How to Keep Your Team’s Spirits Up in Anxious Times

Summary:

Many workers are anxious, worn down, and demoralized. Headlines about AI displacing jobs dominate the news while CEOs publicly tout layoffs and cost-cutting. Economic uncertainty from trade wars, tariffs, and inflation only adds to their concerns.

The numbers are stark. Employee engagement at companies around the world has risen overall since 2008, but according to Gallup data published in April, it’s still just a miserable 21%—down from the previous year, with the steepest drops among managers under 35, the group often tasked with bridging C-suite priorities and frontline execution. Even for engaged employees, the presence of so much anxiety can prove paralyzing, preventing them from speaking up, seeking out opportunities, and playing offense. We see this malaise playing out at the collective level, with entire organizations retreating in the face of uncertainty, obsessing over protecting their markets and cutting costs or mimicking competitors’ successful strategies rather than looking for unique growth opportunities.

As dire as these challenges are, they present us with a defining opportunity for leadership. To succeed in trying times, C-suite executives and managers at all levels must recognize that their teams and organizations need something different than business as usual. They must not only develop smart strategies and display tactical brilliance but also attend closely to their teams’ emotional states, replacing fear of the future with confidence, a can-do spirit, and a more positive, forward-looking outlook.

How do you show up with that kind of courage? By emphasizing moral clarity, personal dedication, and composure under pressure. Inspire and reassure your people by giving them something meaningful to rally around, embody the values and purpose that matter to them, and remain a calm and steady presence.

True leadership is about tuning into emotions and behaving in ways that make others feel more capable and energized. Maya Angelou captured this perfectly: “People forget what you said and what you did, but they never forget how you made them feel.”

Here’s how these approaches look in practice.

Communicate a clear, morally resonant purpose.

Your job is to convey a reason for being that makes people feel like they are part of something important.

When Wayne Ting became CEO of urban bike share company Lime, he didn’t pitch convenient rides; he talked about saving the planet by cutting carbon emissions and reducing urban pollution. The founders of Careem, a Middle Eastern ride-hailing company later acquired by Uber, weren’t focused on disrupting the taxi industry; they were unlocking mobility for women in the region who had been denied that freedom. In founding the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, Dario and Daniela Amodei took as their purpose not the creation of the most powerful LLM out there but “the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.”

These leaders understand something critical. To arouse passion, commitment, and pride in a workforce, you can’t just describe what you’re making; you must reveal why it matters. Give people something worth fighting for so they become the hero of their own stories. Help them feel as if they’re part of a collective quest, framing the organization as a moral community built around common values. Tell stories of shared adversity and sacrifice in service of the purpose, emphasizing the special roles that individuals and teams play in the business’s success.

Embody and model organizational values.

This second strategy involves practicing what you preach, including making real sacrifices and taking visible risks in pursuit of the organization’s purpose. Show people through your actions, not your words, what you truly stand for in ways that feel genuine and relatable. Demonstrate both how committed you are to the company’s ideals and how personally you take its future success. Leave people with little doubt that the organization’s destiny and your own are inextricably entwined.

Founders often do this naturally. Anita Roddick lived her values of environmental activism and social justice so authentically that she became inseparable from The Body Shop. Larry Fink at BlackRock never allowed his organization to do front-runs trades and maintains a fiduciary-first approach, constantly reinforcing “never forget who we work for,” meaning the millions of people whose retirement savings they manage.

But non-founders can do this too. When Satya Nadella transformed Microsoft, he embodied the growth mindset he espoused, admitting mistakes and demonstrating curiosity. PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi lived the company’s “Performance with Purpose” strategy not only by shifting their portfolio of products to a healthier mix but by emphasizing the building of a positive work environment. To help make her employees feel recognized, she took the unusual step of writing personal letters to the parents of company leaders thanking them for the work they did raising them.

It’s important to be someone people feel that they can connect with. Engage directly with team members at all levels and help them see that your devotion to them, the organization, and its purpose and values is real, so they are inspired to follow your example and more motivated to step up and behave boldly even in the face of fear.

When leaders do this, people come to see them as personifications of the organization. Think Jack Welch with GE, Alfred Sloan with General Motors, Steve Jobs with Apple. What fused these iconic leaders with their companies wasn’t just their respective successes but the intense personal commitment they showed to their organizations, particularly in times of crisis or extreme uncertainty.

Display stoic calm, determination, and focus.

The third approach sounds counterintuitive: Care deeply, but don’t let results—particularly disappointing ones—consume you. Instead, project emotional steadiness, show unwavering determination, and stay laser-focused on what needs to get done.

This is no easy task. On one level, you’re incredibly attached to your organization, its mission, and achieving success; this is your life’s work. But on another, you must focus on continuing to take the right steps and make progress toward your goals rather than obsessing over every outcome along the way.

We hear a lot about the importance of resilience nowadays, but this goes deeper. It involves making a deliberate choice to publicly own setbacks, cut losses quickly, learn from them, share those lessons with others, adjust, and plow forward. You should also do the same with wins, ensuring they don’t distract you from further progress. Recognize that people can easily become fearful or despondent amidst adversity and overly complacent in victory and ensure that you instead convey and encourage emotional steadiness.

Nick Saban, the legendary University of Alabama football coach, has a strategy for stabilizing his teams’ collective mood that he calls “the process.” Instead of obsessing over wins and losses, scoreboards or championships, he ensures that his players stay focused on doing the work itself, giving their all in practice, running the correct routes, and making the right in-game decisions. It’s the ancient Bhagavad Gita concept: be circumspect, not indifferent.

Whether they explicitly adopt a process focus or not, we often find great leaders cultivating reserve and detachment. When Anne Mulcahy was tapped to become Xerox’s CEO in 2000, the company was $18 billion in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy. Over the next several months, she moved to stop the bleeding and develop a turnaround strategy, but it was an uphill battle. As Mulcahy remembered in the HBS case study about her experience, “Month after month there was not a single piece of good news. We asked ourselves, ‘Could it get any worse?’ … It did.” And yet she took care not to let the pressure she felt show. “When you’re worried and wondering whether you’re going to make it, people need a sense of direction. They want leadership and clarity, and the confidence that we can succeed.” Her sensitivity to emotion and ability to maintain stability for others helped her lead Xerox to great success over the next few years.

When leaders demonstrate calm intensity—fully committed to the mission but emotionally detached from any single result—they create a reassuring presence to which employees can anchor themselves.

. . .

During periods of turbulence and turmoil, leaders must be not just muscular strategists but also caring empaths, attuned to the emotional barometers of their teams and able to move the mood of the organization in a most positive direction. This requires communicating a clear purpose, embodying and modeling organizational values, and always projecting calm and focus. When you adopt all three strategies, you move everyone toward a more courageous collective mindset that will help propel you through uncertainty toward a more successful future.

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