To Lead Through Uncertainty, Unlearn Your Assumptions

Leaders are typically promoted for competence in strategy, execution, communication, and influence. But in a more complex world, those strengths are hitting a ceiling. Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends survey of about 14,000 leaders reports that we need to look beyond old performance measures such as efficiency, output, and predictable results. Organizations must now elevate human connection, resilience, adaptability, and imagination, which enable work under uncertainty.

McKinsey describes this shift as an inside out journey that begins with presence rather than more tools, skills, and competencies. It asks leaders to stay available when answers are not yet clear, and to invite others into interpreting what is unfolding. Technical and interpersonal skills remain essential. What differentiates leadership now is the capacity for inner steadiness and shared sensemaking when the path forward is unclear.

Consider Dani, a regional GM I coached from a multinational services firm who was known for getting results without drama. Experienced and steady, Dani aligned functions across markets, managed diverse teams, and translated global strategy into local outcomes. When a midyear global initiative upended budgets and structures, Dani did the right things. He reset priorities. Clarified accountabilities. Held efficient meetings. He created space during one-on-ones for concerns. On paper, his leadership was strong. But momentum still slowed. Longtime colleagues withdrew. Team meetings grew tense. Direct reports clashed. “I am doing all the necessary things,” Dani said, “but it is like everyone is putting their frustrations on me, and I do not know what to do with them anymore.”

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Dani’s competence was not the issue. His challenge was the capacity to remain present and show care for his team, while trying to figure out how to navigate the added burdens. What it required was creating space for the team to share that weight instead of holding it together alone. This is the “something else” the research points to—an inner steadiness and shared sensemaking that go beyond traditional skill checklists.

What Capacity Means

Competence is the currency of organizational life. It includes technical strengths such as analysis, strategy, and execution, and interpersonal strengths such as communication, influence, and coaching. Competencies are the hallmark of what competence is called on to be: knowing how to do a set of things well.

Capacity is different. It begins where competence ends. It is how much you can stay present when action will not resolve the tension. It is the extent to which you can hold complexity and tension long enough for meaning to emerge. It is how much you’re able to allow frustration or fear to be spoken and absorb what feels difficult without rushing to closure. Growing this stance asks for unlearning or letting go of assumptions and habits that get in the way, and relearning steadiness and shared meaning making.

What people need first in complex moments is “holding.” As leadership professor Gianpiero Petriglieri describes, holding is the work of thinking with people rather than for them. It’s offering reassurance without pretending to know all the answers. It’s helping others make sense of what is happening. It’s keeping the group together, rather than avoiding difficult conversations and coming up with solutions on your own. In practice, you meet the anxiety, tension, and ambiguity in the room, name it, and help the team interpret it. Capacity is how much of this holding you can sustain.

Leaders grow competence by adding skills, frameworks, and experiences. They grow capacity by unlearning the assumptions that speed, reassurance, and control are necessary when making complex leadership decisions. It requires relearning ways of being that widen the room for reality. Competence equips a leader to manage and organize people so the business runs smoothly. Capacity equips a leader to remain present in the (many) moments when the business and the people in it are unsettled.

How to Grow Capacity

Unlearning is a crucial mechanism of learning. It involves changing prior scripts, not just adding new information. Most leadership development overlooks this and keeps adding skills and frameworks. But the capacity to hold and lead grows by letting go. It is the practice of letting go of assumptions, like equating speed with proof of value, reassurance as progress, or control as safety. As you release those assumptions and behaviors, steadiness, presence and shared holding become more possible. Every practice that follows rests on this shift.

So what does this look like, in practice?

Unlearn the urge to find quick fixes; learn how to take a reflective pause.

Growing your capacity starts with a pause that interrupts the habit of answering quickly to appear decisive. The unlearning is simple and difficult at once: release the assumption that speed equals strength. In the pause, you notice what is actually happening, where the tension is, whose voice is missing, what fear is shaping the room. One minute of quiet after naming a tension signals that the unsolved belongs at the center of the work.

