The Paradox of Leadership Vulnerability: Why Acknowledging Uncertainty Strengthens Your Team
When the Path Forward Isn’t Clear
As leaders, we’ve all faced moments when the path ahead is shrouded in uncertainty. Perhaps you’re navigating a rapidly changing market, implementing a significant organizational change, or responding to unprecedented challenges. In these situations, it’s tempting to fall into one of two common traps: sitting in place waiting for the uncertainty to dissipate, or making a hasty decision just to keep things moving.
I’ve observed both approaches throughout my career, and I can tell you with confidence – both are typically suboptimal choices.
The Counterintuitive Power of Admitting Uncertainty
The best approach I’ve found for navigating rapidly shifting environments is counterintuitive for many leaders: recognize the uncertainty, name that condition out loud, and acknowledge that you don’t have all the answers in that moment.
This approach feels vulnerable, especially for senior leaders who are accustomed to projecting confidence and certainty. After all, isn’t a leader supposed to have the answers? Aren’t we expected to chart the course forward with unwavering conviction?
The irony is that when you make yourself vulnerable by acknowledging uncertainty, you actually take a step toward bringing your team along with you. Everyone knows when a situation is uncertain. Everyone knows when there are no clear and easy answers. By admitting this reality openly, you create conditions where you can truly join your team and get everybody engaged, leaning forward together as you work through the uncertain moment.
Hidden Decision Bottlenecks: The Glasses We Don’t Know We’re Wearing
This principle extends beyond just handling uncertainty. Consider how often our own biases create hidden decision bottlenecks. I like to use a simple analogy: imagine wearing a pair of glasses all the time. If you live life at high speed, these glasses get dirty, smudged, and scratched. Yet because you wear them constantly, you don’t even notice the diminished clarity.
It’s only when you change glasses that you suddenly realize how much clearer everything looks.
Our decision-making processes are often similarly clouded by biases we don’t even recognize. We may not be fully considering all alternatives, or we might be stopping short of addressing the bigger problem. Perhaps participation is limited, or some team members are holding back crucial perspectives.
Creating Conditions for Better Decision-Making
How do we clean these metaphorical glasses? By creating diversity in our discussions, conversations, and collaborations with our leadership teams. This diversity of thought helps us see where we may be missing opportunities or overlooking important considerations.
Developing self-awareness around how you’re managing yourself and your fellow leaders is the primary way to see past the biases that may be holding you back and bottlenecking your effectiveness as a decision-making team.
The Power of “Why” in Driving Change
Another critical element in leading through uncertainty involves communicating the “why” behind organizational changes. The rational “what” is never enough. There are always individual-level consequences around any shift taking place – sometimes small, but they’re there all the same.
When you open up about why changes are important and why the organization is undertaking them, you create opportunities for people to contribute their discretionary energy. They can choose to support that “why” connected with the rationale you’re sharing, not just following instructions, but bringing their best energy and thinking to making the change happen.
Building the Capability to Pivot
Navigating uncertainty also requires developing the capability to pivot quickly – a skill that, like many others, requires regular exercise to develop. Many organizations focus on efficiency, doing certain things repetitively, which often rules out activities like experiments, trials, or pivots.
To build this capability, we need to practice testing, experimentation, and pivoting regularly. In my work with organizations around strategic change, we set up 90-day results-focused experiments. For many organizations, this timeline initially seems impossible – there’s disbelief they can create meaningful results in less than 100 days.
However, with practice and innovative, accelerated ways of working, teams learn new collaboration methods that make rapid results possible. These short-cycle experiments build the “muscle” of pivoting, making organizations more adaptable when market conditions shift.
Measuring the Impact of Leadership Development
This approach to leadership – acknowledging uncertainty, recognizing biases, communicating the "why," and building the capacity to pivot – requires deliberate development.
Traditionally, tracking the return on leadership development investments has been challenging. The line of sight between these investments and tangible outcomes has typically been difficult to establish.
Today’s best practice involves tracking both process measures and outcome metrics. We need to see how behaviors change immediately after leadership development sessions, while also connecting these changes to actual business outcomes like sales results, week by week and month by month.
The Paradoxical Truth About Leadership
The paradox of effective leadership in uncertain times is that strength comes not from projecting certainty when none exists, but from the courage to acknowledge uncertainty and create the conditions for collective problem-solving.
By making yourself vulnerable in this way, you don’t diminish your leadership – you enhance it. You create the opportunity for authentic collaboration that taps into the discretionary energy of your entire team.
Next time you face uncertain conditions, resist the urge to either wait or rush. Instead, gather your team, acknowledge the ambiguity openly, and invite them to join you in working through it together. You might be surprised by how this vulnerability transforms your effectiveness as a leader.
