Dealing with uncertainty is a natural part of being a leader. In fact, a leader’s ability to guide their people through uncertain times is more likely to succeed than the one lacking that ability or skill. After all, the true test of a leader’s ability is when they are needed the most. Leaders are problem solvers. The COVID19 pandemic has created an unprecedented amount of uncertainty that it is the biggest challenge to leaders in this century (Clark, 2020). Dhupia (2020) conducted a series of interviews with leaders at different levels of different organization to understand the challenges they are facing due to the pandemic. The results indicated that as a response to the uncertainty the employees, leaders have had to take on more responsibilities as the scope of their work expanded in a short period of time. In a similar manner, Gino & Cable (2020 posted an article where they related these new changes to a call creating more servant leaders. In the COVID and post COVID era, the scope of work for leaders will continue to expand as the boundaries between leaders and employees continue to reduce. The following sections discuss what leaders need to do to foster certainty through uncertain times.
COVID19 Challenges that Leaders have had to Respond to
Employee Wellbeing
For the organizations that have survived the pandemic, employees and their leaders have had to make tough decisions. At a time when every aspect of the employee’s lives has been disrupted, leaders in most organizations have been forced to be closer to their people and care for their wellbeing. This is especially true when the employees were dealing with an uncertain future in their jobs and their physical wellbeing (Dhupia, 2020). The challenge is not limited to employee wellbeing. Over the last few centuries, different leadership theories have been proposed. While different groups support different theories of leadership, the pandemic has diminished the importance of some while making others essential to the organization’s survival and success. A good example of the former is the reduced utility of transactional leaders (Shadraconis, 2013). Transactional leaders are those that secure the services of their followers by exchanges and bargains to meet immediate needs. Due to the pandemic, the regulations that aim to contain the spread of the pandemic also keep leaders from visiting their employees or customers physically, hold informal meetings, and organize encounters. The implication is that to transactional leaders, trust is to be exchanged with benefits. In the absence of benefits, employees will lose trust in their leaders
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As a result, a paradigm shift occurred where the adaptable leaders, such as transformational and servant leaders, are critical to the survival of different organizations. The employees seeking reassurance from these leaders do not expect them to have all the answers (Staats, 2016). Instead, a show of transparency, authenticity, and to some extent, vulnerability was what they needed (Dhupia, 2020). Leaders who met these needs enjoyed a greater degree of trust from their employees as they were perceived to be on the same level and side. These are also the qualities of transformational and transactional leaders that increase their demand during the pandemic.
Changing Business Strategies
The statement that the pandemic is a disruptor is an understatement. A more accurate description of the pandemic is that it is the biggest black swan event in recorded history. Not only has the pandemic disrupted entire supply chains, it has also managed to change the dynamics of demand and supply, evolved consumer behavior in unknown directions, and facilitated the implementation of regulations that while justified, they are also oppressive to most business models (Seetharaman, 2020). Such changes can be understood in the context of the theory of business, which requires an accounting of three assumptions about their operations. These are assumptions about the operating environment, assumptions about how the organization will meet their mission objectives, and assumptions about the resources and needed competencies to achieve the mission objectives (Seetharaman, 2020). The pandemic has invalidated all known assumptions along these three dimensions.
Leaders have been forced to rethink what they knew about the market, their consumers, their employee’s needs, and adapt their business models with untested strategies. As the situation continues to worsen, the short and long-term prospects for some businesses have become uncertain. It is up to the current and future leaders to not only lead their organizations and people through these uncertain times, but also inspire them to make the best of the situation, and to some extent, chart a part towards future success and prosperity for their organizations and their people.
Decision Making in Uncertain Times
An even bigger challenge than rethinking business strategies and innovating business models is the actual decision making that leaders have to engage in. In response to the advent of the information era, leaders, especially in business, had gotten used to making decisions under conditions of great certainty. Unfortunately, the pandemic has no historical precedent. Leaders who were used to making decisions under conditions of limited or controlled uncertainty have been challenged to adapt, and learn to navigate complexity as early as possible (Drysdale & Gurr, 2017). More than ever, there is a need to increase organizational digital integration to take advantage of the new tools to help in the decision-making process. The current challenges promote the investment into virtual infrastructures that will not only aid in employee management, but also help to stay updated about consumer behavior. If such strategies are implemented, organizations might find themselves in a position to take advantage of emerging business opportunities. Before that happens, organizational leaders need to complement their skills with the new tools.