Dani’s meetings were crisp, yet the pressure still remained. A deliberate pause would have told a different story: we will not outrun this issue; we will think together before we move.

Practice saying what you are noticing and then hold sixty seconds of silence. For example, “I notice we keep returning to the same topic, perhaps there’s something more to be explored.” Or, “I’m noticing we’re avoiding making a decision, let’s stay with the hesitation a bit.” The poet John Keats called this negative capability, the willingness to remain in uncertainty without grasping for premature certainty. Quick fixes give the illusion of progress while leaving the real issue unresolved. Naming the tension, then pausing, signals that complexity is something to contend with, and can even feel rewarding, when deeper issues surface.

Unlearn superficial reassurance; learn how to name the difficulty.

Capacity grows when leaders unlearn the reflex to soothe and replace it with the discipline of saying what is hard, clearly and compassionately. Care begins by telling the truth about what feels heavy so people can absorb and integrate it together. Reassurance calms in the moment and pushes anxiety into hallways and side chats. Naming difficulty converts private strain into shared material for thinking.

Dani listened closely in one-on-ones, yet in the full group, he stepped around what hurt. Colleagues felt privately seen and publicly alone. This is why containment matters. The psychologist Wilfred Bion described containment as the transformation of unmanageable experience into something thinkable and sharable.

You begin containment by putting words to what weighs on people and then staying with it long enough to make sense together. Start your next update with a single sentence that names the tension in the room, then ask what each person is carrying that must be shared for the work to move forward. This can sound like, “I know many of you are frustrated by the shifting budget. Let’s sit with what that means for our team before we decide on next steps.” Or, “The sudden announcement in the change of leadership is not easy. Let’s talk about what feels most difficult about it so we can share it together.”

Unlearn the urge to carry burdens alone; learn how to share the weight.

Many leaders believe that their value is in absorbing pressure so others can keep moving. Capacity requires unlearning this heroism and redistributing the work of sensemaking. When uncertainty is openly shared, the emotional burden lifts from individuals and gives a collective sense of agency.

Invite people to help carry the very uncertainty that touches their part of the organization. Ask what signals they have noticed outside the room and inside it, which stakeholders they have spoken to, and what patterns emerge. What feels more straightforward, what feels hard?

Dani had previously collected worries and returned task lists. He would say things like, “Don’t worry, I’ll speak with HQ and get us clarity by next week,” which relieved pressure for an hour, only to recreate it a week later. Shared holding, by contrast, means that uncertainty, tension, and meaning-making are carried collectively rather than by the leader alone. Shared holding sounds like: “We’re all waiting on approvals. What impacts are you seeing already with clients? Which parts of our plan feels most at risk?” What works better is to slow down and share the weight. Give space to the unrest, to find meaning in it in relation to one another, and then to decide what is worth doing to move forward.

Holding environments are a safe and steady space for people to grow, particularly in moments of discomfort. Leaders create them not by reducing pressure, but by helping the team to name what is difficult, and carry it together.

Unlearn the impulse to avoid conflict; learn how to stay with tension.

High performers often learn to “manage conflict” so the work can keep moving. Capacity asks them to unlearn the behavior that shuts down tension too early and to remain near it long enough to discover what the conflict knows. Disagreement carries data about assumptions underlying fear and risk; when it is rushed, decisions speed up with limited information and understanding.

When executive meetings do not serve sensemaking and respectful debate, tensions leak into the meeting after the meeting. The conflict essentially relocates. It moves to side conversations, informal relationships—where quiet resentment often expands. What feels like efficiency, becomes rework.

Dani had previously shortened charged topics and moved them offline, which lowered the temperature in the room, but buried the truth. Bion’s idea of containment applies here as well: the group brings tension, the leader gives space and attention to it, so the group can face the difficult feelings and make new sense of it.

