Leading in the Waiting Room: How to Hold Your Team Together When the Organization Hasn’t Decided Yet on Organizational Changes

TEAM LEADERSHIP  |  LEADING THROUGH CHANGE

A practical guide for team leaders navigating redundancy uncertainty, collective restlessness, and the challenge of leading others when you yourself are unsettled.

You know the situation. Senior leadership has made a structural decision. The Works Council is still reviewing. Officially, the approach has been announced, but for each person nothing has been announced. But your team knows. Of course they know, people always do. They read the energy, the calendar changes, the careful phrasing in all-hands meetings. And so your team of twelve people, spanning multiple nationalities and backgrounds, is sitting in a kind of suspended animation: unable to fully commit to the work in front of them, unable to plan ahead, waiting for a verdict that hasn’t come.

As their leader, you’re expected to hold this together. To be steady. To keep projects on track. But here’s what nobody says out loud: you’re unsettled too.

This article is for you. Not the polished version of you that presents well in steering committees, but the leader in the waiting room, trying to figure out what to do next. Below are six principles, each grounded in practical steps, for leading through this particular kind of liminal uncertainty.

1. Stop Performing Calm, Lead with Honest Steadiness Instead

The instinct for many leaders in times of uncertainty is to project confidence. Keep the mood up. Suppress the bad news until it’s official. This is understandable, no one wants to be the source of panic, but it typically backfires.

Your team’s antennae are extraordinarily sensitive to inauthenticity. When you perform calm you don’t feel, they register the gap between your words and your energy. The result is not reassurance; it’s a quiet erosion of trust. They stop believing what you say, precisely when you most need them to believe you.

“The antidote to performed calm is not emotional transparency. It is honest steadiness.”

Honest steadiness means you acknowledge the reality without dramatising it, hold the line on what you do and don’t know, and commit to how you will show up regardless of what is decided above you.

In Practice

At your next team meeting, or in a one-on-one, consider opening with something close to this:

This kind of statement does several things at once. It names the reality, which releases pressure. It commits to transparency without over-promising. It repositions you as a credible source of information, which means your team is less likely to fill the vacuum with rumour and speculation.

Note what it does not do: it does not pretend everything is fine, and it does not share information you don’t have or aren’t permitted to share. That line, between honest acknowledgment and inappropriate disclosure, is exactly where leaders must stand.

2. Distinguish What You Control from What You Don’t, Then Help Your Team Do the Same

One of the most disempowering dynamics in uncertainty is the feeling that everything is out of your hands. And in certain respects, it is: you cannot accelerate the Works Council process, you cannot reverse a structural decision made above you, you cannot eliminate the anxiety of your team members who may be affected.

But there is a great deal you can control, and when you make that distinction explicit, both for yourself and for your team, it has a measurable stabilising effect. Research on psychological safety and locus of control consistently shows that people tolerate uncertainty far better when they have a domain of agency, however small, that they can act in.

In Practice

Try this simple exercise in a team session. Draw two columns on a whiteboard or shared screen:

Invite your team to add to both columns. The act of populating the right-hand column collectively is itself an intervention: it activates a sense of agency that uncertainty tends to suppress. The goal is not to minimise what’s in the left column, that would be dishonest, but to ensure the right column doesn’t stay empty.

3. Return to Purpose >> Anchor People to What Doesn’t Change

When organisational structures shift, reporting lines move, and roles become uncertain, teams lose their sense of orientation. One of the most stabilising things a leader can do in this period is to bring people back to what remains constant: the purpose of the team itself.

This is not about motivational language or corporate values posters. It’s about making the team’s contribution to something larger than its own structure concrete and visible. Your team exists for a reason that was true before this reorganization began and will remain true after it concludes. That thread of continuity is more powerful than most leaders realize, particularly for people who are questioning whether their work still matters.

Research on meaning and work, including the foundational contributions of Amy Wrzesniewski on job crafting and Viktor Frankl’s broader observations on human resilience, consistently shows that people can tolerate significant external disruption when they retain a sense of why their work matters. The inverse is equally true: when purpose becomes unclear, even stable conditions feel destabilising.

In Practice

Consider opening a team session by returning explicitly to first principles:

“Before we get into the work, I want to take ten minutes to remind ourselves – and me – why this team exists. Not in the organizational chart sense, but in the actual sense: what would break, slow down, or fail if we weren’t here? What are we genuinely protecting or building?”

This is not a rhetorical exercise. Invite real answers. Write them down. What typically emerges is a reminder that the team’s contribution is real and valuable, independent of whatever is happening at the structural level above them.

For an IT team in a high-stakes engineering environment, this might sound like: “We keep the systems running that allow 10,000 engineers to do their work without interruption. That doesn’t stop being true because of a reorganization.” Simple. But in a period of uncertainty, the obvious needs to be said out loud.

You can also use purpose as a practical decision filter during the waiting period. When team members feel paralyzed about prioritization – “should I invest in this if I might not be here?” –  purpose gives them a frame that transcends their individual situation: “Does this serve what we’re here to do? Then it’s worth doing well.”

4. Shorten the Planning Horizon, Give People a Sprint to Believe In

One of the most common symptoms of collective uncertainty is what looks like poor focus or disengagement, but is actually something else: a collapse of time horizon. When the future is opaque, people unconsciously disengage from long-range goals. “Why build toward Q3 if I might not be here?” is a thought many of your team members are having, even if they’d never say it.

