How Leaders Can Build Stakeholder Trust in Uncertain Times

These are trying times for corporations. The marketplace is rife with unpredictability, especially when it comes to economic and trade policy. The 2025 World Economic Forum’s Chief Economists Outlook report concluded that “uncertainty has become a defining feature of the global economic landscape,” with 82% of chief economists gauging uncertainty as “very high.” This year, the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, which tracks data from around the world, spiked to its highest level in three decades.

When businesses are navigating this level of uncertainty, they tend to veer into self-protection mode and focus on strategies like cost-cutting and hoarding cash. But this inward focus can alienate your business from your stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and communities—at a time you need them the most. If trust is to be built rather than lost during these challenging times, leaders’ attention must expand beyond their company’s uncertainty to understanding and responding to their stakeholders’ uncertainty.

In this regard, consider a few data points from the Edelman Trust Institute that indicate current levels of consumer and employee anxiety:

• 76% of consumers are concerned about the products that they use daily becoming more expensive due to tariffs and trade wars

• 70% of consumers say they’re worried about not being able to afford the things they need because of inflation

• 75% of employees express concern about their pay increases not keeping up with the inflation rate, causing them to lose ground financially

• 58% of employees worry about automation and/or other innovations taking their job away

Suppliers are also experiencing precarious times as companies alter their supply chains in response to global trade and tariff uncertainty. In 2025, 71% of U.S. and 77% of European CEO’s said they plan to alter their supply chains in the next three to five years. That is up from 54% in the U.S. and 61% in Europe in 2024.

This uncertainty-driven anxiety is leading stakeholders to elevate and expand relationships that help them weather the uncertainty and curtail relationships they deem as too risky, a drain on their limited resources, or merely nice to have.

In other words, stakeholders are prioritizing relationships with companies that engage in trust-building behaviors over those organizations that seem oblivious to their challenges or that they see as being preoccupied with their own problems.

This means business leaders must make a mindset shift: Instead of following the natural instinct to focus inwardly on survival, you must instead seek to understand how uncertainty is playing out in the lives of your stakeholders. You can then use this information to create “certainty bubbles” that alleviate their anxiety.

The rewards for doing so will come back to your firm in the form of revenue, customer loyalty, employee engagement, supplier responsiveness, and shareholder returns. To create a certainty bubble, you can employ the following three strategies.

Become a Source of Predictability

Uncertain times upend our ability to predict what the future will hold, breaking expected links between cause-and-effect (“if I do X, then Y will follow”) and the associated reliability that people count on in their daily lives.

The classic example of this is in banking, where the assumption “If I put money in a bank, I can withdraw it at will” underpins the saving, borrowing, investing, and lending that provides liquidity for individuals and institutions. When customers fear that this predictability assumption is no longer viable, the result is a bank run, as we saw with the March 2023 failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate Bank, and Signature Bank.

A trust-building approach to uncertainty can produce a very different outcome. Consider the example of Kaspi, a Kazakhstan bank, which in 2014, alongside two other banks, was the target of bankruptcy rumors on WhatsApp following a steep devaluation of the national currency. All three banks saw lines snaking outside their branches filled with customers demanding their money.

Unlike its peers, Kaspi removed all limits on withdrawals and waived withdrawal fees. Senior leaders went to the branches that were under siege to support their employees. Grasping the customer panic, they authorized employees to keep the branches open nonstop for 72 hours until the last person had been served. They flew in cash from other branches and spoke with and listened to the waiting customers.

Kaspi’s CEO Mikhail Lomtadze welcomed media interviews to rebut the rumors and to get coverage of how they were responding: “I wasn’t trying to say ‘Don’t worry,’ because that type of message doesn’t work in such circumstances. I was communicating the facts. ‘This message is not true. We … will do everything we can to help, including working around the clock.’”

Kaspi’s actions to reestablish predictability succeeded in strengthening trust with its customers. When the bank run began, customers withdrew 10% of deposits. When it ended three days later, withdrawals remained only 10% of deposits. Not only that—new customers flocked to the bank, giving Kaspi the fastest growth in deposits in the country.

