Why Your Team Struggles with Uncertainty—And the Fix No One Talks About

Hi everyone and welcome to this week's live conference. Today, we're talking about uncertainty. Why your team struggles with it or maybe leaders struggle with it. And that fix or the fixes I would say that no one talks about. I'm Claire Hayek, your host. I'm the CEO, founder and CEO of MSP Team Building. I'm a certified neuroscience coach and I'm Here with Courtney Bickert. Courtney, welcome, welcome. Always a pleasure to have you.

Yes, love being here.

How are you?

I'm doing okay.

Yeah, I know, right? We're gonna be talking about that. Just in case you don't know who Courtney is, she's a global citizen leader and management expert and stand-up comedian committed to positive social impact around the world through innovative strategies that she brought in and humor. And basically, we thought we'd put together a live and talk about what everybody is kind of talking about behind the curtains. But nobody's really bringing it forward and talking about what's going on right now, all the uncertainties, all the disruption, and how to deal with it. Because we sometimes talk about the problem but we don't talk about the fixes. And we're here to fix things or help you fix things. So typically, we talk about uncertainty. There's always uncertainty, right? In every single aspect of living, there's always an uncertainty. But I would say recently, with everything that's going on in the US and Canada, as well as AI. There's a lot of disruption. And it's not a temporary challenge. It's really the new reality. And with AI pretty much changing everything on a daily basis, I think we need to be equipped to deal with it in a good way, leverage it in a positive way, right? And to strength. And most importantly, with any challenges coming from geopolitical issues, As businesses, as leaders, as people, period. We need to be able to navigate that. So, some people are equipped with— naturally equipped to handle uncertainties, handle challenges. And some people are not. Some people feel stressed, stuck literally in survival mode. And they just kind of want to give up. They feel disengaged. So, I wanted to share a question with all of you here. Now, what's one word that describes how your team handles uncertainty or how you handle uncertainty? And as you all know, if you've been on these lives before, the chat is interactive. We'd like to keep it that way and engaged. So, please do share first of all, where you're coming from, where you're joining us from today. And just say hello in the chat and tell us, in one word what describes how your team handles uncertainty or how you handle uncertainty and drop it in the chat. And we'll be going back and forth to check the chat and feature your answers. And I'd like to say hello to our team member Connor that is joining us. He'll be also sharing a lot of things in the chat as well as stats, links, etc.

So, Courtney. Yes.

How about we start with the real reasons why people struggle with uncertainty? I mean, we both know you're very aware of how the brain works. I know I always bring the brain talk. Uncertainty literally triggers our survival brain, right? The amygdala kicks in, the stress hormones spiking all over the place. And at this At this point, your frontal lobe is not working properly. The decision-making analytical is kind of cut off. It's just going straight to that amygdala. And so, we're not really reasoning properly. We're not really handling ourselves properly or being focused, right? So, and this is why uncertainty can make even the best teams that work together and click really well together, it can make them feel lost.

Yeah.

So I just wanted to put that out there and make a thing about uncertainty, that it's not something to be taken lightly. And a lot of people may brush it, but that's like, you know, the fight or flight. So you just probably— also, the hidden aspect of the beta-3 brainwaves, the fight or flight, you go hide. So you're kind of pretending that nothing's going on, but you're really, really feeling it on the inside with the stress hormones. And I wanted to know, Courtney, like, how do you— what's your take on all this? And why do you think some teams are able to adapt or leaders are able to adapt better than others, where others completely spiral into stress? What's your take on that?

Yeah, I think that's so true. We as leaders or as team members, and we always play both roles in various different parts of our our lives, that when we panic, as you said, like we're in fight or flight and problem solving is out the window, engagement is gone, procrastination takes front stage. And that's just a really common response. I have a little anecdote that someone said to me the other day, which was, he was saying, God, my workplace right now is a mess. He works government, US government adjacent. He said, uncertainty, everybody is like freaking out. He said, that means that we're all at each other's throats. Nobody knows what's going on. People are spending hours like just bitching about things and nothing's getting done in the meantime, and we're all miserable. And he said, I'm terrified of flying. And he said, when I feel turbulence in the airplane, what do I do? I look at the flight attendants and I think, okay, are the flight attendants acting normally and walking around with their beverages?

Right.

