Recap: What keeps teams grounded when change becomes constant

The Female Quotient recently brought together a powerful panel on leading through change. Emma Chalwin, CMO at Workday; Dr. Maya Shankar, cognitive scientist, author, and A Slight Change of Plans podcast host; Joanne Bradford, executive, investor, and board member; and me.

We’re leaders who’ve shaped organizations, policy, and entire industries and one thing became clear fast.

The leadership qualities we’ve been taught to value, like always having answers, projecting certainty, demonstrating control, aren’t what’s keeping teams grounded right now.

Mission critical. Required. I watch leaders every day try to figure out how to lead through constant change, and the skills that actually work are the ones we’ve dismissed as “soft”.

People prefer bad news over ambiguity

Researchers told one group they had a 50% chance of getting an electric shock and another group they had a 100% guarantee. The uncertain group was more stressed. We would rather know something terrible is definitely happening than deal with not knowing.

Maya brought this up because it explains why leaders project confidence they don’t have. Teams can tell when you’re pretending, and it makes trust impossible when the ground keeps shifting.

Maya says this with no hedging, no apology. When you change your mind, you get smarter by updating instead of defending a position that stopped working.

We worry this looks weak. Teams don’t need us to always be right. They need to know we’ll shift when the situation changes and that it’s safe for them to do the same.

Teams need context more than protection

Emma tells her team when she’s worried, asks for help, admits when she doesn’t know. She runs town halls where leaders share moments that felt career-limiting like bad decisions, wrong calls, and things that seemed disastrous. Then they discuss what they learned. Most leaders won’t do this. Emma’s creating space where being wrong is how you grow, not how you lose credibility.

Maya called this operational transparency. Boston residents were furious about broken street lamps and stop signs that weren’t getting fixed. The city created a public map showing where issues were and tracking progress. They didn’t fix things faster. Trust went up anyway. Residents felt more invested. Some started volunteering.

Showing people the constraints and tradeoffs doesn’t undermine you. It gives them the context they need to trust you when everything feels unstable.

Joanne called it the pizza tracker theory. People just want to know where things are in the process. Once they can see it, complaints drop and trust goes up, even when the speed hasn’t changed.

Start with why change is happening at all

Why are we even doing this change? That’s where I always start. You have to get really clear about what you’re going toward. If you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know if you got there.

Companies come to us wanting to drive transformation, and we start by working backward. What will look different when you’ve achieved that change? What do you need from your leaders to get there?

I come from a product background and we talk about first principles thinking constantly. Strip away the assumptions. What problem are you actually solving and what might solving it look like now?

What happens when support is missing

What does it look like to lead here, right now, especially with AI transformations changing how everyone works?

We talked about leaders being handed AI tools to roll out across their organizations. Zero training. No roadmap. They can’t create clarity for their teams because they don’t have it themselves.

That’s not a failure of effort. That’s what happens when we ask leaders to steady teams through transformation they haven’t been equipped to lead.

The work starts with self-awareness. Who are you, what do you stand for, and how do you stay grounded when nobody else can be? That’s what lets leaders lead without having every answer.

Your values show up in how you move under pressure

We all talked about the core values that anchor us when everything else is moving. Not the ones on the company website. The ones that actually show up when you’re making decisions under pressure.

For me, it’s courage. Saying what’s real when it’s risky. Doing the thing that scares me because that’s where the growth is.

When leaders are willing to be vulnerable and honest about their limits, everyone else gets permission to do the same.

Emma runs every decision through three core values. Authenticity, family and security, and curiosity. They show up in what she prioritizes and who she protects when pressure builds.

Maya’s core value is humor. Work should be a place people want to show up to. She takes the work seriously and herself less so. That creates space for people to take risks and fail without it destroying them.

Joanne keeps her philosophy simple. Keep moving. Action and momentum. When you move things forward, people follow. Values are not what you put on slides. They are what show up when things get shaky and you decide what happens next.

They’re not posters on the wall. They’re the signals people watch to decide if they can trust you through the next wave of change.

These skills aren’t optional anymore

You don’t build vulnerability or grounded confidence by reading about it. You build it in the moment when your team is looking to you and you don’t have the answer.

On the panel, Emma made a bold call. Most leaders in roles today won’t be leading a year from now. Not because they’re not smart or strategic. But because the mission-critical skills for leading through constant transformation aren’t the ones we’ve spent decades teaching.

That has to change. That’s where we come in, helping leaders build the capacities they need for the pressure they are under with expert coaching supported by adaptive AI learning that fits the context and the people in front of them.

When leaders grow in the reality of their work, organizations move with them. That’s where transformation takes hold.

Emma’s prediction wasn’t harsh, it was honest. And I think we’re past the point where leaders can figure this out on their own.

If this is the work you’re doing right now, let’s talk.