What to Actually Say to Your Team When You Don't Know What's Coming
- 3 hours ago
- 9 min read
Helene Christensen helps leaders make clear, grounded decisions and lead with inhabited authority. She advises and speaks at the intersection of marketing, storytelling, creative leadership, and lived human insight, helping leaders navigate change with integrity and dignity.
Most leaders navigating their teams through real uncertainty reach for certainty itself, and that is exactly what makes things worse. The better tool is less obvious, closer than you think, and makes all the difference.
She had taken her family to Southeast Asia for a month. Thailand, Vietnam, one of those trips you plan for two years and then wonder if you will ever actually take. A senior leader at a mid-sized company, in a role where stepping away for that long takes real negotiation, with your calendar, your team, and with yourself. She knew a restructuring was coming before she left. She had been part of the conversations. But she had been told it would be managed, that things would be in a holding pattern until she returned.
They were not. By the time she landed back in Copenhagen, the announcement had gone out, the strategy had shifted, and her team, confused, anxious, and braced for more, was waiting for her. Her first meeting back was in forty-five minutes.
She called me from the car park. "What do I say to them?" she asked. "I haven't even had time to understand it myself."
I have heard some version of this question more times than I can count. Sometimes it arrives as a late-night message, sometimes as a request for a call, or it is often asked at the end of a talk. But the question is fundamentally always the same, everyone is looking to you, and you don't have the answer yet.
The instinct that makes it worse
The first thing most leaders do in this situation is try to sound very certain. They work on the message. They rehearse reassuring phrases and repeat them until they are blue in the face. They prepare answers to questions they don't actually know the answers to, and somewhere in the preparation, deep down, they know it is not quite right.
But they find a way to convince themselves that this is what people need. That confidence is the thing that will hold the room together. That if they can just sound settled enough, the team will follow. So they walk in and say things like, "We've got this," and, "It's all going to be fine."
I understand the impulse. When people are anxious, they look to whoever is at the front of the room. Most leaders believe the thing they need to offer in that moment is composure, control, and a sense that someone has mapped the terrain. But here is what that misses, people are not following your certainty. They are following whether they can trust you.
Trust doesn't come from sounding confident. It comes from sounding like yourself.
The difficulty is that most of us have spent years, sometimes decades, learning to shape ourselves around what the role requires, what gets rewarded, and what a leader at this level is supposed to sound like. Somewhere in that shaping, the part of you that knows what is actually true for you gets crowded out.
You keep moving. You keep delivering. But you are operating at a distance from yourself, and people can feel it even when they cannot name it. Here is the irony, the more you adapt to what the role seems to demand, the more vague you become as a leader.
You stop being someone people can read. You become a performance of a leader rather than an actual one. So when the moment comes where you most need to be trusted, you reach for yourself, and it takes a second to find.
Getting back to who you actually are, and what you actually believe, is not a soft project. It is precisely what makes people start to trust you.
What pretending to be certain actually costs you
I once sat in a room when a company I worked for was acquired. Everyone was called in on a random Tuesday morning. Coffee was sipped a little faster than usual. Glances were exchanged across the table. Then our CEO walked in, a fixed smile on his face, and said repeatedly that this was going to be so good.
It was obvious to everyone in the room that he was just as unsettled as the rest of us. It didn't create calm. It made everything feel worse because something was being held back, and the whole room could feel the effort it was taking to hold it back.
When people can sense that what you are saying and what you are actually experiencing are two different things, they stop trusting the message and start wondering what else they are not being told. The questions they were going to ask go unasked. The concerns they were carrying get carried home. The room closes.
The cost of pretending to be certain is not just your credibility in that moment. It is everything that doesn't get said, the conversations that would have helped, the clarity that could have come from honesty, and the relief that someone actually being straight with them would have brought.
The three things you can always say
When you are standing in front of your team without the full picture, there are three things that are always available to you. They require honesty, and nothing else.
What you actually know: Even in the most uncertain situations, something is solid. Find it and name it, "What I know for certain is this." A partial truth stated directly is worth more than a complete story that no one believes.
What you don't know yet: This is the part most leaders skip. They fill the space with vague optimism or careful phrasing that means nothing. But naming what you don't know is not weakness. It is the clearest possible indication that you are being straight with them. "I don't have the full picture yet, and I'm not going to pretend I do" is a complete sentence. In most rooms, it lands like a window opening.
What you stand for: Not the strategy, not the plan, but what you actually believe. What drives your decisions when things get hard. What this team has built together that no restructuring can take away. People don't follow plans. They follow people who seem to know who they are. This is what creates the kind of calm that cannot be manufactured, because it gives people something real to orient around.
