Leading Through Uncertainty: Why Reassuring Your Team Backfires

Most of the executives I coach got where they are largely by reassuring their teams. They're good in a crisis and good at keeping people calm. What they don't always see is that calm has a cost when it isn't real, and I didn't see it for a long time either. 

In the year after the 2008 financial crisis, I didn't know whether my company would survive. One of my senior people caught me in the hallway and asked, straight out, whether we were going to be okay. I told her we'd be fine. I watched her shoulders come down, and I felt my own come down with hers.

On the subway ride home that night, I understood that the relief in that hallway had mostly been mine. I hadn't told her the truth. I'd said the thing that made me feel better.

I didn't see it at the time, but she'd read that. I only understood it later, from the way she pulled back, and she wasn't the only one. Over the next few months, people stopped bringing me the hard questions.

Years later, at a different company, we were heading into layoffs, and I handled it differently, mostly because I was too tired to pretend. Someone asked me a version of the same question, and I told him I didn't know yet, that here was what I did know, and that I'd tell him the moment I knew more.

I expected him to deflate. He leaned in instead, and we ended up having the most useful conversation I'd had with anyone on the team in weeks. I hadn't given him certainty. I'd told him what I knew, what I didn't, and what I was watching, and it turned out that was enough for him to stop guessing. People can handle knowing what's true. What they can't handle is not knowing what's true. And when nobody tells them, they don't sit with the blank. They fill it in themselves, and the story they come up with is almost always worse than the one you're holding back. I've watched a team convince itself the whole division was going away when what was actually on the table was two roles.

People read the gap between what you say and what you're feeling, and they read it before they can explain it. Stephen Porges, the researcher behind polyvagal theory, calls this neuroception: the nervous system deciding whether someone is safe before the thinking part of the brain gets a say. Your face and your tone carry what your words are trying to cover. Your people might not be able to put words to it; they just come away trusting you a little less and protecting themselves a little more. And the thing you needed most from them in a stretch of uncertainty, which was to hear the bad news early, stops coming.

A client I'll call Ray came to me convinced his team had gone passive on him. His company was in the middle of headcount cuts, and every time it came up he told his people not to worry about it. What I asked him was who felt better when he said it. He knew the answer before I finished the question.

He went back and told them the cuts weren't going to touch his team as things stood, and that he couldn't promise that wouldn't change. He told me afterward that nobody looked relieved. But two people came to him that week with problems he hadn't known about, and that was the first time in a while anyone had.

I'm not consistently good at this myself. I still feel the pull to smooth things over, especially when I'm the one who's scared, and I usually can't see it while it's happening, because in the moment it feels like care. What I can catch is the few seconds afterward, when I notice I feel lighter than I did before I opened my mouth. That lightness is the tell. If answering the question made me feel better, there's a good chance I answered it for me. I miss it more than I'd like, and I'm still practicing.

So the next time someone on your team asks whether things are going to be okay, pay attention to who feels better when you answer. That's most of what I do with the leaders I coach, sitting with them in those moments. If you're in one right now, that's a conversation I'd welcome.

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