A true story: Team vs Uncertainty
Today, I want to share the story of a team I worked with a few months ago.
Mish (also a team coach) and I arrived at a multinational company going through major changes — changes that were deeply impacting the organisation, and consequently, the work and lives of thousands of people.
Leadership change at the top (with no clear successor at the time).
Rapid growth of artificial intelligence in their sector, reshaping entire business models.
Layoffs quietly being planned, but not yet communicated.
In short: a huge amount of uncertainty.
The team we were going to work with was mostly made up of people who were themselves leaders of other teams.
Smart, talented, experienced professionals who, despite everything going against them, had an incredibly high level of energy and engagement as a team.
Instead of saying, “It is what it is” they were asking, “What can we do with all of this?”
The first thing we did was speak with their leader, even though a leadership change was coming. What did they want to achieve with these sessions?
We also spoke with other team members before the session, to gather different perspectives.
What emerged was a shared desire for more direct conversations that simply weren’t happening, a concern about the loss of leadership, and difficulty in keeping up with the speed of all the changes.
Several key questions came to light:
What should they do about the changes in the market, the industry, and the team?
How could they support one another and collaborate better, given everything that was going on?
How could they stay connected and united amidst so much uncertainty and change?
With all this in mind, we ran a face-to-face session. A space for awareness, to process everything happening, and to understand how each person was experiencing it.
The team jumped in right away. They shared hard truths, strong opinions, and emotions that hadn’t yet seen the light of day.
For the first time, they could speak openly about their perspective on the situation.
And about how it was affecting them.
They saw that these weren’t isolated, personal experiences. They were collective. There was shared concern, shared pain.
But that wasn’t all they shared.
In that session, they also discovered a shared sense of energy and commitment to face the change together.
That gave them hope.
We captured all of this in a working agenda, where they outlined an aspirational design of how they want to collaborate while navigating change and drafted action plans to:
Address the team’s need for broader support and collaboration across the company.
Maintain and strengthen their collaboration after the leader’s departure and through radical business model changes.
Shift the allocation of time and energy, moving a bit of the focus from pure content to relationships and the broader business picture.
Weeks later, Mish and I held a follow-up session.
The uncertainty was still there, but the team’s atmosphere, their energy, felt completely different.
On their own initiative, they were seeking greater support from one another. Actively exploring ways to move forward, to collaborate more deeply.
It’s not the uncertainty that defines the situation.
It’s how we choose to face it, together as a team, that changes everything.
Win Wisely.
PS This was a collaboration with Mish Middelmann as part of the Enterprisecoach network. The power and richness of coaching as a pair is that we each have different experiences as we coach teams, and we bring that all to the table in service of the teams we coach. If you are curious about how my co-coach Mish experienced the exact same situation, you can read about his experience here.