Well, if that's how they're acting, then I'm like, okay, We're good.

Yeah.

He's like, I just want my leaders to be flight attendants so I can know. I think some teams, it's not about ignoring it. It's not about you as a leader not being stressed yourself, but being genuine about it and being honest about it. By you being honest about it, you can help others find the psychological safety to say, okay, Here we are. Now, let's talk about what we can do about it and what we can't do about it and how we're going to cope together as a team.

Yeah, I mean, I guess also one of the biggest things that we've seen leaders do or organizations do is not talk about it, right? Just pretend that it's all good. So, it's good to talk about it and Deal with it and feel under control. Be the flight attendant. But avoiding talking about it and just giving the pep talks like, we're gonna make it. We're gonna be fine. Let's push through. It's good. It's good to do that. But how do we do that? How do we push through? So, talk is not enough. You need to kind of have the tools, right, to help your people, help yourself. as well as your people push through. And here's a stat for you, an interesting one. Studies show that high uncertainty environments cause a 32% drop in team engagement unless leaders actively address psychological safety. That's from Harvard Business Review. I mean, that's quite interesting.

Yeah.

So, I think addressing that and whether you give that pep talk or whether you give the motivation or you just talk about what's going on, Again, it's good. It already helps. But giving the tools. Otherwise, some people are naturally equipped to handle it. But some people are not. So, what do you do? What do you do with people that are not? You need to give them. You need to get them help, right? And this is where experts come in to lend a hand. And leadership experts, experts like you and I actually, Courtney, that have been dealing with this, who understand the human brain, understand the human nature, understand leadership, understand workplace dynamics in order to kind of control the situation, give the tools for people to be able to deal with it. It's all about knowledge and training, right?

So, and they are very learnable skills for those of us who are in panic ourselves. And I think one of the things to remember is that if you're feeling panicked, acknowledge how you feel because that's probably how your teams feel. And if you go into a meeting just like, rah-rah, we're going to get through this, they're going to see through that.

Yeah.

Not genuine because they know you must know something. They either think you know something they don't know, or they're going to look at that and be like, no, this is BS. So by acknowledging that, look, I too am concerned about what's going on around us. And you can also— I'll bring in the humor aspect. Some— one way that helps is what's happening is both terrifying and real, and often it's absurd. And sometimes if you can point out the absurdity in the moment, it also helps to make it less personal for people. And, and also, I think when going through how Yes, this is where we are. It's uncertain. So let's think about what we can do about it together.

Right.

We don't know whether we're going to have our jobs tomorrow. I can't tell you whether you're going to have a job tomorrow. But here's what we can do as a team. We can agree this is a safe space to talk about it. We can agree that we're here to support each other. We can share resources with each other. Hey, I'm going to start a Once a week or once a day, 30 minutes to brainstorm solutions for each other or whatever it is to provide some sort of concrete thing that's within the realm of possibility that you can actually deliver on.

There you go. There you go. I mean, there's so much you could do. And I think a lot of leaders, I say this a lot, but leadership is not taught in school.

No.

I mean, I did an executive MBA. 15, 18 years into engineering as a professional leader, managing teams and learning on the field and everything. I did an executive MBA that gave me some tools about leadership and really helped me. I had to do an executive MBA to learn that stuff. I had to go get those tools somewhere. And then, I was like, okay, now I can be a better leader. I can be a better person. I mean, these are the things that are so essential. But not all of us have the opportunity or the time to do an MBA, executive MBA, whatever training that you decide to do. Coaching is always great for the leader. Of course, I'm all for it. But when it comes to your team, what do you do? What do you do if you don't have the tools to help them? If you don't give them the training that they need to in order to understand what's happening and you don't provide the environment, right, in order to kind of give them the tools to endure better, endure stress and rewire how they respond to uncertainty, then really, it's just survival.

Right.

