For the past 2.5 weeks, I've sat beside my niece, Charlotte, in the ICU at the University of Michigan Hospital.
She is 21. She has been there for 12 weeks. Her liver and lungs went into failure, and for a long stretch of those weeks, we didn't know if she would make it through (thankfully, we now have a diagnosis, a treatment plan, and she is progressing extremely well).
On Saturday, a doctor came to assess her swallow function. Charlotte had just had a tube removed from her throat after her fifth intubation. She was writing notes on a piece of paper because she couldn't yet speak properly. One of the first things she wrote was: when can I have a sip of water?
The doctor replied, without warmth: "I understand that's your goal. But it's not mine. Mine is to keep you safe. So it will be at least a week away."
A tear rolled down my niece’s face. Totally deflated.
A little later that same day, a second doctor, Dr Rachel Hechmann, came to see her. She crouched beside the bed, took her hand, and said: "Charlotte, I am so sorry you are going through this. I want to understand your goals, so I can help you get there."
She didn't sugar-coat the truth. She told my niece what she knew, what she didn't know yet, and what the next steps would be. She explained that she could sip water, but she also explained the risks clearly and said, "It's your health journey. You can choose."
Thankfully, she chose not to. But the difference in that room was profound. My niece felt heard. She felt safe. She felt like she had some control in the most uncertain time of her life.
Both doctors had the same information. Both were clinically correct. The difference was what they chose to do with it, and whether they treated my niece as a human being at the centre of the uncertainty, capable of handling the truth.
I thought about those two moments on Monday when I flew home from Michigan to give a keynote for Origin Energy on ‘Leading through Uncertainty’.
Because your team is sitting in that same ICU room right now.
They are watching which kind of leader walks through the door as they navigate change and uncertainty. And the difference between those two doctors mirrors, the difference between leaders who hold their people through change, and leaders who lose them.
I know this from experience, not just observation.
Early in my HR career, I joined Bunnings as HR Manager in NSW, right in the middle of one of the most significant acquisitions in Australian retail history. Bunnings had just acquired Hardwarehouse, which was actually the larger of the two businesses. More warehouses. More headcount. Better systems and logistics.
So how did the smaller player absorb the larger one and build what became one of the most successful retail brands in the country?
I believe it came down to an intentional, relentless focus on culture.
We went warehouse by warehouse, team by team, listening, building a shared vision, investing in people. It was deliberate. It was intense. And the Hardwarehouse teams were not exactly rolling out the welcome mat. These were good, loyal, proud people whose competitor had just taken over their workplace.
What we learned was this: in the warehouses where leaders leaned in, stayed visible, kept communicating, sat with the discomfort, had the hard conversations, and painted a picture of where we were headed together, those teams came across. Slowly. Then fully.
In the warehouses where leaders went quiet, avoided the hard conversations, or delivered information without empathy? Those teams never really converted.
Same company. Same acquisition. Same information.
One variable: what the leader chose to do in those moments of uncertainty.
The reason this happens starts in the brain.
The primary goal of the human brain is survival. From an evolutionary perspective, anything uncertain registers as a potential threat and the brain's default is to avoid threats first and foremost. The challenge is that the brain cannot distinguish between a physical threat and a social one. A takeover, a change in reporting lines, a manager who stops communicating, the brain processes all of it the same way it processes actual danger.
When the threat response fires, the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for reasoning, creativity, and collaboration, goes offline. People stop thinking about the team. They start thinking about themselves: am I going to be okay?
That is not a performance problem. That is the brain doing precisely what it was designed to do.
Research on uncertainty consistently shows something counterintuitive: most people find ambiguity more stressful than bad news. Knowing something is definitive, even when the news is bad, allows the brain to plan. Certainty creates autonomy. Uncertainty fills the void with worst-case thinking.
And when leaders go quiet, people do not stop looking for information. They shift their trust to informal sources. The person who heard something on the grapevine becomes more credible than the CEO who has said nothing for weeks. This is not gossip as a character flaw, it is a predictable social bonding mechanism under stress, well-documented in research going back to Robin Dunbar's work on how humans manage threat collectively.
As leaders, we are either the biggest threat trigger on our teams or the biggest threat regulator. The quality of our communication during change is almost always the deciding factor.
Three principles separate leaders who hold their people through disruption from those who inadvertently lose them.
1. Create clarity in times of chaos. The most destabilising thing a leader can do, usually with the best of intentions, is go quiet until they have all the answers. Clarity does not require certainty. People don't need you to have every answer. They need to understand the why, the direction, and their own role in it. A partial map is always better than no map. The formula, even if you use it imperfectly: "Here's what we know. Here's what we don't know yet. Here's when I'll update you." That closes the void.
2. Tame the threats. Information alone doesn't make people feel safe. The brain responds not just to what is happening but to the language used to describe it. "Due to current business conditions, we will be restructuring several teams" triggers a status threat. "I want to be honest with you about what's changing and why, and I want to understand your concerns" invites the brain into safety. Same information, very different neurological response. Trust is not built in the town hall meeting. It is built in the micro-moments: the check-in that made someone feel seen, the question you asked and actually listened to the answer of, the conversation you didn't rush past.
3. Pursue progress over perfection. The brain is motivated by momentum, not completion. When people can see movement, even incremental, even imperfect, the threat response quiets. The organisations that survive disruption are rarely the ones that got the plan right the first time. They are the ones that kept iterating, kept communicating, and kept their people in the loop about what they were learning along the way. Acknowledging that the plan isn't working and asking for input is not failure. In times of change, it is an act of leadership.
All three of those principles require the same thing: choosing courage over comfort.
Creating clarity when you don't have all the answers takes courage. Sitting with your team's fear and naming it takes courage. Admitting the plan isn't working and asking for help takes courage.
The comfortable path is to go silent and wait until you have something definitive to say.
Two doctors. Same information. Completely different choice.
Two sets of leaders at Bunnings. Same vision. Completely different choice.
Your people are making that same assessment of you right now, not in the big, visible moments, but in the micro-moments, day after day.
Trusted leadership is not what we declare. It is what we do, consistently, when the going gets tough.