Why this is harder than it sounds and what the inner work of leadership actually is
Most people are not fundamentally broken. They are over-adapted. They have spent years shaping themselves around what the role requires, what gets rewarded, and what a leader at this level is supposed to look and sound like. In that process, they have gradually lost touch with what they actually think, what they actually feel, and what they would say if no one were evaluating them.
The work of knowing what you stand for is not about inventing something new. It is about recovering something that was always there, and doing it honestly enough that it shows. That recovery takes time that most organisations never make space for, which is exactly why so many leaders find themselves in a car park at forty-four minutes' notice, asking what on earth they are supposed to say.
This is what I think of as the inner work of leadership. It is the unglamorous, necessary work of knowing yourself well enough that your decisions under pressure, the ones you make when leading through uncertainty and organisational change, when the strategy is unclear and people are anxious, come from somewhere real. A settled place inside you, rather than from the performance of certainty you are hoping will hold things together.
At its core, this work is deeply existential. It asks you to spend not just your career, but your life, getting to know more intimately who you actually are, what you genuinely believe in, what you want to attach your name to, and what you are willing to stand for when it would be easier not to.
These are not questions that get asked in most leadership development programmes. We talk a great deal about posture and presence, about communication training and stakeholder management, about how to run better meetings and give cleaner feedback. We do not talk nearly enough about this, which I think is a genuine loss.
Because this is, in my experience, one of the most interesting and most beautiful aspects of growing as a human being, and also as a professional. The idea that your work is not separate from the project of knowing yourself. That the two are, in fact, the same project.
Leadership, at its best, is someone going first. Taking on the responsibility of the group. Putting themselves on the line, not just professionally but as a human being, in service of something larger than their own comfort or reputation. That requires depth. It requires a relationship with yourself that is honest enough to be useful under pressure.
A leader who has done this work can bring about real change. They can ask people to do hard things and be believed. They can hold a room through genuine uncertainty, not because they have all the answers, but because people can feel that they know who they are. That, it turns out, is what people actually follow.
Not key performance indicators (KPIs). Not polished strategy decks. A person who is clearly, unmistakably themselves.
It is the foundation of the Inner Authority™ Method, the structured process I have built around exactly this kind of recovery. I have watched leaders who were technically excellent fall apart in moments of real uncertainty because they had never figured out what they actually believed. I have watched leaders with far less experience hold a team steady through something genuinely hard because their team knew exactly who they were, and that knowledge was load-bearing. It held the weight of the moment.
The leaders who get through the hard moments with their teams intact are almost always the ones who have done some version of this work. Enough to know what they stand on when the ground shifts.
What she said in that meeting
Back to the car park. She was still in her jacket from the airport. Her suitcase was in the boot. She had forty minutes and a team that needed something from her she wasn't sure she had.
We talked for ten minutes, not about the restructuring, but about what she actually believed. What she had seen this team do under pressure. What she was genuinely uncertain about and why. What she knew was still true, regardless of what had changed.
She went into the meeting and said almost exactly that. She told them what she knew, what she didn't, what she stood for, what she believed they were capable of, and that she was going to work through this with them, alongside them, not ahead of them.
It wasn't a polished speech. It wasn't designed to reassure anyone. It was honest, and honest turned out to be enough.
After the meeting, one of her team members stopped her in the corridor.
"That was the most useful thing anyone has said to us all week," she told her. "Because it was actually true."
The question worth sitting with
Before your next difficult conversation, the all-hands, the one-on-one, or the announcement you haven't figured out how to frame yet, spend ten minutes not on the message, but on these questions:
What do I actually know to be true right now?
What am I genuinely uncertain about, and can I say so?
What do I stand for, and does my team know that, regardless of what changes around us?
Those answers are the most useful thing you will bring into that room. They give your team something real to hold onto when everything else is in motion.
There is this, when you are present in a room as yourself, when what you say and what you feel and what you believe are all pointing in the same direction, people feel it. It is not a technique. It is the simple, unmistakable experience of being in the presence of someone who is actually there, fully and honestly there.
That is what makes a room feel safe enough to be honest in. An honest room is the most useful thing you can build as a leader, especially when no one quite knows what comes next.
Read more from Helene Christensen
Helene Christensen, Leadership Advisor & Speaker
Helene Christensen is an advisor and speaker working with leaders navigating change, uncertainty, and high-stakes decisions. She is the creator of The Inner Authority Method, a framework that helps leaders develop embodied authority and make grounded decisions without relying on performance or persuasion. Her work combines strategic expertise in storytelling and creative leadership with lived human insights shaped by major professional and personal transitions. She has worked with leaders and organizations across Europe and the United States. Her writing explores leadership, dignity, and what gives work meaning - including how leaders can regain direction, energy, and a sense of purpose when leadership begins to feel empty or misaligned.