It's just like, I'm just gonna grab onto any tool I have in order to get by every day. And some people, some of their reaction is things seem very uncertain. I don't know what's going to happen with this company. They start just looking elsewhere right away. So, retention suffers at this point. Being proactive as a leader, as an organization, and making sure that you promote psychological safety. You talk about it and you share the plan moving ahead, the plan A, B, C maybe, as well as You know what? And we're gonna do a training. We're gonna do a workshop so we can talk about this or just give the tools. So, we all feel not only psychologically safe but we also feel equipped with good mental health practice in order to deal with what's ahead, in order for us to be emotionally agile, in order for us to build our resilience. And I want you, Courtney, to tell us about I mean, I talked about agility. I talked about resilience. I talk about psychological safety. And I often hear about micro recoveries and humor. And actually, I'm going to share a stat here. Leaders who incorporate humor increase problem-solving ability by 20% and reduce stress level in teams. That's by a Stanford study. And I want you, Courtney, I mean, you're a stand-up comedian. You're an expert when it comes to humor and how we can leverage humor in leadership. I want you to share maybe an example of how laughter and psychological safety can transform a struggling team or have transformed a struggling team into a high-performing one from your tremendous experience in the field.

Yeah, thank you. So, both humor and laughter are really important for recovery. And for resilience. And it's often hard to say like, oh, well, this isn't a time for laughter. We can't laugh at this. We're not talking about laughing at what's going on, but we're talking about creating an environment where you can laugh together about what's going on or your shared experiences.

Right.

So it can be as simple as something like, you know, when you're meeting with your team, you could say, I don't know, so much is going on. My brains are so scrambled. This morning I poured orange juice in my coffee. I don't know what's going on with you guys. You know, that's just— we're all kind of discombobulated. Let's acknowledge that. Share a moment when you felt that way, and that's going to make you human. That's going to create— they are going to laugh because they're going to think about, yeah, I put my shirt on backwards, or I dressed my kid in blah blah blah, or— and that's going to provide the laughter. And the laughter is what deals with you psychologically because it takes you out of the fight or flight. Because your cortisol, it improves all the healthy hormones that you're feeling, reduces your blood pressure. So it automatically, just by sharing that little laugh, you're already in a recovery phase.

Exactly. There you go. Yeah.

Really important. And for psychological safety, I've used this example before, but I love it. A CEO was going into a meeting where 2 of his top leaders were battling it out, and he was called in and he was mad, and they knew he was mad that, that they had to call him to fly in for this meeting to help negotiate something. And instead of walking in and being mad, he just walked in and said, welcome to the détente. And that created— the way he described it, he said, well, then we had a brainstorm instead of battle.

Wow.

And so just by changing the dynamic of the situation in that small little way, All of a sudden, they were problem-solving together. And the people who were panicked about, oh, are we gonna get fired? How mad is he? All went away.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, as a leader, you bring the weather. We've heard this saying so many times. And it's really about being in tune with— I always talk about the inner leader and being in tune with the outside environment. If you're not in tune with with who you're being in these situations. You might be feeling a certain way but you can just stop and decide and be conscious, self-aware and say, what I do in situations like challenging situations, I lock myself in the bathroom. I try to find a place where I can just regroup. And I just realign my inside, the inside leader. I'm like, okay, Here's what's happening on the outside right now. Who do I want to be right now? Do I want to be the freaking out person or the scared person? Do I want to be in these negative vibrations, negative feelings, fear, uncertainty, self-doubt, and the list goes on? Or do I want to feel more, you know, lock into the positive vibes, lock into the inspiring vibes, lock into the lending a hand vibe or educating vibe or just humorous vibe, joy, right? And what I find very useful is just taking that minute, 1 or 2 minutes, just breathe and just like, okay, who do I want to be? What do I want to tap into? And then, walk in. And that changes the whole room. Like when we say leader, brings in the weather. This is what I'm talking about. But if you are not self-aware and you're not in control of what's happening on the inside, how could you even influence the outer environment, right?

Right.

And again, this is all about bringing the positive in. And what really helps, again, these are just tools that I've used and I've seen a lot of teams use as well. And people that I've coached before, I usually say, if you want to change your mood or change go from that negative to positive. Play a song that you really like. Oh, I love that. Or watch a video that makes you laugh. Or just allow yourself for even 5 to 10 seconds to consciously just say, okay, this big thing right now, this elephant in the room, this huge challenge can wait for 15 seconds. Okay guys, 15 seconds. I think we can toss that for, you know, just create that space, time and space. Play that song. Watch that video that, you know, I don't know, stand-up comedian makes you laugh or practice laughter yoga, whatever. Just, or do funny facial expressions in the mirror. I was doing that a couple of days ago. I was so stressed out and I was just making funny faces. And of course, the judge comes in and says, oh my God, Claire, you're being so silly. That's so stupid. What are you doing? And I'm like, go away. And I literally, I was laughing. I was like, oh my God. I felt the little girl looking at herself in the mirror. I'm like, oh my God, I forgot about how fun I could be and how much fun this is.

