Naming the Fear

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Four Tips for Having the Conversations Everyone Else Is Avoiding

Here’s what no one wants to say out loud right now: people are scared.

They’re worried about layoffs, about funding drying up, about whether the work they’re doing even makes sense in this environment. And the longer we avoid those conversations, the more fear festers.

The good news? You can break the ice and talk about it.  These conversations don’t have to be perfect—they just have to be real.

Don’t Let Silence Create Its Own Story

When leaders say nothing, people make up their own narratives—and they’re rarely hopeful ones. Opening the door for honest dialogue shows your team that fear doesn’t have to be hidden. It can be heard and held.

Use a Grounding Framework

Try this:

  • Acknowledge the context (“There’s a lot of uncertainty right now, and I know many of us are feeling it.”)
  • Share what you know and what you don’t know (including what’s still unknown).
  • Invite questions and concerns without needing to solve them all on the spot. When they can’t be solved right now, ensure people that you are looking for answers. If you know a decision is well off in the future, reassure them when you know more, you’ll communicate what you can immediately.
  • Keep the door open (“Let’s keep this conversation going—we’ll learn our way through this together.”) Note the word ‘learning’.  It reframes the experience.  You aren’t ‘struggling’ or ‘grappling’, you’re on a journey that increases your capacity and certainty going forward.

Listen Without Fixing

Sometimes the most powerful move is simply to listen.  As a leader, that can be very difficult.  You’re wired to fix and act. In this situation, you don’t have to promise outcomes. You just have to stay present. When people feel seen and heard, their anxiety often softens—even if nothing external changes.

Use Fear as a Gateway to Focus

Fear can be reframed. Fear makes things seem bigger and more overwhelming. Once fear is acknowledged, it can help sharpen priorities, clarify values, and re-align effort. Ask: “Given everything, what feels most important right now? What can we control?” Then make an action plan to impact what can be controlled.

Bottom Line:

When you make space for hard conversations, you create a culture where people feel safer, stronger, and more connected. And that’s what builds real resilience—not just strategy decks and cost-cutting plans.

What Good Leaders Do When They’re Worried Too.

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Even when they don’t have all the answers.

Let’s be honest—leaders are feeling it, too. The weight of budget pressures. The ambiguity of shifting markets. The quiet wondering: Will this affect my team? My job? And yet, amid all this, employees are looking to leadership for confidence and direction.

This is the moment where the leadership gap either narrows—or widens.

Here are four tips for leading when everything is not alright.

 

Steady Doesn’t Mean Stoic. You don’t have to pretend nothing’s wrong. In fact, that kind of false optimism only creates distrust. Your team wants to see a real person leading them—not a cardboard cutout of “executive confidence.” When someone is feeling uncertain, they often look to see how those around them are showing up. You can’t always provide certainty in a difficult environment, but how you are responding will help quiet some of the concern. For example, a colleague of mine is facing a pending announcement of layoffs at her company.  She’s a seasoned career professional and has been here before. She has as much uncertainty as the rest of her team; however she is showing up for them by sharing her experiences with a previous lay off, what she’s learned about navigating internal resources, and being curious about what her team is feeling and thinking.

Name What’s True (and What’s Not). People fill silence with worst-case scenarios. Don’t let fear metastasize in the absence of communication. Tell your team what you do know, what you don’t know, and what you’re watching. Earlier in my career, I heard a great saying “Like milk, change has an expiration date.”  What’s true today may not be tomorrow. Transparency breeds trust.

Invest in Mid-Level Leaders. Your middle managers are often closest to the emotional pulse of the organization. This is when they need the tools and support to lead through ambiguity. Train them to hold space for uncertainty while keeping teams focused and aligned.

Align on Purpose. When strategy is in flux, purpose becomes your anchor. Reconnect your people to why their work matters—not just to the business, but to your customers and communities. In times of fear, meaning is one of the most powerful antidotes.

Bottom Line:

You don’t have to have all the answers. But you still have to lead. And that’s what people will remember when the crisis passes.

Our Breakthrough Leadership program helps mid-level leaders lead in uncertainty.  Click here to learn more. 

The Case for NOT Being So Busy

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Some people are busy but not productive.  That’s because they’re not the same thing. For that matter, the most productive among us are not always the most effective, which is a higher level of performance than productivity. Here’s the case for not being so busy.

