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Direction, alignment and disciplined execution still matter, but leaders increasingly have to make the year’s biggest decisions before the evidence is complete – from restructures and portfolio choices to operating-model change and AI adoption. Drawing on research from Edmondson, Grant, Brown, Boyatzis, Weick and Ancona, Patrick Bermingham sets out the capabilities that let leadership teams move responsibly while the answers are still emerging.
Direction, alignment and disciplined execution remain essential leadership capabilities. On their own, however, they no longer cover the full leadership task.
Leaders are making decisions with incomplete data, a shifting context and highly visible consequences. A strategy that looked sound when it was agreed can come under pressure within days because of a regulatory change, geopolitical event, supply disruption or AI breakthrough. Over time, inflation, investor sentiment, public trust and workforce expectations may expose a different set of weaknesses in the assumptions behind it.
For leaders and their teams, ambiguity has become everyday work. A restructure may be necessary before the future organisation is fully determined. Redundancies have to be handled with understanding while the business keeps performing. Boards want pace, investors want confidence and employees want an honest account of what comes next. Those demands arrive together rather than in a convenient sequence.
Leaders who handle this well resist the urge to fill every silence with an answer. They say what is known, acknowledge what isn’t and give people enough clarity for the next decision. They also contain their own anxiety rather than allowing it to travel down the organisation. That combination takes practice.
A useful leadership test: Separate what is known, what remains uncertain and what people can decide or do now. Teams should be able to act without behaving as though every uncertainty has disappeared.
Openness with discipline
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety is sometimes mistaken for a case for agreeableness. Her argument is more demanding: people need to be able to say what is true early enough for the organisation to act.
In ambiguous environments, silence is expensive. Bad news arrives late. Early warnings are missed. Teams become defensive rather than curious. During restructuring or reorganisation, that silence can be particularly damaging because people often know where the friction, duplication and unintended consequences are before the formal governance process does.
Strong leaders invite candour and keep standards intact. Openness has to sit alongside accountability and pace. The useful challenge comes before a decision is finalised; commentary after the consequences arrive is too late.
Leadership action: Before a major decision, ask explicitly for bad news, dissent and weak signals. Progress is visible when challenge arrives early enough to change or strengthen the decision.
Decisiveness without rigidity
Adam Grant’s work on rethinking matters here. Certainty was often rewarded in more stable markets. In an unstable market, unwillingness to revise and adapt becomes a liability.
Adaptive judgement is the discipline of knowing which assumptions remain valid, which are weak and which were little more than inherited optimism. Constantly changing direction is no substitute for that discipline.
In practice, leaders need language as plain as this:
- Here is what we know.
- Here is what we think.
- Here is what would cause us to change course; and
- Here is what will not change, even while much else does.
People can work with those distinctions and with clear review triggers. False certainty followed by surprise is much harder to absorb.
Decision discipline: For each material decision, communicate the facts, assumptions, non-negotiables and review triggers. Teams should know when to act and what evidence would reopen the choice.
Empathy with accountability
Brené Brown’s research on courage and vulnerability takes on a practical edge during restructuring, redundancy or business reorganisation. In that setting, leadership vulnerability means starting the conversation everyone knows is needed and nobody wants to start.
The words themselves can be simple: “We do not yet have the full answer.” “This trade-off is real.” “We got that wrong.” “I need challenge on this.”
During change, people notice both candour and steadiness. They need leaders who can acknowledge difficulty, remain human and still make a decision.
These competing demands put many executive teams under real pressure. They are expected to reduce cost, simplify structures, protect capability, retain critical talent and maintain morale, often at the same time. Work by Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee on resonant leadership adds an important dimension; the tone from the top matters because people read not only the message but the confidence, consistency and emotional steadiness behind it.
Communication test: State the difficult truth, the trade-off and the decision clearly. Then ask people to play back what they heard. The message has landed when they understand the rationale and expectations, even if they don’t agree with the outcome.
Pressure alone will not deliver performance
Boyatzis’ review of neuroscience and leadership research helps explain why inspiring and supportive relationships matter under pressure. Sustained threat can narrow judgement. People protect status, return to familiar patterns and simplify complexity too quickly. The response is understandable. It becomes risky when the organisation needs creativity, collaboration and careful judgement.
His related work on resonant leadership and coaching with compassion supports the observations that many experienced leaders we work with recognise: change is more sustainable when people feel seen, connected to purpose and supported to grow. Pushing harder does not reliably produce the same result.
Leaders can manage pressure while keeping the bar high. The important point is that pressure and performance do not have a linear relationship. Beyond a certain level, additional pressure erodes judgement, trust, creativity and collaboration.
For leaders the distinction matters. A high-performance culture differs from a permanently activated organisation. During prolonged uncertainty, energy needs the same deliberate management as milestones.
Pressure check: Track decision quality, collaboration and recovery metrics alongside delivery milestones. If all three deteriorate, remove avoidable load before asking people for still more effort.
The workforce is not one audience
A multi-generational workforce makes careful judgement about energy, meaning and trust especially important.
The lazy narrative says younger employees “do not want to work” while older employees “resist change”. Deloitte’s 2025 and 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Surveys and Gallup’s 2025 and 2026 State of the Global Workplace reports point to a more complicated picture. People at different career and life stages may express their concerns differently, yet many are asking similar questions:
- Is this work meaningful?
- Can I trust the people leading me?
- Will I be developed or just drained?
- Is flexibility real or performative?
- Does this organisation act with integrity when things get hard?