In practice, structure the live disagreement by asking each side to name what the other is most afraid of losing, reflect back the shared stakes, and decide only what is ready to be decided. For example, the leader could ask, “Let’s pause. Each of you, name what you think the other side is most afraid of losing if we go your way.” Then, reflect back the shared stakes: “I’m hearing both of you care about client trust, one through speed, the other through accuracy.” Finally, decide only what is immediate, “Let’s agree on a communication plan today. Let’s return to the broader questions later after we have more data.” The rest of the unresolved issues can be back on the agenda with a clear timeframe, so they are not buried. The unlearning is trusting that staying with tension prevents eruptions later.

Unlearn being performative; learn how to build deeper connections.

Many executives have learned to project calm as a form of leadership. Capacity grows when you unlearn performance and practice contact with emotions and deeper connection. People settle around leaders who are grounded and real, even when answers are not yet available. Presence requires slower speech, steadier breath, and language that distinguishes what you know, what you do not know, and what you are committed to discovering with others.

Dani’s poise was genuine, yet it sometimes felt distant, which left people alone with their experience. Keats’s negative capability lives here too: not-knowing is not a flaw; it is a capacity that invites others to help you see. When leaders trade polish for presence, rooms regulate, and hard work becomes possible.

Unlearn hidden assumptions; relearn how to lead.

Capacity does not grow by changing what leaders do. It grows by changing how leaders unlearn and relearn. Leaders act quickly and move into solution mode because they are enacting the assumptions of what leadership is supposed to look like. Common assumptions include certainty displays confidence; emotion slows execution; speed is hard work; discomfort is a failing of some sorts.

Assumptions like these are rarely examined, yet they are quietly exhausting. They drive leaders to overreach by filling in the silence, solving problems prematurely, remaining calm, and absorbing the pressures that should be shared. Over time, these assumptions shrink rather than expand capacity, driving leaders away from their roles, instead of allowing them to lean into them.

Unlearning begins when a leader starts to question the behavior. What do I assume will happen if I pause? What am I afraid it would mean if I didn’t fix this? Who will think I’m less competent if I share the tension I am carrying? Testing the answers to these questions in small ways can help loosen the grip of what lies beneath them.

Dani’s shift was not behavioral at first. It was perceptual. He began to notice how often urgency was parading as importance, reassurance as care, or quick answers as control. Naming those assumptions gave him room. He still acted; but he did so more thoughtfully. He still decided; but he did so with more reflection—and a lot less defensively.

Moving Forward

As Dani let go of what got in his way and relearned some behaviors, the tone of his leadership changed. He began meetings by acknowledging what was hard, giving people language for their frustration: “We’ve lost some autonomy with this global initiative. That’s frustrating. I feel it too. Let’s air it out so we can have a conversation about it.” Naming the difficulty let the anger have somewhere to go.

Dani also shared the burden. He assigned responsibility for watching early signals of the impacts of these changes—client churn, employee turnover, delivery lead times—and asked people to bring their observations back to subsequent meetings. The group developed the reflex to track and discuss what mattered together.

He allowed two peers to disagree in the room: “Let’s hear this out fully: what do each of you most fear losing if we choose your colleague’s approach?” Gradually, the meaning beneath their positions would emerge. He let his own uncertainty be visible without giving up authority.

The results were gradual and real. Meetings initially slowed and then gained speed, because there were fewer replays. Side conversations quieted because the main conversation strengthened. People took more responsibility for the tension in the room. They disagreed sooner and made decisions with more trust. Execution improved because care and understanding deepened.

Leaders do not grow capacity in isolation. They grow it in relationship. By pausing. By naming. By sharing. By staying. Presence becomes as decisive as action. Teams stop depending on the leader to hold everything alone. They begin to hold more together. The weight is shared. Collective capacity grows.

This is the move from competence to capacity. From a learning mindset to an unlearning mindset. From mastering what is known to staying present with what is not yet knowable. It is what turns a leader from a reliable operator into a leader others can rely on in complexity.

Copyright 2026 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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