When faced with someone’s uncertainty a common reaction is to reassure them. It starts with sharing with them that there was no wrongdoing or that they are doing fine or something alike.

Another approach is to hide one’s uncertainty to prevent one’s uncertainty to spread towards others while seeking to find certainty for oneself.

In both cases, the focus is on the anxiety and what it primarily does, is deny the existence of anxiety. It is also based on the assumption that one can change the emotion someone else experiences. The desire is to protect the person or the team from feeling anxious and thus maybe not stepping into the task as it would be needed.

There are good reasons for this idea, as anxiety is distracting. It grabs one’s attention and tries to focus it on an existing danger.

However, the drawback of this approach is, that it also distracts from the task at hand, the goal someone seeks to achieve, or the possibilities that exist. A more potent approach is to work together with the other and the team towards a shared creative solution.

The leader’s task in this is to assist the team in its ability to see solutions. Developing the solutions comes with work allowing to locate the relevance of the anxiety in the given context.