The most recent Harvard Business Review magazine’s cover story is The Busyness Trap.  It warns us to not conflate activity with achievement. Almost simultaneously, Sunday’s Boston Globe featured an article about how family life slowed down during the pandemic – and how many parents hope to maintain that slower pace.  Lately, we’re seeing two ends of the spectrum; one is that feeling that we’re supposed to be busy, all the time, and the other that says, slow down.

I was very lucky early in my career to work at a small firm where our president focused on the results we achieved. He was part of a movement at Ford Motor Company in the 1970’s to share profits based on outcomes. He was very clear that our performance was viewed on the impact we made for our clients, not on working the most hours. After that, I went to a global firm that was all about how many hours you worked. So, you saw a lot of busyness that may or may not have been tied to an outcome that benefitted the client or the person working the long hours. As a matter-of-fact, clients were often suspicious about why we stayed around long after they left for the day. I knew the reasons for this philosophy – increase billable hours and/or impress your boss – but, right or wrong, it seemed ridiculous to me because of my previous experience.

Are you or your team getting caught in the busyness trap?  Are you focusing out activities? Or, are you more focused on outcomes? Obviously, there is frequently a connection between the two. You need a certain level of activity to achieve outcome. But there often isn’t a one-to-one relationship.

Why busyness can be counter-productive.

Busyness has become a badge of honor, a status symbol. Our worth seems to be defined by how busy we are. The problem is that, in today’s complex, rapidly changing world, we really won’t create the innovative breakthroughs by always being so busy that we’re at risk of burnout. Instead of doing a good or okay job on a whole lot of things, it’s usually more effective for the organization if you do fewer things exceptionally well. We need time to think, experiment, and reflect. When I am working with leaders to build resilience, I’ll ask them to be silent for 30 seconds to check in on how they are feeling. Too often they tell me they couldn’t shut off their to do list or the many things ahead of them. My question is then, what if you took one or two things off that list, how would it make you feel? Would you be able to be more productive, efficient, and effective at the other things you’re doing?

The person with the longest list doesn’t win.  Let’s let go of being so in love with busy. Start by setting aside a few minutes each day to slow down – to think, to connect, to invent, or just be quiet and rejuvenate. You’ll be amazed at what a few minutes of unbusy can do.

What’s Going On With You? A Little Introspection Can Improve Personal Performance

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Recently, I’ve been talking with leaders, including mid-level leaders, about the challenges they are facing with staff shortages, continued ambiguity from COVID, and end of year pressures. In these conversations, the underlying theme is the toll these issues are taking on their emotions and their continual effort to push those emotions away or to simply plow through them.

The context for these conversations is a broader discussion about leading with emotional agility. Susan David and Christina Congleton, in their Harvard Business Review article, define emotional agility as the ability to manage one’s thoughts and feelings in a mindful, productive way. When most of us get hooked by our negative thoughts, especially at work, we have one of two reactions. We buy into them (“I always do something stupid that gets in the way of my success.”) and avoid the situations that may evoke them. Or, we rationalize them away (“I shouldn’t have these thoughts. Just get on with it.”)

When we get hooked and choose one of these two common reactions, we are not giving ourselves the opportunity to respond effectively and intentionally. To choose to respond rather than react, the first step you must take is to recognize what is going on with you.

When I talk with these leaders, I ask them how many times a day they check in with themselves to assess what they are feeling. The overwhelming response is never. Some will say rarely. A very small fraction will say regularly. Then we do the following exercise:

First, we pause the conversation right there and I give them 30 seconds to just stop and check in with themselves.

Before the pause, I encourage them to work hard to accurately name what they are feeling. Don’t just tell themselves they are feeling stressed. Rather become more granular in the assessment. Are you angry? Frustrated? Overwhelmed? Constrained? To respond, rather than react, the first step is to accurately identify and understand what you are feeling. You can’t create an effective response or strategy if you are unable to clearly define what you are responding to.

At the end of 30 seconds, I ask them about their experience. They often say it makes them feel more centered, have more clarity, and are better able to manage those emotions than have the emotions manage them. It provides them the space to choose a response.

We then discuss how pausing 1-2 times a day – taking 1 minute out of an 8, 10 or 12 hour workday– can significantly impact the ability to become more emotionally agile and the impact of that agility on their ability to lead in challenging times.

Over the next few weeks, take a moment or two throughout the day to check in with yourself. What are you feeling? How are you reacting to those emotions? What opportunities do you have to pause to make the choice of how you will respond?

These are stressful times. You’ll find that this technique also works quite well at home.