Management tip: Leadership under uncertainty
Uncertainty is unavoidable. As a manager, you need to be prepared to lead your team through unclear waters, but you need to have the right mindset yourself. omegaconsulting Managing Director Gerlinde Baumer sums up six tips to help you change your perspective:
- Embrace the discomfort of not knowing. Detach yourself from the claim of omniscience and accept the role of the constant learner. You don’t have to have all the answers.
- Distinguish between “complicated” and “complex” problems. They require different solutions.
- Say goodbye to perfectionism. Instead, strive for progress, expect to make mistakes and recognize that you are able to continuously correct course if necessary.
- Resist the urge to oversimplify and jump to conclusions. Take a disciplined approach to understanding both the complexity of the situation and your own biases.
- Don’t choose to go it alone. Join forces with like-minded people who can contribute their own experiences and perspectives.
- Use the bird’s eye view. A comprehensive, systemic view of the problems at hand can reveal untested assumptions that would otherwise be invisible.
Actively shape your own career with omegaconsulting
Source: Zucker, Rebecca and Rowell, David: “6 Strategies for Leading Through Uncertainty”, in: Harvard Business Review (2021,4), at: https://hbr.org/2021/04/6-strategies-for-leading-through-uncertainty (accessed on19.8.2021)
