Alicia McKay
It’s a worrying time to be in charge.
How can you be a successful leader when you're worried about the future?
We live in a time of unprecedented worry. Weary, worried leaders are leading weary, worried teams through lockdowns, financial panic, job uncertainty, health uncertainty and a never-ending deluge of organisational and personal change.
Hearts are heavy, the future is scary, and you could be forgiven for thinking it’s all too hard.
The worried leader
In 2021, we’ve got more to worry about than ever. Being a leader isn’t simple anymore. It’s not just: “Be good at doing stuff and help other people be good at it too,” like the good old days.
Now we’re worrying about things like:
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Are we vulnerable to cyber attacks?
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How do I protect my team’s mental health and well-being?
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Can we pivot to online services quickly enough?
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Are we environmentally responsible?
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Do we have an inclusive work environment?
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Does our organisation need redesigning?
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Is our vision clear enough for people and customers to engage with?
No wonder we’re tired. But whatever your job title is – Chief People Officer, Head of Marketing, Manager Strategy and Performance – worrying is not in your official job description. There is no prize for a Chief Worry Officer; if you let the pressure overwhelm you, you’re no good to anyone.
How to lead when you’re worried
Your worries aren’t going anywhere. The most successful leaders aren’t the people that are the best at their jobs, or who have the easiest run of it. They’re the ones who take stress and uncertainty in their stride, steer themselves, their teams and their organisations through madness and emerge stronger for it.
You can’t control most of the things keeping you awake at night, but here are five useful tips for managing the load.
Tip #1: Set clear expectations
You know how you’re worried about how to do your job right now? It’s 10 times worse for people with less control, less visibility and less agency than you do. People are wobbly, and rightly so.
It’s difficult to balance caring for your teams and keeping the wheels turning. Blending compassion and empathy with direction and leadership is hard, but it’s a necessary part of your job.
In 2021, with staff juggling families, home-schooling and lockdowns, it’s important to be connected, compassionate and flexible. However, a lack of clarity about expectations and deliverables will only stress their already full plates as they try to guess and infer what they should be doing. Reduce the decision load and ambiguity by creating as much certainty as possible.
Don’t leave people guessing about what you need from them, the bottom lines, and the scaffolds and guidelines for managing virtual meetings, variable hours and deadlines. Instead, ask them what they need, and agree on what’s expected. You’re not being harsh, you’re being helpful.
Next Steps
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Ask your team what they need certainty about right now
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Agree on ground rules for meetings, timelines and communication
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Readjust priorities and projects in collaboration with affected staff members
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Hold people accountable with compassion.
Tip #2: Choose the right outlet
When you lead a family, team or organisation, you are responsible to the people you serve. You set the tone. Vulnerability, authenticity and openness are important – but not at the cost of safety and security for people who rely on you for direction and support.
You might lie awake at night worried about whether you’ll still be in business next month, but delegating that stress to your employees is not fair. They’re not going to tell you when you cross the line and make them fearful for their security, because they’re worried about their jobs.
…but that doesn’t mean swallowing your stress into an internal ball that will eat you alive.
Instead, work out the most appropriate outlet for each of your worries and channel them appropriately. You might share existential panic with your best friend, performance insecurity with your coach, financial concerns with your partner and deadline fears with your peers at the leadership table.
When they have somewhere to go, your worries become more manageable – just ensure you’re putting them in the right place.
Next Steps
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Assemble your personal Board of Directors
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Set clear intentions for what you share with your team, and what you share with others.
Tip #3: Get perspective
Not all worries are created equally, but when we’re in panic mode or feeling overwhelmed, it can be difficult to distinguish between the truly important things and the trivialities. Every new email can start to feel like a threat, and every minor disaster has the potential to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
The reality is that at least 50% of what you’re currently worried about won’t happen or doesn’t matter that much. You’re overcomplicating most of it, because the boundary between when one worry starts and another ends isn’t clear anymore. It’s time to simplify.
You can’t work with what you can’t see, so break it into pieces rather than walking around with an amorphous worry cloud over your head. Write down everything you’re currently stressing over, and sort through it, Marie Kondo style.
Use an Eisenhower urgent/ important matrix, score each worry out of 10 or list them in order of significance. It doesn’t matter what tool you use, the key is to use one. Organising your fears makes them far more conquerable.
Next Steps
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List all of your stressors and unanswered questions
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Sort through them, one by one.
Tip #4: Make decisions
When we’re worried, every decision feels heavier than it needs to. With increased uncertainty, our choices seem to blur into one another. Every time we try to decide on a course of action, all we can see are the other things it’s connected to, or dependent on, and if we’re not careful, we end up paralysed.
There’s no such thing as perfect information or perfect conditions. The more challenging our context and the more senior our job, the murkier things become and the harder decisions are to make—it comes with the territory.
The good news is, most decisions are un-doable. The bigger risk is remaining in limbo and not making any decisions. When we do that, we carry an increasingly heavy mental load, like running a dozen apps in the background. That wears us down, and it's completely unsustainable when we already have low bandwidth.
Instead, make small decisions and tweak as you go. As soon you lock in one or two pieces of the puzzle, you’ve got something to go from, and things get progressively clearer. With one thing decided, we can start to take action in other areas too, creating a snowball effect that drives us forward.
Don’t panic about getting it wrong – you can change or fix it. Just make a decision and keep going.
Next Steps
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Make one important choice right now
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Use that as the basis for the next one
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Repeat as necessary.
Tip #5: Prepare for disaster
Some of the things you’re worried about are going to happen. Many of them aren’t. Other things you haven’t even though to worry about will pop up, and completely rock your world.
Another lockdown, legislative change, a new competitor, the loss of a key staff member, a PR disaster, a big contract that falls through—I can’t tell you what it will be, but I can tell you it will be something.
They don’t warn you how much your job will be crisis response before you move up the ranks. In the early stages of your career, you’re completely unaware of just how much drama and disaster takes place around the leadership table – and just how rocky things are. You have a backstage pass now, and there’s no avoiding it. So get ready for more.
Instead of trying to predict the future, get prepared. Expect disruption and build flexibility and scalability into your plans and processes. Make it as easy as possible to expand and contract. Sort your risks by impact – not likelihood – and put pre-emptive measures in place. Work out the most critical things for business continuity and shore them up.
Most of all, cultivate an expectation of disruption. Rather than being surprised and rattled every time something goes to plan, learn to embrace the chaos. Practice saying, “It’s fine, we’ve got this,” with a confident demeanour, and get ready to say that a lot.
Because you’ve got this.
TL; DR
If you’re feeling worried right now, that’s OK. We all are. Instead of letting the stress consume you, work on five key things to boost your leadership effectiveness in times of change:
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Set clear expectations
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Choose the right outlet
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Get perspective
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Make decisions
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Prepare for disaster
For more on how you can build these skills, check out Not An MBA – a game-changing alternative to traditional executive education for emerging and aspiring leaders.
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