How to Solve Leadership Challenges in a Disrupted Workplace

If your leaders don't believe in disruption, your employees won’t either.?

I’m not just talking about top executive leaders, either: I’m talking about leaders across an organization. If they don’t believe in what you’re doing—if they cross their arms, shake their heads, say, “This is crazy!” when employees ask them what they think—you’re going to have a hard time creating the change you know is necessary.?

If you’ve been a leader for some time, you know that changes prompt challenges. Where and how do you begin in a landscape as disrupted as ours?

Addressing Leadership Challenges

In my discussions with clients, I often hear about similar difficulties. Many of the leaders I’ve spoken with recently have shared the following issues:

• Unclear objectives and communication. It’s all the more challenging when the change is big and complex.
• Resistance to change and change fatigue. Conflicts fuel this pushback and disillusionment.??
• Lack of leadership buy-in. As I mentioned, we’re talking about leadership across the organization.?

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to addressing these challenges, doubling down on alignment and communication—while embracing the messy process—will serve you well.?

Here are five strategies to address and overcome these leadership challenges.?

1. Create Alignment for Buy-In and Transparency

This sounds straightforward, but in many ways, alignment is the biggest challenge facing disruptive leaders. When things are complex and constantly changing, people feel lost. The goal is to get everyone on the same page.?

To get there, assess your existing alignment. See if everyone can answer these three questions:

• Who is your future customer??

• What is your strategy to meet their needs??

• How are you personally contributing to the strategy’s success??

Not fully aligned? Planning (specifically, your Six Quarter Walk) comes in here. Where do you want to be 18 months from now? Take that vision, and get clear on how you will accomplish it. This enables you to stay nimble in a changing landscape: At the end of the first quarter, you can assess where you’re ahead, and where you’re behind and adjust accordingly.?

Perhaps more importantly, your Six Quarter Walk enables your teams to understand their roles and how their responsibilities roll up and contribute to the transformation. Complexity and conflict ease when people know what they contribute. Equip your teams with the knowledge and resources they need to move forward.??

2. Communicate Constantly

As leaders, we often think it's “one and done.” But that couldn’t be further from the truth.?

I often think of how Jeff Weiner, former CEO of LinkedIn, began his meetings. He’d introduce himself every time (of course, everyone knew who he was!) and share LinkedIn’s mission: “to connect the world's professionals.” He’d then review the company values that enable the team to accomplish their vision.?

Jeff did this at every meeting. When employees asked him how long he planned to do this, Jeff answered, “I’ll stop when people stop looking surprised.”

That’s the reality of leadership: you must constantly (and consistently) communicate.?

3. Embrace the Messy Middle

When you start from one place and reach toward another, you’re bound to hit the in-between. It’s this space—the messy middle—that prompts change fatigue. People know they will have to wade through it and don’t want to. It’s uncomfortable.

As a leader, your imperative is two-fold:

• Describe the middle, and offer context for it. Tell your teams what the “after” looks like, and explain why you must go there. This also means you’ll need to share why your current state is no longer tenable. Your team needs this clarity to commit to the journey.?

• Reassure your teams that it’s going to be okay. Change is hard and scary, especially when the space you’re in now (the “before”) feels comfortable. Build up your relationships with your people, empowering them to speak up when and if the going gets tough. By reassuring your teams that you’ll be with them—come what may—you create psychological safety, enabling you to push forward together.?

Most leaders and their teams want to get through the messy middle as quickly as possible. I invite you to take a different approach. Embrace the opportunity to be curious and look around, no longer anchored in the past and not yet arrived at the future. These are rare opportunities to revel in the liminal space.?

4. Disagree Well and Commit Completely

If people are able to disagree well, they’ll be willing to bring all ideas to the table.

We know that the bigger the change, the bigger the conflict. Your job as a leader is to create a culture of strong communication (this includes strong conflict resolution). This goes back to my first point: If everyone is 100% aligned with and committed to the vision, then the disagreements that arise are simply about how to get there. In this way, disagreement is a powerful, generative tool.??

The hallmark of disagreeing well is that once the decision is made, you have confidence that those who were on the “losing” side of the argument are wholly and truly committed to the path forward. Because they’d want to know that if the outcome had been different, the approach would have the team’s full support.?

5. Embrace Setbacks and Failures

This is a tough one for leaders in particular.?

Most leaders I know feel that failure is not an option. They expect themselves to be 100% right all the time, but it rarely works out this way.?

Disruption calls for leaders to reflect on their relationship with failure: What does it look like for you? What does it look like for your team? How do you move forward from it??

Part of this work involves giving yourself permission to change your mind. Most decisions are reversible. Of course, you want to be thoughtful and informed when you make choices, but sometimes, once you’ve gleaned more information, you need to go in a different direction.?

That’s okay.

Every decision allows us to learn, improve, and advance the team. If you try something and it works, that’s great! But there’s value and benefit in trying something and realizing it doesn’t work.??

Embracing learning (through failure) is a huge step in navigating these challenges.?

Above all, anticipate the issues that inevitably will arise when you create change. Preparing for them in advance enables you to meet disruption most effectively.?

Your Turn

We’re navigating a lot of disruption, especially with new tools like GenerativeAI. What are some of your biggest disruption leadership challenges, and how do you address them??