Being a leader during change can be a struggle.
Last year, I was working with a group of senior leaders navigating one of the most disorienting situations any manager can face: their organisation was mid-change, the destination wasn’t clear yet, and their teams were looking to them for answers they simply didn’t have.
Country heads. Business unit managers. Cluster leads. All of them working through a recently announced merger — serious, experienced people who had heard the news the same way their teams had, and were now expected to lead through it. Every single one of them was wrestling with the same thing. Not the change itself, but the pressure of being expected to have answers when none existed yet. By the end of our time together, the feedback was consistent: for the first time since the merger was announced, they felt free of anxiety about the future. Not because the uncertainty had gone away. Because they knew how to stand in it.
That pressure is real, and it’s not going away. If anything, the pace of organisational change — restructures, market shifts, strategic pivots, leadership transitions — means that leading through ambiguity is no longer an occasional challenge. It’s a core leadership skill. The question is whether you’re building it deliberately or just hoping you’ll figure it out when the moment arrives.
Why Leaders Struggle With Uncertainty
Here’s the thing about hierarchies: we’ve spent decades equating seniority with certainty. The leader is supposed to have the map. They’re supposed to know what’s next, calm the nerves, and explain what’s happening. That expectation gets baked into how organisations function and how people look to the person above them.
The problem is that sometimes the map doesn’t exist yet. And when leaders find themselves without one, they tend to do one of two things — both of which make things worse.
The first is faking certainty. Projecting confidence they don’t actually have, making commitments that can’t be kept, or speaking with authority about things they’re genuinely unsure of. It feels like leadership in the moment. But when the reality contradicts what was said — and it will — trust collapses. And trust, once damaged in a time of uncertainty, is extraordinarily hard to rebuild.
The second is going quiet. Pulling back. Waiting until there’s something concrete to say before saying anything at all. This feels responsible, but it leaves a vacuum. And here’s what we know about how human brains handle vacuums: they fill them. With assumptions. With worst-case scenarios. With the kind of catastrophising that spreads through a team like a slow leak, quietly undermining focus and morale long before any actual bad news arrives.
Neither approach works. So what does?
What Leading Through Ambiguity Actually Requires
Let’s be honest about what we’re asking leaders to do here. It’s not to predict the unpredictable. It’s not to perform a stability they don’t feel. It’s something harder and more specific: to hold a team’s anxiety steady. To manage it down to the minimum. To be a calm, regulating presence in the middle of something genuinely unsettling.
That’s not a soft skill. It’s one of the most demanding things leadership asks of us — because you can’t regulate other people’s anxiety if your own is running the show. More on that in a moment.
For the team, there are four things that actually move the needle.
1. Focus on direction, not destination.
You may not know exactly where you’re going to end up. That’s honest. But in almost every change situation, you know something about the direction — the general territory you’re moving through, the values that will guide decisions along the way, the priorities that aren’t changing even when a lot of other things are. Lead from that. “I don’t know exactly what this looks like in six months, but I know we’re moving toward X, and I know how we’re going to work together while we get there” is not a weak message. It’s an anchoring one.
2. Be honest about what you know, what you don’t, and what you’re trying to find out.
People can tolerate uncertainty far better than they can tolerate feeling that information is being withheld from them. There’s a meaningful difference between “I don’t know yet, and when I do, you will” and silence. The first builds trust. The second breeds speculation.
Saying “I don’t have the answer to that question yet” is not a sign of weakness. For most teams, it’s a relief — because it’s the truth, and they already suspected it. What they needed was for someone to say it plainly, without spin.
3. Communicate more, not less.
The instinct when you don’t know what’s happening is to wait until you have something concrete to report. Resist it. The absence of information doesn’t read as “the situation is stable.” It reads as “something is being hidden.”
Communicate even when the update is that there’s no update. Communicate the process. Communicate what you’re looking into. Communicate that you heard the concerns raised last week and you’re still working on it. Frequency matters as much as content during periods of change, because it signals presence — and presence signals safety.
4. Protect their focus.
Change creates a gravitational pull toward distraction. Speculation, hallway conversations, energy spent trying to read signals and second-guess outcomes. It’s natural, and it’s corrosive. One of the most practical things a leader can do is keep pulling the team back to the work itself — to the job they were hired to do, the standards they’re accountable to, the output they can control right now.
This isn’t about denial. It’s about channelling energy productively. Teams that stay focused during uncertainty tend to come through it in better shape — professionally, reputationally, and often practically. The work continues to be the work, regardless of what’s being decided above.
One honest caveat on all of this: the approach above assumes a baseline level of organisational good faith. There are situations — significant redundancies, legal processes still in motion, confidential M&A detail that genuinely cannot be shared — where radical transparency isn’t just inadvisable, it may be irresponsible. In those cases, the guidance shifts slightly. You can’t always say what you know. But you can almost always say that there are things you’re not yet in a position to share, and that when you are, you will. That distinction — between withholding and hiding — is what your team will remember.
What You Need to Do for Yourself First
Here’s where most leadership guidance on this topic falls short. It tells leaders what to do for their teams but skips the prior question: what do you need so that you’re actually capable of doing any of it?
The emotional intelligence framework is useful here. Self-knowledge comes before self-management, which comes before being able to effectively read and manage the people around you. You can’t regulate other people’s anxiety if you haven’t dealt with your own. That’s not a nice idea — it’s a sequencing requirement.
So start there. Get comfortable with your own discomfort. That doesn’t mean pretending you’re not stressed or uncertain. It means developing enough self-awareness to understand how your internal state is showing up for the people around you. Is your anxiety adding to theirs? Are you projecting calm or transmitting pressure? These are not abstract questions. Your team is reading your energy in every interaction, and they’re adjusting their own behaviour accordingly.
Resist the impulse to over-control. Uncertainty makes many leaders tighten their grip — more check-ins, more oversight, more approval gates. It’s understandable. It also signals to the team that something is wrong and that they’re not trusted to handle it. Give people autonomy. Support them. Let them do the work. Control what you can control, and be transparent about what you can’t.
Get comfortable saying “I don’t know.” Not as a throwaway disclaimer, but as a genuine, trust-building act. “I don’t know the answer to that yet, and here’s what I’m trying to find out” is one of the most honest things a leader can say to people who are looking to them for certainty. Done consistently, it builds more trust than a confident answer that later turns out to be wrong.
And be honest with yourself about what kind of presence you’re being. If you walk out of a team meeting and the energy in the room is heavier than when you walked in, that’s data. Pay attention to it.
The Long View on Ambiguity
Change and ambiguity used to be episodic. Something that happened, and then resolved, and then you had a period of relative stability before the next thing. That rhythm has shifted. The last several years have made clear that for most organisations, operating in uncertainty is simply the new normal.
That matters because it changes what we’re actually developing when we build these capabilities. It’s not crisis management for a specific moment. It’s a leadership disposition — the ability to be honest, consistent, and fundamentally human in the face of things you can’t fully control or predict.
The good news, and I mean this, is that it’s learnable. It’s not a personality type. It’s not something you either have or don’t. It’s a set of habits and orientations that can be developed — through reflection, through practice, through the kind of deliberate work on self-awareness that too many senior leaders skip because they assume it’s only relevant earlier in a career.
At PROAKTIV, we work with leaders across the Asia Pacific on exactly this — not the theoretical frameworks, but the practical capability to navigate ambiguity without losing the trust of the people who are looking to them for direction.
Nobody expects you to have all the answers. What they need is to believe that you’re honest, that you’re present, and that you’re in it with them.
That, more than any map, is what steady leadership looks like.
