Leadership Through Uncertainty

Leadership doesn’t wait for you to feel ready. It shows up when a team is stuck, when a tough decision is sitting untouched, or when the tension in the room is obvious and no one names it. I’m Beki Fraser, and I’m breaking down the leadership skills that matter most in those real-time moments, especially when your instinct is to move fast and prove you belong.

We start with context, because rushing to solutions can be a hidden leadership liability. Under pressure, our brains grab familiar patterns and fill in the gaps, which makes us confident and sometimes wrong. I share a personal “area versus volume” story to show how easy it is to solve the wrong problem when something looks the same on the surface. From there, we dig into why slowing down early can actually accelerate outcomes later by preventing misalignment, resistance, and rework.

Then we get practical about trust and how quickly it forms. Trust isn’t built by positioning ourselves as the expert. It’s built by how it feels to work with us, especially when we don’t know, when we’re challenged, and when we invite input. We talk about the subtle ways trust gets lost, including “collaboration” that asks for feedback but doesn’t show how it influenced the decision. We also explore adaptive courage: making the call when clarity is incomplete, staying open to adjusting as things unfold, and resisting the trap of endless analysis.

We close with a development lens that goes beyond retention. Instead of measuring success by who stays, we ask whether people grow and whether they leave stronger than when they arrived. If you want more grounded leadership, better team engagement, and decisions that land, hit subscribe, share this with a leader who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Connect with Beki on LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/BekiFraser
Learn more about her coaching: TheIntrovertedSkeptic.com

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Short Story Long is produced by Crowned Culture Media LLC