In the ensuing years, Kaspi was able to build upon the trust it had engendered with consumers to grow into a fintech, marketplace, and payments platform that in 2019 was used by half of Kazakhstan’s 19 million citizens. It went public in 2021 and was the second-largest IPO on the London Stock Exchange that year.

Become a Source of Certitude

Systemic uncertainty (created by external forces like global tariff volatility, recessions, or pandemics) is defined in part by the proliferation of “known unknowns”—risks that can be identified, but the outcomes or durations of which aren’t known—and “unknowables”—risks that cannot even be identified due to the complex interactions of the forces at play.

Everyone is subject to these uncertainties, but firms hold crucial advantages over their stakeholders, including:

• Greater access to sources of information and key governmental decision-makers

• More resources to help them monitor and understand emerging risks

• Knowledge of the actions they are considering

Companies can use these advantages to increase trust by identifying and creating “knowns” for their customers, suppliers, and employees amid a plethora of unknowns and unknowables. They can provide information or make commitments that can be counted on, even if that certitude is time limited.

Take the actions of Honeywell CEO Dave Cote during the 2008 global financial crisis. A veteran of two prior recessions, Cote recognized the severity of the situation, but he also knew it would end at some point end—a known unknown.

To keep the promises the company had made to customers, he directed his business leaders to reach out to suppliers, letting them know the size order Honeywell would place as soon as conditions started to turn positive. In return for a degree of certitude amidst a lot of uncertainty, Honeywell’s suppliers rewarded the company with a first-in-line position, enabling them to steal a march on competitors who were slower to respond.

In another example, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic was a textbook case of unknowables for Clark Twiddy, president of Twiddy & Co., a vacation home rental and sales company in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. State officials had closed the bridges that connected Twiddy’s vacation properties to the mainland, making guest visits impossible. Twiddy had to manage homeowners and guests as they asked logical but hard-to-answer questions about everything from refund policies to whether homes could be cleaned for safe occupancy to how long the bridges were going to be closed. At the same time, employees wanted to know how they would be kept safe from exposure and whether their jobs would be eliminated.

Twiddy decided to do what he could to be a source of certitude for his stakeholders. For homeowners, he enlisted the local North Carolina real estate commission to draft a statement on property management companies’ legal obligations during Covid-19. This established a framework for issuing refunds of vacation deposits, offering clarity on that issue to homeowners and guests.

Twiddy also established a series of weekly virtual town halls in which he shared what the company knew, what it didn’t know, what it was doing in response, and what homeowners could expect in the coming week. He brought in cleaning suppliers to explain how they were keeping owners’ properties safe and local health and government officials to describe the political and health effects of Covid-19 on the Outer Banks as the pandemic unfolded.

Twiddy took the same approach with guests and employees. Staff fielded guest questions about how they would provide service safely when rentals were possible. To address employee concerns about job security, he shared information on cancellation rates and projections of how many weeks of funding the company had before pay reductions or layoffs might be needed. He also described how management was thinking about the longer-term ability of the company to stay in business.

Twiddy’s attention to stakeholder needs for certainty—even limited in term—enabled the company to maintain and grow its portfolio of units to rent, meet its reservation target of 20 weekly rentals per unit per year, and even expand revenues by being able to charge more for their properties. Twiddy maintained an employee retention rate of 95%, compared to average retention of hotel staff of below 20% during the pandemic.

Become a Source of Stability

Becoming a source of predictability or certitude earns gratitude and trust. As strategies, they are relatively “free”—a change in tactics and practices that require operating differently to create certainty when it’s hard to find.

The third trust-enhancing strategy—becoming a source of stability—entails a decision to bear or absorb some of the financial costs of the uncertainty rather than passing it all on to your stakeholders given your vastly greater resources, financing options, and ability to postpone or shift priorities in the near-term.

It’s easiest to see this at work with the change in the global tariff landscape, where the pricing challenge is clear. Pass on too much of the cost, and risk losing customers and competitive standing if your competitors don’t do the same. Pass on too little, and you decrease near-term profits by running a lower-margin business, thereby risking declines in share value, the ability to pursue strategic objectives, and financial loss.