The Breakdown of Trust
Once the immediate survival of the organizations and the future of its employees has been settled, there will be a need to look forward to the uncertain future and chart a path. When this happens, cultivating trust will become essential, but difficult to achieve and sustain. According to Clark (2020), the validity of information will be short, where the trends observed yesterday might by different from those that will occur tomorrow. As the employees and consumers continue to lose their trust in established methods, a trust gap will be created. Leaders need to fill the gap and become anchors for both the employees and the consumers. Achieving this will be a challenge, given the fact that the tools and strategies leaders used to inspire trust will no longer work. The regulations that aim to contain the spread of the pandemic also keep leaders from visiting their employees or customers physically, hold informal meetings, and organize encounters.
Furthermore, existing methods are not effective to building trust. Given the current work environment (COVID19), the main way to maintain contact is through virtual means. These have yet to be proven to be fully effective. Video calls, for instance, limit the degree and effectiveness of verbal and non-verbal communication when compared with in-person interactions (Ebner & Thompson, 2014). If leaders need to refill the trust gap, they need to be innovative with their solutions. A good strategy for leaders is to expand the scope of the work, where they keep in constant contact with their people to ensure their personal and professional lives are unaffected. Should their people be experiencing challenges, they need to help out, not as a superior from the workplace, but as friends helping each other out. Trust can also be inspired by conferring a higher degree of autonomy onto the employees. For instance, instead of relying of hard deadlines for tasks, leaders can allow the employees to set flexible timelines. such as the man-hours required to complete a task, and leaving the employees to decide when and how they will perform the tasks. Trust can also be built by sharing a concrete vision of the future and inviting the employees to contribute towards its achievement.
The Meaning of Leading Through Uncertainty
The challenges leaders are facing today might lead to the misconception that this is the end of leadership as it is known. Others might also think that the struggles leaders are experiencing due to the pandemic outline the weaknesses in their models. In other words, leaders might not do well in these uncertain times due to the increased ambiguity or the lack of ability or skill to process information quickly, make decisions, and adapt their mindsets to accommodate the changes as effectively as possible ( Ashrafzadeh & Nambudiri, 2020; Clark, 2020). Counterintuitively, the uncertainty is just a challenge to some leaders. To these types of leaders, uncertainty is an opportunity to thrive as they are forced to bring out their full potential and make decisions in situation where there are no clear answers or guidelines for their decisions.
Unfortunately, not all types of leaders possess these adaptive skills or talent. To them, there needs to be a guideline that will not only give a clearer understanding of leading through uncertain times, but also outline essential leadership skills and abilities that would be required. Below are three essential capabilities leaders need to lead their people and organizations through uncertain times.
Personal Adaptability
When leading through uncertain times, the key thing leaders need to understand is that most, if not everything they knew about leadership needs to be re-evaluated. Before the pandemic, the only leaders who contemplated having their people run the organizations remotely were those who perceived inherent benefits from such management styles. As a result, such leaders had to be very familiar with different technological tools that would help them lead their organizations virtually (Nielsen & Aagard, 2021). During the pandemic and in a post-pandemic world, such cases will cease to be the exceptions and become the rule. All leadership abilities associated with managing remote and virtual teams will become an essential part of the leader’s skillset.
The point is, leaders now have to be adaptable. There is a business imperative that currently forces leaders to have a growth mindset, lest they fail to foster certainty among their organizations and people in uncertain times (Allen, 2018). Note that being adaptable is not just about having a growth mindset. Adaptability also means knowing when to evaluate and update their mental models immediately after they become irrelevant or a detriment to their leadership abilities (Clark, 2020). All these changes are easier said than implemented. Leaders also have to be resilient enough to support their people and organizations even when they are under stress. If leaders are no longer up to task with the challenges brought by the uncertainty, they risk failure, both personal and organizational.
Adaptability in uncertain times described in the previous paragraph can be achieved through transformational leadership. According to Shadraconis (2013) and Chai et al. (2017), transformational leaders are unique due to their natural ability to lead their organizations in uncertain times. They do so by using sensemaking as a determinant of the actions that need to be taken (Shadraconis, 2013). Transformational leaders also inspire their followers to take collective action, which can be crucial when responding in a crisis situation.