Transcript

Why Readiness Can Mislead

Speaker 0:00

In my last episode, I spoke with Ed Holi nski, and it stayed with me. Leadership isn't a straight climb, it has more to do with how well you read context, how quickly you build trust, and whether you're willing to act when things aren't fully clear. Some leaders wait until they feel fully ready. Others step into the room, listen hard, learn fast, and build trust as they go. Hi, I'm Beki. Welcome to Short Story Long. In this podcast, we discuss ways you can integrate who you are into how you lead. Today I'm offering strategies for building your skills as a leader. Let's break down what's important as you navigate your leadership ladder. The conversation with Ed stayed with me because it challenged something that appears in leadership, which is this belief that readiness comes first. You don't earn your way into leadership by having enough experience, enough certainty, enough of the right answers before you step forward. It may sound responsible and thoughtful, but it actually delays you in moments where leadership is already required. Leadership doesn't arrive on your timeline. It shows up when something needs to be handled. A decision is sitting there and no one's picking it up. A team is stuck on the same issue over and over and forever. And then there's that tension in the room that everyone can feel, but no one, no one is addressing. It's in those moments that there isn't really an option to step away and get ready. You're already in it and you need to lead. What stood out to me in talking with Ed is that he didn't treat readiness as something he had to achieve before stepping in. He paid attention to what was in front of him. He trusted what he already knew and built the rest through action and through the people around him. There's something much more grounded in that approach because it shifts the focus away from proving you belong in the role and toward responding to what the situation actually requires. That actually starts with context, which is something that sounds simple but is often missed. Getting context requires you to slow down at the exact moment you feel pressure to act. Ed said that context sometimes matters more than the content you're bringing with you. It's likely you were taught to prove value through fast action. You're expected to assess, decide, and implement without spending too much time sitting in the problem. That approach works when situations are clear, but it creates a habit of jumping to solutions before fully understanding what's going on. It reinforces the idea that speed signals competence, even when a slower read of the situation would maybe just lead to a better outcome. Your brain looks for patterns and reuses them because well, because it's efficient. When something feels familiar, your mind fills in the gaps so you can act. That works under pressure, but it can also lead you to assume you're seeing the same situation when key details have changed. This is from a long time ago, but I took calculus twice. Actually, all three semesters of calculus I took twice. Once in high school and then again in university. Let me just say for those of you who are listening who might be in those university years, yeah, don't do this. What happened was I was going through the same experience for the second time. And when I was getting exam questions, then all of a sudden they kind of looked the same. And so just what I just described happened. My brain looked for patterns and reused them because they were efficient. So one fine day, I was sitting in an exam. And what ended up happening was that the exam that had been delivered a couple of weeks, a couple of months prior, was asking me to calculate the area of the surface of the sphere in calculus, right? Not that uncommon of a calculation. Okay, fine. Fast forward to my fine day, right? They're asking for the volume. Those are different calculations, but they were the same spheres that were being listed. So my brain went back to, I've already done this. Why would they do this twice? And I'm here to interject, why would you be so lazy as to create the exact same exam question? But that's fine, that's fine. I fell into the trap and I calculated the area instead of the volume. Naturally, I got zero points unsaid. And it put me into a situation where, quite frankly, I had to change my degree because I was having that as a challenge over and over and over again and not recognizing what was happening in the moment. It was only at the end of the semester when I looked back and went, oh, well, that's what happened. Leadership works the same way. Sometimes you're in the moment, things are moving quickly, you rely on what you think you already know to guide you to go forward. But it's not the same. What you know is relevant, but it isn't complete, and you have to keep on going. The problem is that you're not walking into the same situation twice. And like with my exam, even when it looks familiar on the surface. Each person brings different experiences. The history of the team shapes how they interpret what's happening, and the pressure around the work changes how decisions land. If you react quickly and rely on what's worked before, you can end up responding to what you expect to see instead of what's actually there. You know, area versus volume. When that happens, it usually doesn't fail in a way that's obvious or easy to point to. Instead, you start to see it in how people respond. Conversations take longer than they should. You find yourself explaining the same thing more than once. People nod in meetings, but don't follow through the way that you expected them to. I've seen this in my own work more than once. There was one situation where I stepped in to work with a team. They had been through multiple leadership changes in a very short period of time. They were capable, experienced, and had become completely guarded. Priorities had shifted as initiatives would come and go. Leaders had made commitments that didn't hold. The instinct walking into something like that is to create direction and establish a plan so people feel like things are getting done. That would have been a rough path to take. What the team needed wasn't another plan. They needed to be acknowledged for what they had already survived and how that was shaping their mindset. If I had skipped that and gone straight into action, I would have reinforced exactly what they were expecting, which is that this was just another person coming in with another approach that they had no reason to trust. Progress slower at the start. It meant asking questions that weren't just about the work, but about how the work had been handled before. It meant listening without immediately trying to fix everything. That's not always comfortable, especially when you feel the weight of needing to deliver. It is what allows the next steps to actually land. Sometimes you need to move slowly to go faster later. Moving slower at the start gives you a clearer read on what's actually happening, what makes your next choice more effective. When you rush, you often create rework, misalignment, or resistance that costs far more time later. Taking a beat up front isn't hesitation. It's setting yourself up to act with precision instead of correction. That's the difference context makes. It shapes what will work before you ever decide what to do. That connects directly to trust. The way you handle those early moments tells people a lot about how you're going to lead. Not once you've had time to establish yourself, but right at the beginning. In your first conversations, in how you respond when someone challenges something, or in how you handle not knowing. People are paying attention to all of it, and they form a read on you. Once that is set, it's not impossible to shift, but boy, it does take a lot more effort. One of the things I appreciated in how Ed described his approach is that he didn't try to build trust by positioning himself as the expert in the room. Show what you know, establish credibility early, and make it clear why you're the one leading. And eh no. Instead, he was clear about what he didn't know and just as clear about what he was committed to doing. There's a steadiness in that. It doesn't feel like someone trying to prove something. It feels like someone who is there to do the work well and is willing to engage with others to actually get there. That difference matters more than people realize. Because trust isn't built through statements. It's built through how people experience working with you, especially when there's pressure. People are not measuring what you say about your leadership. They're deciding based on how it feels to work with you. Especially in those moments where it would be easier for you to move too quickly, not follow through, or shift when things don't go according to the original plan. Those moments carry more weight than anything you say about how you lead. Some leaders are incredibly capable and also difficult to trust. It's not because