Consider a July 2025 Wall Street Journal analysis which found that Amazon had increased prices on over 1,200 “low-cost essentials” despite prior commitments to hold the line on prices. The Journal found that Walmart, by contrast, lowered prices on the same items by almost 2%. While Amazon blasted the findings, stating that the sample of items examined was not representative of the millions of products it offered, the furor caused by the reporting showed the consumer sensitivity to tariff-driven price hikes, especially when companies had made commitments to do otherwise.

Companies can also become a source of stability by serving as a shock-absorber for employees, not eliminating but cushioning the effects of economic instability their employees face.

For example, during the global financial crisis, Honeywell was alone among U.S.-based diversified manufacturers in using furloughs, rather than layoffs, to reduce costs. Having conducted layoffs in two previous recessions, Cote had concluded that the disruptions they caused were more damaging than many realized.

The furloughs were managed differently based on the conditions facing each of Honeywell’s five divisions, with a range of employee impact from one to five months of unpaid (or in countries where support was available, partially compensated) leave. Managers, customer-facing employees, and engineers working on high-priority projects were exempted.

While some employees in the divisions where conditions required longer unpaid furloughs complained that it might have been better if some people had just been laid off, in the end, Honeywell’s more employee-stability conducive furlough strategy resulted in less “regrettable attrition” of high-value employees to competitors when business picked back up. And the company’s bet on retaining a knowledgeable, intact workforce paid off, with total returns for the period 2009 to 2012 beating its nearest competitor, GE, by 28 points.

To be clear, creating certainty for stakeholders is not about working directly to address the larger societal challenges that underlie the uncertainty. It’s also not about simply sounding optimistic or attempting to generate hope for the future. It is about offering immediate, concrete uncertainty relief using resources entirely within your control or influence.

Creating Certainty While Maintaining Flexibility

While your organization is mitigating the uncertainty in its stakeholders’ lives, it will still be experiencing the full brunt of that uncertainty. Thus, firms must strike a careful balance between uncertainty amelioration and maintaining the flexibility they need to effectively respond to changing marketplace conditions.

The cardinal rule is to not over-promise but do everything you can to keep the commitments you make. The goal here is not to eliminate uncertainty, which is likely impossible, but to blunt or lessen it. That said, you’ll want to demonstrate that you’re doing everything you reasonably can to reduce uncertainty, which means being transparent about what your organization can and cannot do and why.

Potential uncertainty mitigation strategies include: price freezes or reductions, interest forgiveness, time-delimited furloughs, layoff moratoriums, future order commitments, support for people who lose their jobs, sharing trustworthy information gathered from experts and decision-makers, and transparency about the state of the business.

In the context of these strategies, you can maintain flexibility by adopting time limits so that you can make adjustments to your commitments as circumstances change. You can also reduce your risk exposure by prioritizing helping those most in need of certainty, such as avoiding salary cuts among lower-paid employees while reducing compensation at the top of the organization or by offering concessions first to smaller entities that have fewer reserves.

A word of caution: Your history will follow you into the present. These strategies will be less effective in giving stakeholders a greater sense of certainty if you don’t have a consistent history of follow-through, integrity, and being stakeholder oriented. A checkered past will decrease faith in the certainty being offered despite your best implementation efforts. Amid their own feelings of insecurity, few stakeholders are going to be open to giving businesses second chances or the opportunity to suddenly rehabilitate themselves. So yes, uncertainty is a trust-building opportunity, but predominantly for organizations that have previously built a foundation of trust.

A trust-building orientation during times of uncertainty not only helps corporations achieve better outcomes during the period of uncertainty, it allows them to slingshot out of the bad times poised to take full advantage of the recovery. As Honeywell’s Cote observed when opting for furloughs over layoffs: “I’ve been a leader during three recessions and I’ve never heard a management team talk about how the choices they make during a downturn will affect performance during a recovery. There will be a recovery, and we need to be prepared for it.”

Consider the case of Twiddy & Co. The bridges to the Outer Banks reopened on May 20, 2021, and within days the guests they had offered “reservation preservation” to showed up in droves, along with many new guests. Every house was booked through October, and guests wanted to pre-book through 2022. There was no way Twiddy could have managed this increased demand if they had had the same 20% employee retention rate as the rest of the industry. The trust-building investment Twiddy made in creating certainty during uncertain times built the conditions for its success coming out of the worst of the pandemic.

Copyright 2025 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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