It’s hard as a leader /manager when you’ve been told to deliver hard news on behalf of someone else’s decisions, especially one that you weren’t even involved with making or shaping. You’ve been given the script but you don’t have all the context, and you don’t have the answers.

Over the past few months, myself have the team have been leading team collaboration workshops across a range of industries, teams, and company sizes. What was interesting were the patterns that started to emerge which we can only attribute to the fact that no one was spared the changes and challenges brought on over the past few years.

In both my practice as aa practitioner and managing expectations of some fleeting founders, and as a business owner, navigating the grey that is my client’s “leadership” needs, I’ve had to excel at creating clarity through their uncertainty. When I reflect on how I do this, it brings me right back to my coaching fundamentals.

“Venting doesn’t extinguish the flame of anger. It feeds it.” - Adam Grant

Agree with Adam Grant’s position above?

How many of you use a good ol’ vent sesh to let off some steam about someone you’re working with?

There are many scenarios at work that can trigger that kind of frustration within you, scenarios like….

I was catching up with a good friend who works in a large tech scale-up. The organisation has been built by happenstance, piling on people after each funding round. Now that they are public, it’s a mess but can’t afford the optics of a complete restructure. So there you have it - a lot of folks with inflated titles trying to prove their worth on the daily.

As I wandered the streets of Amsterdam filling the time I had between meetings and wanting to enjoy the first day of spring, I was drawn into an unassuming book shop that I must have passed hundreds of times before. It was full of treasures and I could have spent the rest of the afternoon getting lost in all the jewels (books, zines, prints).

After having recently run several women's programs with female founders and executive leaders alike, I was struck by the amount of self-doubt there was in the respective rooms. Here you have A-players of their business/industry and they are constantly having to work against a loud voice of doubt.

How amazing was it to see legendary performers such as Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Eminem, 50 Cent and Mary J. Blige at the Super Bowl halftime show this year?

Well, it actually depends on who you ask.

🤓 As a leader of a business, I have had to hold a lot in my head and have developed a specific way of doing things. My experience has given me great context, subject knowledge, and clarity. It can appear that solutions come naturally and easily to me and my team naturally come to me for my thoughts.

Although tempting, we can’t look forward without looking back. Like a project retrospective, it’s important to take stock of what we did well, could do better and maybe shouldn’t do at all.

I was recently on a call with a founder/CEO who stated:

“I used to have team meetings with my (global) team but no one found them to be any good, so I stopped them and now just have 1:1s with everyone.”

As we come towards the end of the year and reflect on 2020, it has become clear that there are some companies that have done a particularly good job at leaping to the next playing field while others have floundered in the face of crisis. What did these companies do to strive in uncertainty?

In your leadership its important to level up your decision making by communicating clearly, widening your circle of decision makers, and leading with focus, resilience, and compassion as you execute your plays.

Becoming human-first as a leader requires a deep level of self awareness – emotional intelligence, cognitive empathy, and control. Find out more about building that connection with yourself, about dropping into a level of consciousness and understanding with yourself as you take stock of what it means to lead from a place of compassion, what it is to be truly human first.

It can be tricky to give hard feedback when you aren't face to face to alleviate the discomfort that comes with a difficult conversation. And, on top of this, in an already challenging time, you have to be cautious of not sinking employee morale too heavily. After speaking with our community of executives, founders, and managers, we have discovered five strategies to help you deliver this hard feedback in an effective and encouraging way.

With many companies understanding the long term gravity of this distributed environment, riddled with continued uncertainty, we turned to our network of manager, executives, and founders to brainstorm together, 5 Values for leaders to lean on to anchor their teams in the midst of uncertainty.

As many leaders found themselves navigating new technologies and ways of working, leaders demonstrated increased attention on their people, focusing on everyone’s safety and well-being, and then moved to incorporate remote tools into their team’s skillset in order to enable effective remote work and collaboration.

There are five leadership qualities that you want to avoid as you begin to foster increased curiosity in your organization and make the move to high quality collaboration in this remote word:

Gillian discussed how personal values play a role in our work life as, for founders, they are intimately tied to company values. It is important that you don’t react to situations, instead, learn to respond and reconsider, do not override your energy either, as doing so will put you in the danger zone of burnout. This kind of self-mastery starts with you understanding your values and how you approach them, these values can be anything from your behaviors to the things that guide you.

Victoria Stoyanova is a “People’s Architect” or a community and ecosystem builder who has been curating communities for coworking spaces, startups, and corporate companies and helping them understand who they need to be talking to and how. She joined our founder, Gillian Davis, in conversation to address the best ways to build community and generate growth within a company.