J: Welcome to Slingshot25’s Shotcast, a series of —
C: So you’re really not gonna tell me what you’re gonna say?
J: Wait, Courtney is interrupting me as I’m trying to do my introduction. We are going to talk about uncertainty today.
C: Be prepared for anything.
J: Courtney is threatening me with —
C: Do not feel safe.
J: I feel suddenly… Well, I was feeling safe, and suddenly I don’t feel so safe anymore.
C: All right, get going.
J: I think this is appropriate. So let’s do the spiel one more time here for our listeners who we’ve probably turned off at this point. Welcome to Slingshot25’s Shotcast, a series of bite-sized podcasts that will feel like an espresso shot to your brain. I’m Jackie.
C: And I’m Courtney.
J: And indeed, what we want to talk about today is uncertainty. We have a lot to say about this. Everyone has a lot to say about this, so we thought we would just join the chorus and see if we can add a little something thoughtful, or maybe unexpected.
C: Maybe even helpful.
J: Well —
C: That would be unexpected…
J: That would be unexpected for us, I imagine. So the first thing that comes up for me when I think about uncertainty is, of course, it’s ubiquitous; it’s everywhere, which I think is the definition of the word ubiquitous. And it’s largely because we have so much unresolved ambiguity. There’s just… I saw a stat today that organizations are sending through what they call planned changes, meaning that they put them on a strategy deck somewhere and present them to the executive team, and plan them to roll through the organization. They do ten of those a year. Ten a year is the average for, I’m guessing, relatively large-size organizations. Probably not your mom-and-pop shops, but that’s probably not who’s listening to us. So if you’re listening to us, you probably work in an organization that has a large slate of changes that are planned and coming at you, and probably from all different levels of your organization. And essentially, we could say that just means change is happening all the time.
C: Mm-hmm.
J: Because I don’t know any one of those changes that’s going to get done in thirty days. So that means you actually have change going on all the time, and we know that those changes that are happening are overlapping and entangling, and they don’t come through like coming down an assembly line. They’re happening all at once.
C: Yeah, and the word “planned change” is giving too much credit.
J: Hmm.
C: Planning to change something doesn’t mean you’ve planned out how it’s going to change. So —
J: Precisely.
C: It’s probably too generous to think that you have a plan to roll out how things are going to work.
J: Right. You have a plan to introduce change. What we’ve noted through, I don’t know, decades of working in these places, but also working with clients in the role that we’re in now, is they don’t plan the details of integration. How is this actually going to… When this change hits where work gets done, what’s going to happen? What do we do when questions pop up? There’s oftentimes a little bit of a “your eyes are bigger than your stomach” kind of idea —
J: Where people think this change sounds really great, and then it starts to travel through the organization and starts to hit all sorts of entanglements and snares and confusions. Their idea, though, is that they’ll listen to all of those, and they’ll… Stop snickering. You’re snickering too soon. Stop. I can’t even get through my sentence. But I know why. I know the cynicism that we’re feeling right now. I know you all know it, those of you who are listening. So this is where uncertainty comes from. You’re not crazy if you’re feeling uncertain. It’s everywhere, all the time. And one of the things that we bristle at, and I know, Courtney, you’re actually going to talk about what leaders should be doing, but one of the things they shouldn’t be doing is saying, “What we really need to do, this would be so much easier, if our employees were just more resilient, if they could just suck it up a little more.” And so we actually get phone calls asking for resilience training for employees, and the eyebrow arch goes up whenever we get one of those requests, and we ask a lot of questions about what’s going on here. Because resilience isn’t… it’s a good thing to have, by the way. This is two truths that seem to be in opposition, at the same time. Resilience training is great if, as an individual, you’re like, “I would really like to learn some of the skills of being more resilient.” It’s just a great human skill to have. It’s a bad prescription coming from leaders.
C: Yeah, because what it does is blame the people, or put accountability on the people who are trying to make it work. It sort of flips it upside down and says, “Okay, you didn’t start the fire, but we need you to fix it.” And the accountability for actually creating an environment where people can be successful, where they have a chance, should sit with the leader, not the employee who’s trying to adapt to the change. They can work on it together, but we can’t just outsource the responsibility to make the environment healthy for people, and then when it’s not healthy, say, “Man, I wish my people would clean up this mess.” That is really, really unfair, and it happens a lot. I think the thing leaders should be doing is providing — and I just heard this word in a podcast last week, and I love it — providing certainty anchors. People are so uncertain, they’re so scared, they’re so nervous, they’re so worried, and there’s lots to be uncertain, scared, and worried about. And what leaders can do, parents can do, others can do, is provide a certainty anchor. A certainty anchor is just reminding people what is true for sure, no matter what. You can’t predict the future, we can’t predict the future, but there are some things that are just always going to be true. Who loves you? Who cares about you? Where you live, what’s next to you? I coach my kids a lot around just… look sideways, who’s beside you? And look down, who’s looking up to you? Who’s looking for support from you? Who can you take care of? And when you look in your world, however big or small that is, and you look sideways and down, you start to find opportunities to create value, opportunities to create goodness, opportunities to help, and that feels kind of good when things are uncertain. And so reminding people where those are — who are your people, where are your chances to help, and what’s always true no matter what? Yeah, the world might look different, but we’re still going to be a bank. The world might look different, but we’re still going to care about our employees. The world might look different, but we’re still fill in the blank, right?
C: And then, maybe one other thing — it’s going to sound redundant coming from us, but the other thing I think leaders need to do a lot in times of uncertainty is acknowledge and validate the feeling of being scared, anxious, worried, disappointed when things are changing that they can’t control. It’s perfectly understandable that people are going to be feeling all of those things, and then some. So if you’re not acknowledging, validating that — just saying to people, “I see you there. It makes sense you’d feel that way” — do it. And if you’re doing it a little bit, do it more, because people are very… and I found myself saying in a talk a couple weeks ago, people are not okay. They’re just not. You can’t run with your motor open with anxiety all the time, and that’s the world we’re living in. So be someone who allows people to ground, allows people to be seen, reminding people the future’s always been unknown.
C: Right? It always has. What’s different?
J: Not for psychics.
C: True, but… oh, that’s a whole different podcast.
J: We’ll get to that one eventually.
C: So what would it feel like to be reminding people the future’s always been unknown, and maybe be the voice of a little optimism? We figured it out before. We’ll figure it out again.
J: I love that. And it might also be why — we’ll just leave you with one little anecdote here from another bit of news I read recently — that we all know AI skills are things companies are paying for. If you have the skills to turn AI into agents and to reshape the work in your organization, then organizations want to pay for those skills. That is the number one skill in terms of where companies are spending their merit budgets this year. The second place is leadership. The second skill that they’re essentially willing to pay for, that they see as a premium to their organization, is leadership skills, and I think we just gave people a sense of why that’s true.
C: Absolutely.
J: Well, I think that’s all for this episode of our Shotcast, but we always have much more to say. If you want more, drop us a line at Slingshot25.com. Until next time.
