How to Support Your Team When Anxiety Is High

Five actionable strategies to lead through ambiguity – because the world won’t stop surprising us

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Being a culture consultant is tough right now. Not a day goes by without a client asking me to help their teams manage constant anxiety.

An innovation director described how her leader encouraged the team to become more “experimental” and explore how to incorporate AI into the workflows – though it seemed he was really looking for ways to replace them with algorithms.

A CTO at a government university told me how he received instruction from the new administration that attacked the foundational values that made the institution so successful.

Meanwhile, a marketing director at a recently merged manufacturing firm realized that the “synergy” everyone was celebrating meant his team had to deliver three times the work with half the headcount.

Anxiety is dominating every conversation lately. This isn’t just regular uncertainty – we’re experiencing a fundamental reshaping of work itself. The social contract is being rewritten, and people feel excluded from the negotiation t…