of their intent, but because of how they operated. When they're too quick to do anything and always moving things forward without really sitting back waiting and thinking and asking. Oh wait, I once was one of those people. I remember being the person who thrived on having answers and giving direction. I was sure I knew what to do and confidently headed toward reworking what I didn't catch the first time. I was missing context and importantly, not building the right kind of trust. From one side, that behavior can look like strong leadership. Things change, decisions get made, and there's a sense of direction. Unfortunately, from another angle, it is a very different experience. There's no real space for people to contribute, no room to think out loud, and no sense that everyone's perspective is ever going to shape the outcome. That shift changes how people participate. They start to hold back instead of working things through out loud. And you can feel it in the conversation as it becomes more about agreement than any actual thinking. The work may move faster, but it doesn't improve because you're no longer getting the full perspective of the team. And that's where details get missed and that rework starts to creep in. I've also seen a different version of this that looks collaborative, but lands the same way that I just described. It's leaders who ask for input, invite discussion, create space in the conversation, but then shift forward with a decision that doesn't reflect what was said. This isn't necessarily dismissive, but it does leave people unclear on how their input was used, or if it was at all. After a few cycles of that, people still show up to meetings and they look like they are participating, well, mostly. Pay attention to the moment you start moving too quickly toward your own solution instead of fully taking in what's being shared. Stay with someone's thinking long enough to actually understand it before deciding what to do next. Then that's when you can close the loop in a way that makes it clear how their input influenced the outcome, even if the final decision goes in a different direction. This is where trust is either built or lost. The goal is to create an environment where people are genuinely engaged in the work with you, contributing to the thinking rather than simply executing on your orders. When all of that is in place, the quality of the work changes. You get better input, you catch issues before they grow, and people take more ownership because they see themselves in the outcome. Then there's the piece that most people don't talk about as directly, which is the need for courage in moments where clarity is incomplete. There comes a point where you've done the work to understand the situation, and there still isn't a perfectly clear answer. That's why you need to lead effectively. Ed shared an example of choosing not to run a pilot on a large initiative, knowing that it wasn't the typical approach. And what stands out in that decision is not that it was bold for the sake of being bold. It's that it was aligned to what the situation required. Speed mattered more than validation in that moment. Waiting would have created a different kind of risk, likely slowing momentum to the point where the opportunity itself started to fade. Those are the decisions that feel uncomfortable, because you don't get to rely on a clear precedent. They're making a call based on your read of the situation, and you have to be willing to stand behind it while also staying open to adjusting as things unfold. I've seen leaders get stuck here. Not because they don't know what to do, but because they don't feel like they can justify it well enough yet. So they stay in analysis longer than the situation actually calls for. Suddenly, the situation that needed a decision starts to stall. You can feel it in the team as things lose momentum, and people begin to wonder whether anything is actually going to get decided. Adaptive courage is knowing when more thinking isn't going to change the answer and being willing to act with the information you have. It comes from trusting your read of the situation and staying responsive as things unfold, rather than waiting for perfect clarity. Public service announcement, perfect clarity very rarely, if ever, exists. It stayed with me that Ed thinks about developing people, because this is another area where leadership can either expand or narrow without people realizing it. There's a strong emphasis in many organizations on retention. And while that matters, it can quietly shift how leaders approach development. It becomes a focus on keeping people instead of growing them. The sign? Offering money to stay instead of opportunity. Sadly, what starts as the fear of losing strong contributors becomes the reality of stagnation and discontent among your highest performers. That's the opposite of what you actually wanted. What makes that tricky is that it doesn't feel wrong while it's happening. It seems right to keep someone strong on your team. And there's a real pull to make it work. Even if that means stretching to hold on to them. If someone has to leave in order to grow, that's telling you something. It points to a gap between what's possible inside the role and what they're ready for next. This is another thing that people tend to notice. And it's not just the person who's deciding whether to stay or go, but everyone around them. They're paying attention to whether growth is something that actually happens or something that gets talked about when it's convenient. And that shapes how they engage long before anyone makes a decision to stay or go. Ed reframed that in a way that opens things up. Not just asking whether people stay, but whether they grow and whether they leave stronger than when they arrived. That's a very different way of thinking about your role as a leader. It requires you to let go of the idea that success is measured by how tightly people stay connected to you and instead focus on what they become while they're working with you. I've had moments where someone I was leading stepped into an opportunity outside of my team. And there's always a mix of reactions in that. There's pride in seeing them grow, and there's also the reality that you're losing someone who contributed in a very meaningful way. That tension is real. The question becomes whether your goal was to keep them or to develop them. And those are not always the same thing. When people feel like their growth is genuinely supported, their behavior changes. There's a level of engagement and ownership that comes from knowing they're developing in the work, not just holding a role within it. That creates stronger teams, even if it means people move and change roles at some point in time. Looking across all this, what becomes clear is that leadership isn't about having a formula you can rely on. It's shaped by how you interpret things in real time and how you choose to respond to it. That requires paying attention in a way that most people don't, along with the discipline to stay with the real issue instead of defaulting to what feels familiar. I know there's nothing complex about this, but it does take intention to actually do it. Leadership tends to happen in the middle of what you're already dealing with, and your impact comes from how you read the situation and how you choose to respond to it. One way to respond is this skill builder challenge, if you choose to accept it. I invite you to think about one situation this week where you feel the urge to step in quickly with an answer, a decision, or maybe even just direction. That instinct usually comes from a good place. You want to move things forward, you want to be helpful, but it's also the moment where context gets missed and trust can get cut short. Instead of acting right away, stay in the problem a little bit longer. Ask one more question than you normally would. Let someone else add to the thinking before you close the loop. Notice what shifts when you give the situation a little bit more space. Strong leadership isn't about having the answer. It's knowing when to hold it long enough for something better to surface. That moment you're paying attention to this week, the one where you feel the urge to step in and push things forward, is usually where all this appears. It's easy to assume you already have a read on your environment, especially when something looks familiar or when there's pressure to keep things moving. That's when the mind starts to fill in the gaps for you. And what feels like confidence can actually narrow what you're seeing. If you stay with it just a little longer and let someone else shape the thinking with you, you start to get a more accurate read of what's in front of you. And that doesn't slow you down. It sharpens how you move next. Thanks for listening. If you found this episode helpful, share it with someone who could benefit from it. Until next time, I'm Beki Fraser, reminding you to integrate who you are with how you lead. Okay, bye.