of what emotions members of your own team are likely to feel. It’s also helpful to prepare yourself for bumps in the road ahead. In the face of uncertainty, it’s common for people to feel helpless, lose their motivation, have lower output, or even jump ship for a role at a more stable company. 

Being emotionally and mentally ready for these outcomes will allow you to better respond to these situations. In the days following the news of our acquisition, I prepared myself for the likelihood that some folks on my team would resign. When those scenarios came to pass, I was level-headed and ready for them. Similarly, I envisioned what it would feel like to be laid off, as well as what I might do if I was chosen to stay.

Grounding the team

Once you’ve processed the upcoming changes and prepared yourself for any number of outcomes, you can fully shift your focus to your team. 

In my experience, the most helpful thing you can do is to ground the team.. Provide clarity and share context whenever you can. This helps your team focus on the raw facts rather than unproductive conjecture. 

If a project that the team planned to work on is being put on hold because of the organizational uncertainty, share the context around that decision with your team. Similarly, if you need to shift how you spend your own time as a manager in response to the changes in the company, be clear about what is changing, what is not, and why. 

As a leader, being willing and open to share what you do know (as well as what you don’t know) in difficult times can be particularly reassuring and helps to create a culture of trust and transparency. While you may not have all the answers, your team will be able to trust that you have their best interest at heart and are sharing whatever information you have as soon as you are able to.

Another useful strategy is to gently remind folks of what is in their control versus what is not. For example, layoffs are not in their control, but how we show up for and support our teammates is.

Notably, grounding your team doesn’t mean you should sugarcoat things. It’s better to admit what you don’t know and instead acknowledge the emotions or concerns that they might be having and validate them, while also helping them focus on what they can control.

Providing support

One of the best ways to navigate through unsettling times is by supporting your team. However, each person might need a different flavor of support. Some reports might want to lean on you as a sounding board. One engineer on my team wanted more regular checkins during the early days of the acquisition news and specifically wanted to hear how I was processing the change. For him, support looked like me validating his emotions, coaching him through the uncertainty, and sharing my own perspective on the situation.

Some folks might want to use work as a distraction, while others may be too distracted to work. Both are natural responses to uncertainty, and you can support each in different ways. 

An engineer who is feeling demotivated by their current task might enjoy pair programming on a different area of the stack with one of their peers. You can help facilitate those connections. After our team saw some backend engineers leave, I encouraged our frontend experts to dive into the backend stack and use the situation as an opportunity to learn and pair on a new challenge together. 

Takeaways

Facing change and uncertainty as a leader is daunting, especially when you have more questions than answers. However, if you can manage to hold on to your humanity, lead with authenticity, and meet your team where they’re at, you’ll find a way through the uncertainty to the other side.

Perhaps most importantly, the next time that you are met with the challenge of leading through uncertainty, you’ll have built up confidence in yourself and will know that it’s possible to chart a course through tough times, while keeping your team steady along the way.

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