The answer is not to force engagement with the long term. It’s to radically compress the planning horizon to something that feels real and reachable. A two- to three-week sprint focus does several things simultaneously: it gives people a concrete outcome to work toward, it re-establishes shared momentum, and, critically, it creates small, visible wins in a period when there are almost no external signals of progress or stability.

In Practice

At the start of each week or fortnight, name the sprint focus explicitly. Keep it specific and achievable:

The last sentence in that framing is important. It appeals to professional pride and signals that the work has intrinsic value independent of the organisational turbulence. For a cross-national, technically skilled team, which is highly likely to include people for whom professional identity and craft are core motivators, this registers.

You might also consider making the sprint visible: a shared board, a brief weekly stand-up check-in, a simple end-of-sprint review. The ritual of the sprint creates a small, shared rhythm when the larger rhythms of the organisation feel broken.

5. Lead Your Team Members Differently, Because They’re in Different Situations

Here is a distinction that many leaders in this situation miss: the four people who are likely to be made redundant are not experiencing the same psychological reality as the eight who are not. Leading them identically is not fair, it’s actually a form of avoidance.

The eight who are staying have their own specific vulnerability: what researchers in organizational psychology call survivor syndrome. They may feel guilty for keeping their roles. They may feel anxious about increased workload. They may feel conflict about whether to outwardly grieve for their colleagues. These feelings, if left unnamed, fester and often surface later as disengagement, presenteeism, or quiet resentment toward the organization.

The four who are facing redundancy have an entirely different need: they need to be helped to hold their head up during the waiting period, and, when the moment is right, they need practical, active support in what comes next.

For Those Likely Leaving

Before any official announcement, your room to act is limited, but not zero. You can:

• Check in with them individually more frequently, without making it awkward. The check-in does not need to name the situation, it just needs to be present.
• Signal that their contribution continues to matter right now. People who feel written off tend to disengage, which is bad for them and the team.
• Begin privately gathering your thinking about references, recommendations, and any internal mobility options. You want to be ready to act immediately when the announcement is made.

Once the announcement is formal:

This is not a speech. It is a commitment. Keep it short, keep it human, and, most importantly, follow through.

For Those Staying

Name survivor syndrome before it becomes invisible:

6. Pay Particular Attention to Cultural Difference

You lead a team of multiple nationalities. This matters more than it might appear in a situation like this one.

Different cultural backgrounds shape what people expect from a leader in times of uncertainty, what counts as appropriate disclosure, how direct communication should be, and what forms of support feel natural versus intrusive. Drawing on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions research: team members from high uncertainty-avoidance cultures (common in parts of Southern and Eastern Europe) may be experiencing this period with significantly more acute anxiety than colleagues from lower uncertainty-avoidance backgrounds. Team members from high power-distance cultures may be waiting for you to act, and may not feel it is their place to raise concerns unless you explicitly invite them. Team members from more individualist backgrounds may be quietly problem-solving alone, while those from more collectivist contexts may be most distressed by the threat to team cohesion rather than their individual role.

In Practice

This is not about stereotyping, it is about paying closer attention than usual. A few concrete steps:

• In one-on-ones, ask open questions about what support looks like to each person. Don’t assume. “What would be most helpful to you right now?” is a simple but powerful question.
• Be aware that some colleagues may communicate distress indirectly, through lower energy, shorter contributions in meetings, or reduced responsiveness. Don’t wait for them to knock on your door.
• Consider whether your team’s preferred communication channels differ. Some colleagues may engage more readily in a structured one-on-one than in open team discussion; others the reverse.

7. Manage Your Own State, Because It Travels

This is the section that leaders most often skip. It shouldn’t be last; in some ways it’s foundational.

Your emotional state is not private. Research on emotional contagion, particularly the work of Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson, demonstrates that team members automatically and unconsciously absorb the emotional signals of their leader. When you walk into a room carrying suppressed anxiety, exhaustion, or low-grade dread, it migrates. Your team does not need you to pretend to feel differently than you do. But they do need you to have somewhere to put what you are carrying, so that it does not leak unmanaged into your leadership.

“You cannot pour from an empty vessel. But you also cannot lead well from one that is overflowing and has nowhere to drain.”

 In Practice

Ask yourself honestly: where is your support structure right now?

• Do you have a peer, someone at your level or above, with whom you can speak candidly about what this feels like?
• Do you have access to coaching or a confidential sounding board? This is precisely the kind of complex, role-specific, emotionally charged situation that executive or leadership coaching exists to support.
• Are you protecting enough physical space, rest, movement, time away from screens, to stay resourced? Leadership under stress tends to hollow out these basics first, and they are not luxuries.

One specific practice that some leaders find useful in high-uncertainty periods: a brief daily check-in with themselves. Not a journal, not a lengthy reflection, simply a moment, perhaps before the working day begins, to ask: “What am I carrying today? What do I need to set down? What do I want to be true about how I show up?” It takes three minutes. Over weeks, it tends to shift the underlying tone of your leadership.

Closing Thought: What Your Team Will Remember

Periods of organisational upheaval are, paradoxically, among the most revealing of a leader’s character. Not because leadership under pressure is necessarily heroic, it often isn’t, but because it strips away the comfortable conditions under which leadership is easy and exposes what you actually stand for.

Your team is unlikely to remember, in five years, exactly what was decided and when. What they will remember is how you treated them. Whether you went quiet or stayed present. Whether you spoke plainly or hid behind corporate language. Whether you helped them hold their dignity through a process that easily could have stripped it.

None of the practices in this article require organizational permission. They require only that you show up, honestly, steadily, and with genuine care for the people in front of you. That is the work.