How to Lead Through Uncertainty and Ambiguity

In business, it’s a rare stretch of days or weeks where everything is running perfectly according to plan. There are so many variables and other details happening because you have people working for you, people supplying your raw materials, people buying from you. And let’s not forget the push and pull of political and economic events that create havoc in your company.

As the leader, you’re supposed to have a handle on these things and be able to lead your company through the rough, choppy waters of business life.

But, as I’ve already discussed elsewhere, you don’t have to know what’s going on, you have to rely on the people around you to provide you the information and expertise that you need.

What you need to be able to do is to communicate.

You need to be an expert communicator, and you need to do it clearly and often, updating your constituents on a regular basis, and telling them the truth.

You don’t want to have to go back a day later and apologize for the day before. People are more likely to trust and believe you if they can trust the news, even if it’s bad.

Winston Churchill figured that out during World War II. He held a lot of radio broadcasts to the British people, and the first bunch of them were nothing but bad news. He never made any promises that he couldn’t keep, but he also always told the truth, even if it wasn’t good news.

As a result, people knew they could trust him to tell them how things were going instead of filling everyone with platitudes and misinformation designed to keep everyone happy or at least satisfied.

The second issue is to manage and discipline your management team to not fall prey to conjecture. That ends up being the enemy within. If people don’t like the news they hear, they’ll go somewhere else to get a nicer story. You only have to look at the number of conspiracy theories around anything political to see that in action.

Your managers and supervisors will have a tendency to create their own narrative — it’s only natural. So that means when people go to a different source for an alternative to the bad news, there are your managers and supervisors trying to soften the blow, which may actually counteract the reality of a situation.

Everyone needs to be on the same page when it comes to communicating certain messages.

That means you need to inform your management team before you communicate with everyone. It might be a pain in the ass, but it avoids a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation in the process. It also prevents the management team from coming up with their alternative versions and creating confusion.

Once, when I was still in the lighting business, one of our biggest suppliers was visiting — I hosted the CEO and chairman of the board for a few days. I gave them a plant tour, and of course, within nanoseconds of people seeing them, they concluded the business was going to be sold, which just killed production.

It wasn’t being sold, of course, but it took several weeks to quash that rumor because there are always barrack-room lawyers pontificating about what something means and “what you really ought to do.”

I was already in the habit of communicating with everyone face-to-face once a month at a general meeting. And even though I had heard the rumor and addressed it, that didn’t stop the barrack-room lawyers from running their mouths. I had to bash a few heads (figuratively, of course), but within a month, the reality set in, and everyone realized the company wasn’t being sold.

It’s amazing how quickly the herd instinct can take over!

When you’re dealing with a time of uncertainty, ambiguity, or even crisis, your updates should be as regular as once a day. Not only do people come to rely on that news, it also lets you point to improvements of the prior day or week. It helps you maintain your credibility and helps people learn to trust your message.

If you already hold a regular town hall meeting once a month, you’ve already set the expectation for that. But in a crisis, you need to deal with it every day, sometimes for weeks, depending on the scope of the issue.

For example, let’s say one of your company’s buildings burned down. That’s not going to be fixed in a week, but everybody’s job depends on that. In other words, they can’t do their job until they get what they need from that building.

And they’re already facing uncertainty and fear at home about what that’s going to mean for their jobs and for their families. They’re worried about how long they’ll be out of work, when they can return, and whether they’ll be able to pay bills and feed their families.

You can’t help them with monthly town hall meetings or even weekly updates. You need to make daily updates and be open to answering questions several times a day. That’s the only way to put to rest all the rumormongering and fear-driven actions that lead to a lot of bad choices.

So, keeping everyone up-to-date on a regular basis until you can demonstrate changes and improvements is the important thing. And once you’re out of the crisis, you can reduce the frequency of those updates.

Most importantly, people will take notice of that, so it adds to your credibility if your messages can match the circumstances.

I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now, I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.