Yeah.

So, it could be as simple as that. It's between you and yourself in private. You know, and then when you step up, step in the room, trust me, that changes everything, right?

We have a— I just wrote something on this, but in comedy that's called taking the mic. So how do you— and it's very, very deliberate. And so like you're saying, taking that time beforehand to think about what energy do I want to bring with me, right? Are we having— am I bringing kind of a lighthearted conversation? Am I being sort of— am I being really serious and Whatever the energy you want to bring in, think about that and be very deliberate about it. And that affects the style in which you walk in. It affects the first words you say, right? How you say them and what tone you say them. And that is what sets the entire energy in the room. And you have those first few seconds to do that. And then you you've grabbed their attention in the energy that you want to be setting. So it's really powerful. And like you said, Claire, it's also all about centering yourself beforehand and having a laugh beforehand, whether it's making faces, a song, watching a funny meme, thinking of something that made you giggle, listening to a song that you think is fun, dancing by yourself because you think that's silly. Actually, that laugh, that internal or external— it could be louder—

Internal.

Internal giggle is already going to make you more calm. They're going to make you that flight attendant who's walking in with that demeanor to have the conversation in the way that you want to have it.

I love the whole flight attendant analogy.

I love it too.

It's such a good reference. I've been flashing on screen here if some of you are listening to the audio here, some questions that we were interested in knowing. So, If your team or you are struggling with uncertainty, yes or no, please do put it in the chat. And what's the biggest struggle for you or your team right now? Low energy, uncertainty, resistance to change, burnout? We would definitely like to hear from you. And let's dive right into solutions. We have a couple of minutes here. Again, always flies by. A couple of minutes left. Let's talk about actual strategies that we could apply. We do want to— I mean, I think we've given you a couple so far. But some actionable strategies you can apply right now is maybe just set short-term goals when it comes to this, what's happening with this uncertainty, how are you going to deal with it? And just to set the tone, to create momentum. Even when, you know, maybe the long-term goals are uncertain, you can say that. You can say, okay, this is the plan. We don't know if that's gonna hold in a couple of months. However, let's set these short-term goals for now. So that again, that creates a bit of clarity and focus as opposed to, oh my God, we're projecting so much into the future that we are not really clear on what's going on. It's like, why are we even even bothering with it because this could change next month. So, setting the short-term goals gives some sense of certainty. And then, you can shift those, right? Again, every week maybe or every 2 weeks, every month depending on the situation you're going through. And that's one thing, clarity, right? And the next one is reframing. We don't think of uncertainty, challenges, etc., as actual opportunities to reframe. So, we have the power to look at something that is uncertain and think about it in a different way. Or just if you visually can see this in your mind, you're faced with the challenge. You're face-to-face, we say, right? We're facing the challenge or the uncertainty. Well, why don't you step on the side and look at it from the left-hand side and step on the right and look at it from the right-hand side? So, reframe how you're seeing this and look at it maybe as an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to shift maybe your business model, an opportunity to look at innovative or creative things to to run your business. These are opportunities. Challenges and uncertainty are opportunities for us to learn and grow as a business, as a leader, as a person. So, reframing is very important. Being able to step and look at it from different angles. Step around it as opposed to just look at it from one angle. And this is resilience 101. It's like, this is happening. Why is this happening? What can I learn from it, right? And I mean, again, I think leveraging humor. Courtney, I'm gonna leave this one to you. There's a lot of studies actually that show— I'm going to read that one here. Laughter builds trust and reduces anxiety levels in teams by 39%. Harvard Medical School. I mean, come on, people. You know, if you're not laughing, you're missing out. Courtney?

Yes. No, I mean, there's so many studies about that. And I'm trying to think of one that I just read the other day. But in the meantime, I love the idea of the short-term goals, for instance. And this is not necessarily humor, but you can even go like, okay, how are we as a team going to get through this week? What are the— and that's the kind of timeframe people in the US, at least many people are looking at. So how do we— how are we as a team going to get through this week? What are the must-dos? How are we going to help each other? What are the things we want to add on, etc. So I think that short term— and reframing is, um, also part of reframing, and where you can access that innovative part of your brain is the humor aspect.