Younger workers may voice these questions more explicitly. Older workers often carry valuable institutional knowledge that goes underused. Mid-career leaders can be squeezed hardest of all: they are expected to deliver the change, support their teams and absorb uncertainty from above.
Leaders therefore need to look beyond generational labels and design work, communication and development around life stage, expectations and sources of motivation. Another engagement survey will not supply that judgement.
Workforce action: Segment teams by role, life stage and work need, then test proposed changes with representative groups. The design is working when different groups understand the support, flexibility and performance standards that apply to them.
Sensemaking has become critical
Sensemaking earns its place in leadership here.
The idea of leadership as sensemaking has a strong evidence base from Karl Weick’s work on organisational sensemaking and Deborah Ancona’s work at MIT Sloan on sensemaking as a core leadership capability.
Sensemaking starts with untangling noise from the outside world: elections, trade restrictions, AI breakthroughs, regulatory shifts, activism, conflict and market volatility. Leaders then translate those developments into choices that teams can understand.
Good sensemaking is closer to a working explanation than a 90-slide deck or a slogan. It connects external reality to the choices the organisation is making.
During a restructure, people ask more than what is changing. They want to know why this shape, why now, why this trade-off and what the change means for them. Without a credible account from leaders, they will construct one from partial information.
Sensemaking also brings protected assumptions into view. Every organisation has routines and priorities that carry history, identity and political weight. Stable periods allow them to sit undisturbed. Ambiguity asks whether they are fit for the future being built. Leaders need enough respect for the past to understand those choices, and enough independence to change them.
Sensemaking action: Translate each major external development into its implications for the organisation, the choices that follow and what teams should do differently now. Then ask teams to explain those implications in their own words.
Systemic limitations
In our work with leadership teams, intelligence is not the constraint. The people are smart and committed. The constraint lies in a leadership system designed for more stable conditions.
- Meetings search for certainty.
- Dashboards reward lagging indicators.
- Talent processes focus on individuals.
- Cultures confuse escalation with failure.
- Strategy cycles exist in a global context that no longer moves in cycles.
Transformation ambition has grown faster than the system around it. Meetings, measures and talent processes often cannot absorb the complexity, sequence competing choices or sustain the people doing the work.
Operating-system action: Review meetings, measures, escalation, talent and strategy cadence. Change the mechanism that most rewards certainty or delays learning. The test is whether decisions, escalation and course correction become faster while challenge remains visible.
The capabilities that matter now
Communication is only part of the work. Organisations also need to build the capabilities that allow leaders to guide change while the course is still evolving.
- Pause before reacting.
- Separate facts, assumptions and hopes.
- Invite dissent before decisions are finalised.
- Notice how change is landing for different groups.
- Judge when to consult and when to decide.
- Sequence change instead of merely announcing it.
- Stay steady without becoming detached.
- Learn in public.
- Create meaning when certainty is unavailable.
- Rebuild shared context when the organisation hears a decision for the first time after the leadership team has lived with it for months; and
- Revisit long-standing assumptions and legacy choices while respecting the people who built them.
Ambiguity tests more than strategy. It also exposes the emotional capacity of the organisation.
People can tolerate a great deal of change when they understand why it matters, where they fit, what is expected and what support is available. A series of disconnected announcements landing on already stretched lives produces a very different response.
Polished transformation language will not carry an organisation through the next few years. Leaders will need to combine strategic clarity with emotional intelligence, disciplined communication and a willingness to adapt.
The question worth taking back to the leadership team is simple: where are we still waiting for certainty, and what trust, judgement or learning would allow us to move responsibly now?
Final leadership choice: Choose the two capabilities the next phase of change requires most. Define the behaviours leaders must demonstrate, then review evidence of those behaviours alongside delivery.
References and further reading
Ancona, D., Malone, T. W., Orlikowski, W. J. and Senge, P. M. (2007) ‘In Praise of the Incomplete Leader’, Harvard Business Review, February.
Ancona, D., Williams, M. and Gerlach, G. (2020) ‘The Overlooked Key to Leading Through Chaos’, MIT Sloan Management Review, 1 September.
Brown, B. (2018) Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. Random House.
Edmondson, A. C. (2018) The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.
Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R. E. and McKee, A. (2002) Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Harvard Business School Press.
Grant, A. (2021) Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Viking.
Weick, K. E. (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage.
Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M. and Obstfeld, D. (2005) ‘Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking’, Organization Science, 16(4), 409–421.
Boyatzis, R. E., Smith, M. L. and Blaize, N. (2006) ‘Developing Sustainable Leaders Through Coaching and Compassion’, Academy of Management Learning & Education, 5(1), 8–24.
Boyatzis, R. E. (2011) ‘Neuroscience and Leadership: The Promise of Insights’, Ivey Business Journal, January/February.
Clark, T. R. (2024) ‘What Employees Need from Leaders in Uncertain Times’, Harvard Business Review, 28 February.
Auger-Domínguez, D. (2025) ‘How to Make a Seemingly Impossible Leadership Decision’, Harvard Business Review, 11 November.
Watkins, M. (2025) ‘The Five Biggest Leadership Challenges for 2025’, Management Today, 11 March.
Wylie, I. (2024) ‘Why Business Students Are Getting to Grips with Geopolitics’, Financial Times, 8 September.
Berwick, I. (2025) ‘Lessons in Leadership: Facing Up to the “Perfect Storm”’, Financial Times, 6 August.
Deloitte (2025) 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey.
Deloitte (2026) 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey.
Gallup (2025) State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report.
Gallup (2026) State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report.