Trish's Blog

We have become quite good at talking about how disruption affects employees. The anxiety on the factory floor, the worry in the open-plan office, the junior staff wondering whether their role survives the next round of automation. These conversations matter and I am glad we are having them.

But there is a fear we rarely name out loud, and it sits at the top of the building.

The AlixPartners Disruption Index surveyed more than three thousand senior leaders this year. Forty-five percent said they fear losing their jobs. Forty percent reported feeling more anxious in their roles than the year before. These are not interns. These are the people we expect to have the answers, the ones who are supposed to project calm while everyone watches them for signs of where things are heading.

Read those figures and a picture forms that we do not often allow ourselves to see. Nearly half the people leading our organizations through this turbulence are afraid they will not survive it. And they are carrying that fear in near silence, because the unwritten rule of leadership is that you do not get to look uncertain.

I have a lot of sympathy for this, and I also think it points to something we have misunderstood about leading in unpredictable times.

Here is the trap. When a leader is privately frightened, the instinct is to grip harder. Control more tightly. Demand certainty from the team that they cannot feel themselves. Project a confidence that is hollow underneath, hoping no one looks too closely. But people are remarkably good at sensing the difference between real steadiness and performed steadiness. The performance does not reassure them. It teaches them that honesty about unknowns is not welcome here, so they start hiding their own doubts too. The fear does not disappear. It just goes underground, where it cannot be worked with.

You cannot lead people through ununknowns that you are personally trying to outrun. If you are sprinting from your own doubt, every decision becomes about managing your image rather than meeting the situation. The team feels it. The thinking narrows. Everyone starts playing it safe at exactly the moment when the situation calls for the opposite.

So what is the alternative? It is not to dump your anxiety on your team, nor to wallow in not-knowing. It is something harder. It is the ability to stand inside unknowns without pretending you have already escaped it. To say, in effect, “I do not have the full picture yet, and we are going to keep moving and thinking anyway.” That is not weakness. In a year like this one, it might be the single most useful thing a leader can model.

When a leader can be honest about the limits of what they know, it flows onto the people around them. The fear comes up out of the basement and into the light, where it can be examined and acted on. People stop performing certainty and start contributing real thinking. The awkward observation that someone was sitting on gets spoken, and it turns out to be exactly what the situation needed. Steadiness without pretence gives everyone permission to be honest, and honesty is what good decisions are built from.

I want to be clear that this is not about leaders sharing every worry or turning meetings into group therapy. It is about a particular kind of grounded calm. Not the calm of someone who has it all figured out, because no one does right now, but the calm of someone who has made peace with not having it figured out and can keep functioning regardless. That is a learnable capacity. It is the same muscle I ask everyone to build, and leaders are not exempt from needing it. If anything, they need it most because everyone else takes their cue from how the person at the top holds uncertainty.

So if you are one of the forty-five percent, carrying a fear you feel you cannot show, I would offer you this. The way through is not a better performance of confidence. It is a sturdier relationship with the unknown itself. The leaders who come through this period well will not be the ones who pretended they were never afraid. They will be the ones who learned to think and decide and lead while the fear was still in the room, and who gave everyone around them permission to do the same.

The fear at the top is real. Naming it is the first honest step toward leading through it.