What It Takes to Lead Your Team Through Turbulence
Workers are feeling the destabilizing effects of political and social upheaval. Protect your team with four interconnected approaches to boost resilience.
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As geopolitical shocks, civil unrest, and viral news cycles unfold in real time, the boundaries between the outside world and the workplace are increasingly porous. Political protests, public demonstrations, and national crises don’t just dominate headlines — they influence the conversations, emotions, and the daily lives of employees. For leaders, this presents a complex mandate: to ensure business continuity while tending to the human impact of upheaval.
The takeaway for leaders? Empathy and adaptability aren’t soft skills; they’re strategic imperatives. There is a growing recognition among leaders that stress triggered by external events is no longer peripheral. In today’s world, it’s a central management challenge. To explore these dynamics, we conducted a cross-national study to understand how leaders respond when external unrest threatens to destabilize the emotional and operational rhythm of their teams.
We interviewed 15 managers — three each from the U.K., France, Chile, South Africa, and Turkey — during periods of intense disruption and learned that sustained turbulence can leave deep psychological and operational footprints within organizations.1 To deepen our understanding of the employee experience, we also engaged with five or six team members in each region. Their reflections revealed just how quickly focus, morale, and psychological safety can erode when the world outside shakes the foundations within.
In select locations, we went a step further, spending up to three days embedded in the workplace to observe team dynamics in real time. A third of participating managers later reported that the presence of external observers helped them identify their own blind spots, better interpret team behavior, and refine their leadership responses during crisis conditions.
Our inquiry focused on four pivotal questions:
- How does exposure to external unrest affect employee focus and productivity?
- What communication strategies can alleviate anxiety and stem the spread of misinformation?
- In what ways do flexible work arrangements and support initiatives help teams build resilience?
- How can leaders strike a balance between safeguarding employee well-being and maintaining business continuity?
What emerged was a clear pattern: External unrest takes a measurable toll on performance. Roughly 80% of employees we spoke with described struggling to stay focused during periods of heightened disruption, and managers reported productivity declines of 15% to 20% during peak episodes of instability. These weren’t isolated experiences but systemic disruptions with ripple effects across teams.
However, we also found evidence of what works. In teams where leaders took a proactive approach to communication — providing timely updates, acknowledging uncertainty, and creating space for employees to voice concerns — managers reported noticeable gains. In fact, around one-quarter of these proactive communicators saw improvement in their teams’ ability to communicate and coordinate effectively when crisis protocols were in place. In these environments, clarity didn’t just calm nerves — it restored momentum. But this happened only where leaders acted quickly and communicated frequently. Those who waited for direction from higher-ups or feared saying the wrong thing missed the moment, which allowed anxiety and misinformation to fill the vacuum.
Too many leaders are still responding to external unrest with vague emails, performative concern, or a retreat into silence. That’s understandable — these are genuinely unprecedented times, and several of the managers we interviewed admitted that they felt unprepared; as one put it, “There’s no playbook for this.” But our findings show that uncertainty is not an excuse for inaction: Leaders who hesitated saw anxiety and misinformation surge. Leading with rigor, precision, and courage means making hard calls faster, showing up visibly when it’s uncomfortable, and eliminating ambiguity from every communication touch point.
Four Factors Affecting Adaptation
Our interviews and observations revealed four interdependent dynamics — flexibility, innovation, communication, and attentiveness to silence — that shape how unrest filters into organizations and how teams can adapt in response. While each factor played a distinct role, in practice they were tightly linked. Teams that adapted most effectively combined them, drawing on flexibility to stabilize operations, using crisis as a springboard for innovation, relying on measured communication to restore trust, and recognizing silence as a signal that requires active interpretation.
Flexibility as a Protective Buffer
One of the clearest themes to emerge from our research was the protective role of flexibility. In organizations that responded quickly to disruption by altering work structures, employees consistently reported lower anxiety and higher levels of focus. Managers in both the U.K. and Chile described pivoting to remote work and redistributing tasks when unrest threatened continuity. The impact was quantifiable: Those teams experienced 23% fewer missed deadlines and an 18% drop in stress-related absences compared with organizations that clung to standard procedures.
In organizations that responded quickly to disruption by altering work structures, employees consistently reported lower anxiety and higher focus.
Innovation Under Pressure
Disruption doesn’t have to lead to dysfunction — if leaders respond with precision, empathy, and intent.
Communication With Discipline
How leaders communicated during disruption proved pivotal as well. Counterintuitively, our data showed that increasing the volume of updates did not calm employees — it often amplified anxiety. The most effective leaders communicated less frequently but with greater intentionality: They shared only essential information and acknowledged uncertainty, using a tone that conveyed empathy rather than panic.
In France, one organization limited updates to key developments and delivered them in measured language. Employees reported a 40% decline in anxiety compared with peers in companies that sent out constant streams of updates. In South Africa, trust in leaders rose by one-third when managers admitted openly that they did not yet have all the answers but promised to follow up with clarity. This honesty was received not as weakness but as credibility.
Employees also valued involvement in shaping communication strategies. Where teams had input into the cadence, content, and channels of updates, they reported more relevant messages and less fatigue. A French employee noted that “messages felt designed for us, not broadcast at us,” capturing the shift from generic reassurance to meaningful dialogue.
Silence as a Signal
Interconnected Dynamics
The four dynamics — flexibility, innovation, communication, and attentiveness to silence — did not operate independently. In fact, they often reinforced each other. Flexibility created the space for innovation, which sustained morale during extended disruption. Clear communication reduced noise, which made it easier to detect subtle signals of silence. Attentiveness to silence, in turn, fed back into flexible policies and empathetic communication.