There you go.

You can even just start writing— write jokes with your team about this moment is so crazy, I blank, and your own punchlines. I am so out of it these days, I blank. You can come up with any of these. Just write some jokes about it because what you'll find is your team and you are going to start seeing the absurdity in a lot of what's happening. And there is a lot of absurdity in our lives every day, and it's like on steroids right now. So that helps make it a less personal to everybody because Okay, if it's that wacky, then it's not about me.

That's true. Yeah.

Um, and so that's already making people be able to kind of calm down, take it less personally. And you're also, at the same time, if right after that you go into, okay, let's think about it. What does this mean we can do? What are some of the things we can do together? What are the opportunities? Now you've got the people thinking. Um, you've got them out of fight or flight and into reframing.

These are so many good— I mean, I hope we both shared today some gold nuggets you can part with. Again, we've been doing this for a long time, Courtney and I, you know, I think 30 years for Courtney and roughly pretty much 20 years in the field in engineering and 10 years with MSP Teaming for on my end. And, and what basically we want to wrap up with today is that Uncertainty is here. It'll always be here. And it's, I mean, we wanted to talk about it today because it's especially a bit more prominent these days. It goes up and down. But now, it's pretty much at its peak. And we put together actually a workshop. We called it like Resilience at Work. And I'm gonna put the QR code here. And basically, it's all about leading with certainty. Hmm. In uncertain times. And we help you and equip you with leadership tools and neuroscience strategy and engaging strategies leveraging humor, leveraging a lot of different aspects and things that we have taught and practiced ourselves in many organizations. And it's basically a program that could be done virtually. It could be done in person or hybrid where we walk you through these tools and help basically you and your team navigate uncertainty and come out not only just navigated but turn it into strength and build resilience and agility. Because I think we're going to need it more and more. We've always needed it. But I think we're going to need it more and more moving forward in this crazy, interesting AI tariff, all that stuff world. But I'd just like you to, we're going to share the link in the comments. Do write to us if you want to know a bit more about it. Just type resilience in the chat. But really, the easiest way is just to scan the code and go check it out. It's all explained on this webpage. And basically, what we'd invite you to do is, again, it's all on that page, is to book a strategy call with Courtney and I where we walk you, we help you over 30 minutes or so, give you some tips and tools and look at more of what's going on with you and your team because every team and every organization is different and challenges and uncertainties are being experienced in different ways. So, we will help you. We'll give you a couple of tools. You will part already from this strategy call and assessment. You will part with some tools that will help you straight away. And we can talk about that. We have 3 different packages, 3 different workshops at different levels that we could talk about and explain to you. which one would adapt better to your team depending on your need. So, I think being proactive is our middle name. We wanted to bring this. We actually put this together. We've been doing this for a long time. But we wanted to really reframe it and focus on resilience in uncertain times. And we'd love to have a chat with you. So, do reach out whether you are interested in the training or you just want a tip. And we just wanna add value and try to help as many people as possible. This is why we're in this business. I mean, I know Courtney and I, you know, we pretty much have the same values when it comes to what we're doing, why we're doing it. And Courtney, I don't know if you wanna add anything on the program.

Yeah, no, I think like you said, we just wanna help people at this moment meet the moment. It's a tough moment and it's here to stay. And so we all have to find our resilience and come together And we are here to help you in that. There you go.

And so, do scan the code. I'm gonna leave it here on the screen. And we're gonna wrap up. Next week, we'll be actually doing the third, the part 3 of the 3-part series of Breaking the Taboo. I'm gonna have Courtney again with us with Viviane and Jacinthe. And it's all about mastering healthy conflict through creativity. This is what we're going to focus on. That's going to be the 3rd part of the Breaking the Taboo Live. It's next week on Wednesday, March 5th. Again, same time at 11:30. Thank you all for joining us. And please do reach out. Hopefully, we can connect over a phone call. We'd love to see your beautiful faces and talk about what you're going through and how we can help you. All right. Have a good day, everyone. Thanks, Courtney. Talk to you soon.

Bye.

Okay.