Driving Leadership Performance and Development in Uncertain Times—10 Enduring Lessons

Your Leadership Talent Strategy

1. Take note of what this moment reveals about your leaders

The current climate is more ambiguous than previous crises, presenting unique opportunities to reassess leadership capabilities. Stars will emerge and empty suits will be exposed. Recognize leaders who demonstrate intellectual and emotional resilience, self-awareness, and agility. These qualities will be crucial as organizations face unpredictable challenges.

2. Play offense and defense

The biggest shifts in a sector’s competitive rankings occur during moments of uncertainty, including downturns. Defensive measures are essential, but the best leaders also think strategically about opportunities to go on the offensive. Leaders must find opportunities amid uncertainty while maintaining optimism. This dual approach allows organizations to adapt and thrive in volatile environments.

Your Anchor Talent

3. Push leaders to look outward

During times of uncertainty, many top leaders succumb to the natural human tendency to retreat inward and fail to support each other. Ironically, they become more individualistic at the very time when leadership matters most. The best leaders recognize and resist this response, and, critically, support peers who need their guidance and mentorship.

4. Bet on poise, perseverance, and resilience

Hemingway famously defined courage as “grace under pressure.” Uncertainty exerts substantial pressure on leaders and provides a real test of their ability to persevere in spite of it. Look for—and allocate more responsibility to—those who demonstrate a combination of calm, competence, and confidence in the face of uncertainty.

Your Rising Leadership Talent

5. Deploy leadership talent strategically

Uncertainty provides a valuable opportunity to test and develop leaders. You are already assigning leaders to rapid-response teams and forming new initiatives to confront volatility. As you do so, work to ensure that, where possible, critical initiatives are led not only by safe hands, but also by those rising leaders with high potential.

6. Provide rising leaders with the latitude to lead

During periods of uncertainty, senior executives have a natural tendency to assert control, stripping away leadership responsibility from their direct reports in an effort to mitigate risk. As a result, rising executives become operators and executors, not leaders and decision-makers. Your team’s leadership skills will atrophy, and those weaknesses will echo through your leadership ranks for years afterwards. Avoid reverting to command-and-control styles and recommit to empowering your teams.

7. Let stars shine

Ensure that senior leaders do not unwittingly allow hierarchy to stifle the emergence of the best leaders with the best ideas. Merit and potential will reveal itself during a uncertainty, and the strongest leadership will often come from those without leadership titles. Don’t stand in the way of the stars that emerge.

Your Future Leadership Talent

8. Don’t assume that we will soon enter a buyer’s market for talent

Though it may be counterintuitive, external hiring for top talent is about to get much harder. In environments characterized by extreme uncertainty, those in stable roles often become highly risk averse and unwilling to make a transition, even when unsatisfied with their current situation. Many forecasters believe that we are heading toward a buyer’s market for talent. We are not. Organizations should remain vigilant and strategic in maintaining their talent pipelines to outpace competitors.

9. Be cognizant of (but not beholden to) the signals sent by decisions on talent investments

The need to tighten costs, defer, or delay investment decisions are natural in times of uncertainty. It is important to remember that cuts to leadership and talent development can send a message that talent development is a luxury good. If you are reprioritizing talent investments, be sure that your approach is as thoughtful as your approach to reprioritizing investments in top-line growth initiatives.

10. Remember that cold recruiting engines take time to restart

In the wake of past downturns, many companies found that it took years to restart their recruiting engines (and rebuild talent pipelines) that had been shut down. If you need to slow down your hiring, or pause it altogether, a thoughtful approach to keeping the engine running—e.g. through talent mapping and prospective candidate engagement—will enable you to significantly outpace your competitors when markets heat up.