Consume Uncertainty, Transmit Clarity

“The job of a leader is to consume uncertainty and transmit clarity.”
-Yamini Rangan, Chief Customer Officer, HubSpot

The Heavy Burden of Leadership

Leaders carry heavy responsibilities, which inevitably means they face significant challenges.

Being a leader is not for the faint of heart. It’s a continuous struggle to meet the demands of leading people, growing revenue, keeping a vision alive, and taking care of their own well-being and their family's, so that their life works and they can, in fact, perform.

Every day, I talk to leaders whose day-to-day struggles are so intense that even the strongest among us would find it hard to keep going.

Facing Harsh Realities

In a recent Groundwork coaching session, an executive leader was faced with several new harsh realities:

• His senior management team uncovered several barriers to their own performance that he needed to unblock. They needed more of his already limited time and attention.
• An uncontrollable circumstance occurred on one of their important projects that was taking up a lot of mental energy.
• He was under evaluation by his board of directors and while he had outperformed most all targeted goals, the feedback he was getting was leaving him feeling defeated.
• The recession was starting to hit his industry, and tremendous uncertainty was looming.

Inside, he felt like throwing in the towel. We’ve all been there.

However, he had several extremely helpful things going for him:

• He had solved harder problems in the past.
• He had the awareness of his survival patterns this time around. He knew intimately where he was making decisions from.
• He had a system to rejig priorities.
• He had spent many years cultivating a strong faith that helped get him through tough times.

The Power of Awareness and Systems

The first thing we did was dump a complete inventory of all the existing issues he needed to solve. We got everything in front of us—out of his mind and into capture.

Already, relief surfaced.

Then, we dropped in. He could see the parts of his survival pattern that were having a field day.

We decided on our agenda for the next session: Rejig priorities using Focus Areas, cross-check the calendar with the new priorities, and set agendas for each of his direct reports for their upcoming 1-1s.

Before leaving our call at the end of the day on Friday, we blocked time for him to run new financial models first thing next week, and I assigned him his homework: To have time with his family, get out in nature, and spend part of Sunday on his spiritual practices.

The Path to Clarity

It truly is the job of a leader to take uncertainty and use it as a catalyst for clarity. But so many leaders are caught in cycles that keep them from ever reaching clarity. Many are making futile attempts to “problem-solve” from a place of survival and fear. Fear doesn’t ever really breed clarity. It might give you a temporary solution, but it is unlikely to give you the clarity that comes from seeing the whole picture. It will not give you the solution that comes from the place deep inside you that knows the right steps to take.

One of the key coaching points we use at Groundwork in states of urgency is to not make decisions or take action unless clarity is present.

Sometimes, waiting for clarity can seem completely ridiculous. How can we wait for clarity when there is an emergency unfolding?

If you are caught in a crossfire, it might absolutely be necessary to enact quick decisions because the fear is real and could cause harm unless you act.

But we often have this kind of response when it is not appropriate. A good leader knows that widening the gap between stimulus and response is the whole game.

A good leader reserves reactivity for true emergencies.

A Leader’s Reflection 

At the end of our session, this executive leader reminded me of something powerful too. He reminded me that it’s lonely at the top. He emphasized how essential the clarity I bring to our conversations is to his success.

He left the session feeling reflective. Later that evening, I received a text from him sharing more insight he had uncovered about his survival pattern, as well as a renewed energy to tackle the issues.

Practicing Groundwork means you are dedicated to a kind of leadership that is grounded, thoughtful, and clear. You “consume uncertainty and transmit clarity”.

Keep up the good work, folks. The world needs your leadership.