How to Lead With Clarity When Everything Feels Uncertain | Warren Whitney

How to Lead With Clarity When Everything Feels Uncertain

By Tom Prest, Director, Warren Whitney

If you’re a leader wondering why your team seems more anxious or scattered than the workload alone would explain, the missing piece is usually clarity, not more meetings, not more perks, just clarity. You’re in the right place if you’re trying to figure out what to actually say and do about it.

The Problem: Ambiguity Makes Everything Worse

When the broader world feels uncertain, economically, socially, or politically, ambiguity at work compounds it. People need something solid to hold onto, and vague direction from leadership is one of the fastest ways to drain a team’s energy into worry instead of work.

The short answer: clarity doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means making visible the answers that do exist. Leaders can offer that by being explicit about three things: what the team is here to do together, how people are expected to treat each other, and what good performance looks like right now.

Why Tom Prest

Tom Prest is a Director at Warren Whitney with more than 30 years of experience in human resources, administration, and organizational leadership. His roles and areas of expertise include organizational development, process and policy improvement, and strategic planning, the practical, structural side of leadership that turns “we should be clearer” into an actual plan. He’s worked across nonprofit and for-profit organizations, including as interim and fractional nonprofit CEO, giving him direct experience setting this kind of structure under real time pressure, not just in theory.

What This Article Covers

• Why ambiguity is more costly than bad news
• The three things leaders need to make visible
• How this connects to documents you probably already have
• A concrete next step for tightening this up

The Three Things to Make Visible

1. Purpose and priorities. What is the team actually here to do together, right now, this quarter?
2. Norms and boundaries. How are people expected to treat each other, especially when they disagree?
3. Performance expectations. What does good work look like under current conditions, not last year’s conditions?

None of this requires inventing new answers. Most organizations already have some version of these: a mission statement, an employee handbook, a set of team norms. The work is surfacing what already exists and saying it out loud, consistently, rather than assuming everyone already knows.

A Small, Concrete Move

One low-effort, high-impact step: if your team’s expectations around handling disagreement are already outlined in an employee handbook, don’t let that document sit unread. Bring it into your next team meeting and make it fresh in everyone’s mind. Use regular meetings to reconnect the team to mission and priorities, rather than treating those as a one-time announcement.

Next Steps

If you want help translating your organization’s existing mission and policies into the kind of day-to-day clarity your team needs right now, Tom Prest works directly with leadership teams on exactly this. Please feel free to contact us or view Tom’s full bio for more on his background in leadership development and organizational change.