Yes, of course business leaders hate uncertainty because it affects the bottom line. But I think there’s more to it than that – it’s personal.
To be a good business leader, you have to have a clear vision, good planning skills, and the ability to take decisive action. You also likely care a lot about your work and the people you work with, whether they are on your staff, are partners in delivering goods and services, or are clients. Either you came into your role already strong in those attributes, or you nurtured them in order to be successful.
What happens when that set of personality traits runs directly into the buzzsaw of wide-scale economic uncertainty?
High levels of uncertainty in the economy threaten or limit many of those things that make you, you on a professional level. How can you have a vision when what is on the horizon is totally unclear? What kind of business plans can you make and confidently initiate in the absence of stable economic policies? Worst of all, how can you take care of the people who depend on you in this situation?
And, if you are a business owner, your personal finances are intimately tied up with your company’s success, which can undermine your emotional steadiness at a critical time.
Take a moment to give yourself some grace. You were ready for stability—and instead, recent events have handed you a big ol’ bucket of “who even knows?”
Feeling scared, angry, threatened, and a host of other emotions are entirely reasonable responses. The occasional emotion that’s come up for me is a sense of persecution – Hey, I’m just trying to run a successful small business here – why is that being made so unnecessarily hard?
In future posts, Ed West and I will expand on how you can use the traits that make you a good leader to respond effectively to uncertainty, and bring your organization along with you.