How to Hold Authority When No One Has the Answers
Updated: Apr 15
Leadership under uncertainty | Strategic decision-making | Executive coaching Geneva
There's an unspoken expectation embedded in most leadership roles: that you know where you're going. That the vision is clear, the strategy is sound, and your confidence, even when circumstances are difficult, is founded on something real.
But many leaders in Geneva's creative, digital, and tech sectors are quietly navigating something that contradicts this expectation entirely. The market is genuinely uncertain. AI is reshaping workflows faster than any strategy can anticipate. Geopolitical conditions are affecting client confidence in ways that feel outside the frame of any planning model you were trained to use.
And the people around you are watching your face for information.
Performed certainty and its costs
When leaders feel uncertain but believe they shouldn't show it, the most common response is to perform certainty they don't feel. This is understandable — and often genuinely necessary in the short term. Teams need steadiness. Clients need confidence. Boards need composure.
But performed certainty has a shadow side. It prevents the honest strategic conversations that uncertainty actually requires. It creates cultures where people don't surface problems because they sense the leader needs the narrative to hold. It exhausts the leader, who must maintain the performance while managing the private experience of not knowing. And it models, for the whole organisation, a relationship with uncertainty that treats it as something to be hidden rather than navigated.
Transactional analysis offers a useful distinction here between what's called script-based responses to uncertainty — the old patterns, often formed in conditions where uncertainty genuinely was dangerous, where not knowing put you at risk — and Adult responses, which engage with present reality as it actually is, without contamination from historical threat.
Leaders operating from script in uncertainty tend toward one of two poles: the false certainty of overclaiming direction, or the paralysis of avoiding decisions until the picture is clearer (which it never is). Neither is a present-moment response to what's actually happening.
The authority that doesn't need certainty
Here's the shift that changes things: genuine authority doesn't require certainty. It requires something different — what might be called grounded presence under uncertainty. The capacity to be fully in contact with a complex, ambiguous situation without either performing your way through it or being destabilised by it.
This is a relational quality as much as a cognitive one. Leaders who have it can say I don't know without it reading as weakness, because the admission comes from a stable place rather than an anxious one. They can hold the tension of competing possibilities without needing to collapse it prematurely into a decision. They can communicate honestly about what's unclear while still providing the directional grounding that teams need.
CEOs and their top teams are under immense pressure to make consequential choices faster, with less data and more scrutiny. They need structured, high-quality spaces in which to think, learn, rehearse decisions, and align together.
That kind of space — where the pressure is held but not amplified, where thinking can be genuinely exploratory rather than performative — is something most leaders don't have access to in their operational lives. And it's exactly what makes the quality of strategic thinking possible that circumstances now demand.
The intelligence that uncertainty requires
Psychologically, the capacity to tolerate uncertainty without collapsing it is closely related to what attachment theorists call reflective function — the ability to hold one's own mental states and those of others in mind, to think about thinking, to stay curious rather than reactive when conditions are ambiguous.
This is not an abstract quality. It shows up very concretely in how a leader runs a board meeting when the numbers are difficult, how they communicate strategy when the strategy is still forming, how they handle the team member who asks a question they don't have an answer to.
And it develops. Through reflective practice, honest relational feedback, and — critically — through having experienced being genuinely accompanied through uncertainty rather than having had to manage it alone.
What this era is actually asking for
The leaders who are finding their footing in the current climate are not the ones who have the best answers. They're the ones most able to be honestly present to a difficult situation — and to bring enough inner stability to that presence that it becomes, for the people around them, a resource rather than an additional source of anxiety.
That's a demanding thing to ask of anyone. It's worth being honest about that. And it's worth being honest about the fact that it requires support — not as a sign of insufficiency, but as a basic condition of being a human being operating at the edge of their capacity.
Fleur Jaworski-Richards Executive Coaching
Fleur Jaworski-Richards is an executive coach and psychotherapeutic counsellor based between Chamonix and Geneva. She works with senior leaders in creative, digital, and technology sectors, bringing over 25 years of industry experience together with ICF coaching certification and UKCP psychotherapeutic training.
