I do believe people are inherently evolved to feel uncertainty and similarly to entropy which grows over time, our uncertainty, if left unchecked, grows over time.
When you have a random toothache and you don’t do anything about it for months, unless you are medicating somehow, you probably won’t feel more confident that it’s going to be ok. And each time the pain pops up again, you will feel higher uncertainty about what it means and why you haven’t got it fixed yet?!
Similarly, we all have our uncertainty at work. And it changes over time. In some cases, it is resolved in a matter of hours, like when you don’t know why that stupid VBA macro doesn’t work. In others, it might take months like when your company is getting acquired and you don’t know if you will have a job next quarter.
And there are all those other things between. Any conversation, any meeting, missed deadline, met the deadline, work with an unknown deadline.
What makes this difficult to understand is that we all carry our own bag of neuroticisms and each of us is on our own journey in learning how to work with them ourselves. We all have our own ways of understanding ourselves and understanding of language we use to describe situations and expectations from a workplace.
But we are all wired to seek certainty. At least most of us are.
However, certainty is a fairly strong feeling. I’m not sure if I’m an exception, but I am a person who feels certain only on very rare occasions. Most of the time it’s the feeling of lack of uncertainty, which I believe is a much better state to strive for.
Now I need to somehow wind this back to people leadership since it’s what the article is called…
When you are leading people, it’s important to pay attention to this. And it’s anything, but easy.
And we won’t get it perfect, ever. In a lot of cases, we will mess up.
But there is a difference between uncertainty from doing a new type of work, not knowing how to do it and doing the same work whilst not knowing the context and not knowing if I’m going to be fired if I make a mistake.
And we all know one simple example of this: “Hey, can we have a chat when you have 5 minutes?”
Most of us immediately go to our place of uncertainty. I.e. Have I done something? Is there a mistake I’ve made? What have I missed? F******ck… what is this about”. And then we sit in 15 minutes in anxiety, because our manager is “just finishing their meeting”, so it’s not just those promised 5 minutes! And then your head just spirals in those thoughts whilst your watch tells you about your increased stress, which freaks you out even more!
Calls start and your heart is pounding. This is it, I’m getting fired, let’s get my CV up to date while I wait for my manager to join…
“Hey, how are you doing, I was worried about you, you seemed a bit frustrated on the last call, so I want to find out if I could help you with that piece of work somehow?”
And all those 15 minutes of uncertainty and anxiety disappear in a few seconds.
We don’t always know how our communication will land, but we can always try to do better.
A few things to do:
- Make yourself accessible. If your next availability for your people is always at the end of next week, people will just drown in uncertainty. And eventually will learn not to bother.
- Don’t just cancel 1:1 or move them by one week, especially if you are not generally accessible. We all have accumulated uncertainty and are waiting for that opportunity to talk and clarify things. Conversation, which might not seem too important for you, might be really important to the people you manage.
- Give people context! Have one less latte a week and use those 15 minutes to give 3 people 5 minutes worth of context!
- I believe openness and integrity go a long way. It’s ok not to know things and it’s ok to say that you don’t know something. It’s much worse to try to murk the water, or even worse, to lie. Naturally, there are things which can’t be shared, but it’s important to be consistent about the line.*
- In general, communicate!
Disclaimer: I mess these things up all the time, so I’m not trying to sit on a high horse here. We are all trying to learn something and apply it!
*One person I know always just slightly nodded and shrugged their shoulders, which I understood I got to a point where they didn’t want to share more details (e.g. having NDA or dealing with sensitive issues), which worked quite well.
Just above average 