Embracing uncertainty: A leader's guide to flexibility

Leaders typically spend January prepping for the year ahead. But that’s difficult when you’re eight months pregnant, and your baby has zero concern for your deadlines.

I’ve lost count of how many times people have asked how long I’ll be away, whether I’ll be checking my emails, or what support I’ll need when I return. People often expect leaders to have all the answers, but the truth is: I don’t know yet.

Lucky for me, that uncertainty worked to my advantage. It forced me to change my approach from setting goals to building flexibility. This has resulted in a team that is autonomous and adaptable, whether I’m in the room or away on leave.

You don’t have to have all the answers

According to a report by Careers After Babies, 98% of moms want to return to work after having a child. However, less than a quarter actually do. Early parenthood is unpredictable, and there’s no way of knowing how it’ll unfold.

While I’m committed to my career, I’m under no illusions that March might bring me sleepless nights, and the months ahead may be full of doctors’ appointments. I might have no time to work at all.

That isn’t a challenge you can plan your way through. Sure, you might end up returning after six weeks. But if you set yourself that deadline and you end up delaying, you may end up feeling like you’ve failed and start to question your leadership when you’re actually managing two of the most demanding roles there are.

But you do have to be ready for anything

When you don’t know the outcome, you need to prepare for every possibility. That means focusing on building flexibility and developing resilience, because systems that can cope with volatility and deal with change don’t rely on a single timeline or person.

At Woofz, we’re focused on setting out clear decision ownership, so everyone understands where to turn for support, and also how to train our teams to handle pivots and take on new responsibilities when we need to. We aimed to create a team capable of thriving even when conditions change, without constant oversight.

Resilience doesn’t just help organisations get through difficult moments. It actively improves long-term performance.

Research from software and consultancy firm MHR Global found that 82% of the most resilient organisations rank highly for customer satisfaction, while 76% score highly for employee engagement.

Overall, resilient businesses are far more confident in their ability to outperform competitors across growth, profitability, reputation, innovation, and adoption. And the flexibility that this culture of autonomy and adaptability provides will allow me to be flexible too, as I deal with the birth of my child.

How to embed flexibility within your organisation

If you don’t have flexibility embedded in your organisation, the following can be helpful:

• Encourage cross-training: Let your team experiment and explore new skills, or take on “side quests” as we like to call them, even if it doesn’t support their primary role. If only one person knows how something works, that’s a risk. There’s high value in having people who can step in when a problem arises, and the person whose job it is to fix it is unavailable.
• Give your team some slack: It’s okay to set deadlines and timelines, but if you don’t leave room for issues to arise and situations to change, that’s a problem. When there’s no time to adjust (and you inevitably miss deadlines), you start to associate change with failure.
• Plan for scenarios, not certainties: You can’t set one plan and expect the universe to deliver. There are many potential outcomes to any given situation, so it helps to agree in advance how you would respond to each one. When you anticipate change rather than react to it, it becomes way less scary.
• Take a momentary step back: Make yourself unavailable for a day and see where the system wobbles. It’s useful to identify where dependencies lie, what gaps exist, and where there isn’t a clear sense of ownership. Pinpointing issues while the stakes are low gives you time to fix them before the system breaks down and you’re not there to step in.

Not knowing is part of the job

The concept of the “all-knowing leader” is such a myth. Many leaders talk big, but the fact that 44% of founders suffer from imposter syndrome says it all. We’re human, and nobody has it all figured out. Most of the time, we’re putting on a brave face and hoping for the best.

If the experience of managing pregnancy and leadership has taught me anything, it’s that admitting “I don’t know yet” isn’t a weakness. Like early parenthood, startups are full of unknowns. What separates good leaders isn’t their ability to eliminate uncertainty, but how they equip their teams to respond when difficulties arise and circumstances inevitably change.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Natalia Shahmetova is the CEO and Founder of Woofz by nove8.

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