Ability to Navigate Complexity
It should be noted that the only certain thing about the pandemic is that it will bring about change at different levels of the organization. Businesses will have to change how they operate, relate and communicate with their customers, and how they manage their employees. The modus operandi today is to have the employees work from home (Couch et al., 2021). Furthermore, most of the communication that happened in the organization now has to be facilitated remotely (through the organization’s internal networks or over the internet). These changes are as comprehensive as they are complex. Furthermore, there is no one way to managing the change to ensure the continued success of the organization.
There is an imperative for the current leaders to be capable of managing change. Change management is a topic that most leaders are familiar with (Clark, 2020). What makes navigating and managing change difficult is that leaders have to do it at all levels of the organization, at the same time. If the organization did not have a digital integration program, they will need it as they overhaul their operations while teaching their employees on how to use the new systems. At the same time, these employees are working from home, where there are distractions and where the traditional human resource management policies no longer apply. Navigating these and other sources of complexity will be a skill or ability that current and future leaders will need. After all, the world has yet to experience all the short and long-term consequences of the pandemic.
The good thing is that the tools to help leaders navigate complexity already exist and have been proven to be effective. One such tool is the Seven Domain Framework that has been used in education to successfully manage and navigate complexity. According to Drysdale & Gurr (2017), the Seven Domain Framework helps leaders manage their knowledge in uncertain times by focusing of seven key areas: context, determining the direction, developing the organization and its people, influencing, teaching and learning, and leading.
Rebuilding Trust
Despite the high levels of uncertainty and interpersonal constraints everyone is dealing with, especially leaders, there is an opportunity for them to cultivate trust through empathy and authenticity. Being good communicators will no longer do. Instead, leaders will also have to add transparency to cultivate trust among their followers. While difficult to achieve, leaders can still pursue two strategies. First, they can inspire engagement, where their job will be to inspire their organizations and people to work towards a larger purpose. Secondly, leaders will have to gain a deeper appreciation and the value of diversity. Given that trust goes two ways, leaders will have to demonstrate their ability to appreciate difference through inclusion and inspiring a sense of belonging beyond simple differences.
Note that these are not the only abilities that leaders will need to understand and practice what leadership through uncertainty. As mentioned before, the world has yet to experience all COVID has to offer. Even then, being adaptable and having the ability to navigate complexity is an essential starting point. Leaders that understand this and practice it will know to never rely on certainty, today and in the post-covid19 era. Instead of becoming comfortable that they have managed to tide through the pandemic, such leaders will be preparing themselves and their organizations to be resilient to changes and find solutions even when there are no clear solutions.
Conclusion
Leaders are natural problem solvers. Dealing with uncertainty is a natural part of their identities and sense of worth. The COVID19 pandemic has created an unprecedented amount of uncertainty that it is the biggest challenge to leaders in this century. At the same time, the pandemic has created new opportunities, especially in the field of leadership. The challenges leaders are facing today require creative and innovative solutions. For example, the disruptions in the employee’s personal and professional lives are forcing leaders to reconsider their distance with their employees. Should they retain their dignity and continue working as is or should they start approaching their employees not as superiors but caring friends. Regardless of what they choose, the changes brought by the pandemic are irreversible. Furthermore, enough time has not passed to gain an understanding of their full scope or their short and long-term impacts. Unfortunately, not all leaders innovative and creative enough to adapt and thrive in uncertain times. They need a guideline that will not only give a clearer understanding of leading through uncertain times, but also outline essential leadership skills and abilities that would be required. As a result, the three most important capabilities leaders need to foster certainty in uncertain times are ability to adapt, navigate complexity, and rebuild the trust that has been lost or eroded. Change is the only constant. The ability to adapt will help them stay ahead of the curve and ensure their organizations and employees are the least disrupted by the changes. Being able to navigate complexity will enable these leaders to understand and take advantage of emerging opportunities. After all, competition will be low if their organizations emerge as market leaders in uncertain times. Achieving all this requires that the workforce retains enough trust in its leaders to overcome their uncertainty and fears about the future.
References
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