Taken together, our findings reveal that the effects of external unrest on organizations are systemic: Productivity declines, morale erodes, and anxiety spreads. Yet they also show that leadership responses can mitigate these effects significantly. Organizations that combined adaptability, creativity, disciplined communication, and active listening not only weathered disruption more effectively but also emerged with practices that endured beyond the crisis.
Four Recommendations for Leaders
Our research points to four imperatives for leaders navigating external turbulence. While the pressures of disruption may appear to be overwhelming, the practices that enable teams to endure and even thrive are neither accidental nor unattainable. They can be cultivated deliberately, if leaders are willing to approach crisis as both a test and a teacher.
Embed flexibility as a strategic strength. Too often, flexibility is treated as a concession to employees rather than a core organizational asset. Yet in every country we studied, flexibility served as the foundation for resilience. Leaders should formalize their approach to flexibility in advance, not improvise it in the moment. This means establishing explicit policies for remote work, staggered schedules, and task redistribution that can be triggered at different levels of disruption. By clarifying these parameters early, leaders signal readiness and create a shared sense of security.
Flexibility also requires more than policies — it demands empowerment. Employees need clear guidelines on which decisions they can make independently, and the confidence to act on them without fear of reprisal. Organizations that delegated meaningful authority during crises resolved problems nearly twice as fast as those that relied on top-down approval chains. Some leaders went further by rehearsing scenarios in which front-line workers assumed control of daily operations. These drills reduced anxiety and built muscle memory, ensuring that when real unrest struck, employees were not paralyzed by uncertainty. The message is simple: Flexibility cannot remain theoretical. It must be lived, rehearsed, and trusted.
Embrace disruption as a catalyst for innovation. Periods of stability rarely create the urgency needed to abandon outdated routines. In contrast, crises quash inertia and provide license for reinvention. Leaders who encouraged experimentation found that their organizations emerged leaner and more agile. The challenge is to institutionalize this spirit rather than let it dissipate once the immediate danger passes.
The effects of external unrest on organizations are systemic: Productivity declines, morale erodes, and anxiety spreads.
Practical steps can help, such as conducting what-if workshops like teams in South Africa did. Other organizations held rapid hackathons, giving teams a short window to reinvent processes under live constraints. Those initiatives not only produced lasting improvements but also energized employees, who said they experienced greater ownership and visibility of their work during the process. Leaders should ensure that such innovations are not lost to post-crisis complacency. Regular reflection sessions — where teams revisit what was tried, what succeeded, and what needs refining — can transform temporary improvisation into permanent capability.
To lead through turbulence is not simply to protect what exists; it means using disruption as a platform for exploring what could be better. By explicitly linking crisis response to innovation, leaders shift organizational identity from one of fragility to one of adaptive strength.
Communicate with discipline and restraint. In unsettled times, many leaders fall into the trap of equating more communication with better communication. Our findings show that this instinct often backfires, heightening anxiety and flooding employees with information that obscures rather than clarifies. The more effective approach is disciplined restraint.
This involves three commitments. First, leaders must focus on essential information only — what affects employees’ work, safety, or immediate priorities. Second, they should acknowledge uncertainty openly. Admitting that answers are incomplete fosters credibility rather than undermining it. Third, they must deliver messages with empathy, resisting both alarmist tones and empty reassurances.
Employee involvement is crucial here. At companies where staff members helped shape communication cadences and channels, messages felt relevant rather than generic. Leaders who invited employees to codesign internal communication systems reduced message fatigue and built shared responsibility for the flow of information. Some organizations even introduced “communication blackout zones,” agreed-upon periods when nonurgent messages weren’t sent, to protect employees’ attention and signal respect for their time. These practices highlight that communication is about intentionality, trust, and respect, not volume.
Communication is about intentionality, trust, and respect, not volume.
Developing sensitivity to silence requires training managers to notice subtle cues — declines in participation, shorter responses, changes in tone — and to treat them as early warnings. One organization institutionalized this by appointing rotating “empathy leads” within teams: individuals tasked with observing dynamics, prompting check-ins, and surfacing concerns that might otherwise remain unspoken. Far from being a soft gesture, establishing this role provided critical infrastructure, ensuring that signals of distress were caught before they deepened.
Leaders also play a vital role by modeling vulnerability themselves. In teams where senior figures admitted their own uncertainties or stresses, psychological safety increased markedly. Employees explained that these disclosures gave them “permission to be real,” making it easier to speak up before disengagement set in. Attentiveness to silence, paired with authentic openness from leaders, created the conditions for honesty and trust to flourish, even amid external turmoil.
Integrating Practices
Each of the four imperatives — flexibility, innovation, disciplined communication, and sensitivity to silence — carries value on its own, but their true power lies in their synthesis. Flexibility creates the space for innovation, innovation sustains morale, disciplined communication reduces noise, and attentiveness to silence ensures that emerging stressors are addressed before they spread. Leaders who weave these practices together build organizations that are not merely reactive but genuinely adaptive.
Crises will continue to arrive, often unpredictably. Leaders cannot script the timing or the form of disruption, but they can prepare the conditions under which their organizations will respond. By embedding flexibility, embracing innovation, exercising restraint in communication, and learning to hear what is unsaid, leaders equip their teams to navigate turbulence with clarity and confidence. These are not stopgap measures. They are the practices of leadership for an era in which unrest is not an exception but a constant backdrop.
