10 Goals and Practices for Leading Teams: No 9. Let the team engage with uncertainty

Introduction

One of the emerging challenges for leaders of teams is dealing with uncertainty - including volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, or VUCA. With uncertainty Teams can feel lost, confused, chaotic and appeal to leaders to provide certainty. Actually, leaders can’t do that: they don’t have omnipotence, nor see into the future. 

The challenge emerging for leaders is to provide clarity on how the team can become comfortable with engaging with uncertainty together. OKRs, experimenting, early testing and habitual reviews of team process, all offer ways for teams to take deliberate, coordinated action with things that no-one knows the answers to.

The Goal

For leaders to focus on how their team can engage with uncertainty together, rather than providing the false certainty of a clear plan that relies on a predictable future. 

The Practice

Discuss as a team the things that no-one can know such as market volatility, or new competitors. Invite the team to embrace this uncertainty together - it’s OK, it’s the same for everyone who has their eyes open. Using OKRs to steer your team’s progress, build and test the smallest experiments as rapidly as possible in the areas of uncertainty. Review the evidence of what progress was made and decide where to experiment next. Review how the team worked together and make adjustments to help quicken the pace and the effectiveness of how the team is working together. Deepen relationships, transparency and trust as a way of strengthening the bond of the team. Help them to realise that it is each other, not the future, on which they can depend.

Links to the other nine Goals and Practices for Leading Teams:

No 1. Be clearer on the team's purpose

No 2. Appreciate team dynamics - and use them to team better

No 3. Let's ditch SMART objectives and replace them with OKRs

No 4. Empathise with our stakeholders - more, with skill

No 5. Don't motivate your team - create the conditions for them to motivate themselves

No 6. Make performance a team game

No 7. Agree on how to disagree

No 8. Don't delegate, or empower - coach

No 9. Let the team engage with uncertainty

No 10. Learn to self-manage - together