The 3 Practices for Leading Through Uncertainty

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
AI is everywhere, but what does it mean for your business? Gartner is the world authority on AI, with more than 200,000 client conversations and more than 6,000 written insights on AI in 2025 alone. Leaders across the C-suite, just like you, are partnering with Gartner to turn AI ambition into impact. Go to gartner.com/ai to learn more.

**Alexis Hueringa** (0:36)
Welcome to Gartner ThinkCast. I'm Alexis Hueringa. This week, we're tackling how to lead in times of uncertainty. In a disruptive and volatile year for all industries, many are wondering how to still be effective in making decisions while managing a team. Gartner distinguished VP analyst Mary Mesaglio will give a few basic tips, including how to communicate with honesty, when to share clear priorities, and why you should stand by your guiding principles.
Now, here's Mary.

**Mary Mesaglio** (1:07)
Today, I want to talk to you about leading in times of uncertainty. Here at Gartner, we're hearing from clients and prospects from all geographies, all industries, public and private sector, about the massive amount of uncertainty they're navigating inside the organizations, outside the organizations, kind of everywhere. And so there's some things you can do to lead when everything is uncertain and volatile and ambiguous, etc.
Some of these things are things you probably already know, but I just want to give you a quick refresher on how to be the best leader you can be when everything appears uncertain. So three things I want to talk about. Number one, communicate with honesty and empathy.
Number two, have hyper clear priorities and repeat them often so your people know what to expect and what's important to you. And number three, where things are really uncertain and you just don't know what's going to happen next, share your guiding principles, the principles that you'll use to make decisions. So if we go into number one, communicate honestly and empathically. I know this sounds drop dead obvious. Of course, many of you are probably thinking that's what I do every day. But just a reminder, this is absolutely not a time to insert your language with a lot of corporate speak. So a lot of generic, nice sounding buzzwords that don't really tell anybody anything. So if you're talking about an AI transformation or a digital transformation, don't say we are transforming into a digital first, AI first organization ready for the changes of the 21st century, exploiting our ecosystem of partners in order to deliver agile customer centric or citizen centric innovations.
That doesn't help someone with the uncertainty they might be currently feeling. So real words, plain language, and a lot of honesty delivered in an empathic way. That is the way to communicate right now and the tolerance for corporate speak in your organization is probably pretty low right now.
Second thing, communicate hyper clear priorities and repeat them often so that people understand what matters most to you, what they should be doing next in this great tumultuous sea of change, so that they understand the hierarchy of needs that the organization has and can focus on those. So some tips here. It sounds really obvious again, right? Communicating priorities.
I think a lot of leaders underestimate how many times they need to repeat their priorities. I would say the rule of 10 by 10 by 10 sort of applies here. So repeat your priorities 10 times in 10 different ways for people to get 10 percent. Your people are busy. They're busy doing the normal stuff they do every day at work. They're busy thinking about their kids' piano lessons, and their in-laws that are going to visit this weekend, and the performance evaluations they have to do, and the meeting they're organizing, and the 50 emails they have to respond to. So the chances of them massively paying attention to your messaging the first time and only once, and remembering it all, are really low. So prepare to repeat yourself. Good rule of thumb is if you're not turning blue in the face, repeating yourself, you're probably not saying it enough. And make sure those priorities give them a sense of what's expected of them.
Give your employees a sense of agency. I have dominion over my own life. I am an agent in my own life. This is what's expected of me. This is not just happening to me. I'm not just a passive observer. So communicate what's changing, but communicate what's not changing. So don't just talk about the changes that are occurring. Talk about the things that are staying the same. In lots of enterprises, there's a lot more than you might think, that's actually staying the same, that the values that you're anchored in, the way you lead. Make sure you communicate the stuff that's not changing, not just the stuff that's changing.