A few weeks ago, a senior manager at a global technology company we work with burst into tears mid-meeting. For months, she had been fighting fires and chasing one AI update after another, rewriting roadmaps every week as new tools arrived. That same morning, she had stepped out of a call where the CFO confirmed that a restructuring would almost certainly eliminate many of her team members’ roles. Minutes later, one of her direct reports had asked her, “Am I going to have a job in six months?” By the time she joined our leadership session, the weight of pretending she had answers had become too much, and the emotions spilled out.

That moment captures something larger. Strategy once felt like running a marathon on a clear day. Now it feels like sprinting through the fog while the track shifts beneath your feet. Leaders everywhere are confronting the same reality that things increasingly feel out of control.

Three distinct forces are colliding to create this pervasive sense of fear and uncertainty. In this article, we’ll discuss those forces, how fear affects how you lead, and how to respond.

Three Engines of Leaders’ Fears

The forces driving today’s fears are familiar, but the rules for managing through them are being rewritten in real time thanks to the high volume and fast pace of change. Consider the effects of:

Policy volatility.

Leaders must now navigate shifting tariff regimes, abrupt regulatory changes, the risk of public clashes with politicians, evolving H-1B and immigration rules, and sudden trade embargoes. These shocks can arrive with little warning. A policy announced on social media can change hiring plans overnight. New tariffs can disrupt supply chains and product roadmaps. A single post can make or break stock prices within hours. These are no longer rare events; they’re rhythms of disruption: constant, ambient volatility that reshapes decisions about people, operations, and capital every single week.

An AI-saturated world.

AI is infiltrating every workflow, every product, every decision. The questions it raises feel existential: What does “work” even mean when machines perform the thinking? Which functions should be redesigned, augmented, or replaced? For many workers, the line between being augmented and being replaced has never felt thinner.

Geopolitical fragmentation.

The global map is fracturing. The single, integrated system of the past is splintering into rival blocs and regional hubs. Trade barriers and sanctions are rising. Movement of capital, precious hardware, data, and talent faces more restrictions. How should a firm position itself across regions with different rules and risks?

How Fear Distorts Leadership

Fear changes the brain before it changes behavior. Unchecked fear does more than paralyze people; it reprograms priorities. Research in neuroscience suggests that acute stress shifts brain resources toward threat detection, narrowing perception and draining creative capacity. Instead of scanning for opportunities, the mind locks onto threats.

In this mode, we’ve seen leaders default to firefighting. They fix the urgent and delay the important. Experiments stall because they feel unsafe. Imagination shrivels up. As a result, managers begin trading long-term potential for short-term gains and protection.

We’ve seen three clear patterns emerge:

1. Decision deferral disguised as prudence. Leaders wait “one more quarter” for clarity that never arrives. Hiring and capital expenditures keep getting delayed.
2. Over-indexing on control. Fear breeds micromanagement. Checklists replace principles; compliance replaces curiosity. The conversation shifts from creating value to avoiding loss, and initiative disappears in the process.
3. Narrative drift. When fear takes over, the story unravels. Without a vivid, durable vision, teams do what’s safest for their own units, often at the expense of the wider narrative. Activity increases while direction fades. The company gets busier, but aimless and emptier of meaning.

Paradoxically, when uncertainty compounds, the more valuable clarity becomes. Fear feeds chaos, but leadership must feed coherence. The task now is not to eliminate fear, but to convert it into focus. That begins with how leaders design their systems—and their own time.

How to Respond to Fear

In our work with CEOs, boards, and executive teams across several industries, we’ve uncovered five practical steps to address these shifts while preserving imagination, morale, and momentum:

1. Build a policy intelligence system, not a rumor mill.

When policy shifts come by social post, panic spreads faster than facts. The antidote is to create a structure that systematically processes new information. This is how leaders turn anxiety into intelligence:

• Create a cross-functional policy desk. Include legal, government affairs, compliance, supply chain, finance, and HR. Meet weekly.
• Write a brief. Outline what happened (for example, a new regulation, investigation, or policy proposal), what is probable, and what is confirmed. Identify what, if anything, should change in operations, hiring, pricing, or sourcing.
• Set response thresholds. Define specific triggers—such as a law banning imports of key materials, a tariff crossing a threshold, or a deadline being set—that justify action. Avoid whiplash from every post or speech.
• Close the loop. Track which signals turned into real rules and which didn’t. Use that record to inform future responses.

At one company we worked with, a global leader in streaming content, leaders created a simple, weekly “signal brief.” A team regularly scanned new regulations, court rulings, and political statements, then summarized what was “noise” vs. what might become a law relevant to their business. Every Monday, the executive team reviewed the brief and selected from just three options: no action, prepare, or act now. This led to fewer panicked email chains, clearer ownership, and a documented history of which shocks mattered to the business. The structure didn’t remove uncertainty, but it contained panicked reactions to it.

The result is a calmer organization that responds to facts rather than fear or rumors.

2. Default to real options, not binary bets.

“Binary bets” are all-or-nothing commitments: single, large investments that assume the world will behave exactly as planned. Those are dangerous acts of faith in a volatile environment. Real options, by contrast, are small, staged investments that let you learn from the market before you commit more resources. They limit how much you can lose on any single move while keeping the possibility of bigger wins open. To implement them:

• Stage commitments. Break big initiatives into milestones with learn-then-spend checkpoints where you assess results before releasing more budget. 
• Release capital only when signals improve. Tie funding to concrete evidence, such as early customer usage, unit economics, or risk indicators, rather than hope.
• Run pilots and proofs of concept. Test new products, services, or processes in the market and in operations, not only on slides.
• Value flexibility. Compare the benefit of waiting with the benefit of moving now. In some cases, fund two small but competing pilots to learn faster.

We worked with a product organization building AI-powered features in a competitive marketplace. The founding team had been stuck in a debate about a single, large platform bet. Rather than choosing one winner in advance and putting all resources behind it, they funded three small pilots in different customer segments, each with a clear learning goal and a time-boxed budget. One pilot failed quickly, one evolved into something entirely different, and one showed strong promise and was later scaled up. Because leadership treated each experiment as an option instead of a commitment, the team moved faster with less fear of being wrong and greater focus on what could be learned from the dynamic market.

This approach converts unknowns into structured bets and keeps the company moving without overexposure and overcommitment.

3. Create an AI operating doctrine.

AI is not a single tool, but a menu of capabilities that will rewire processes and products. Leaders need a simple doctrine that guides its adoption while reducing fear in their employees:

• Clarify where AI augments work today and where it may replace teams. Be direct and humane. For example, be transparent with employees about which roles will change, how decisions will be made, and what support people will receive.
• Map product risks and opportunities. Where can AI enhance an offer, and where could it disrupt or commoditize it?
• Appoint AI champions in every function. Give them license to run safe experiments, share lessons, and coordinate standards.
• Set boundaries and guardrails. Define data controls, model-selection criteria, testing protocols, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.
• Create pathways for skills. Offer new learning tracks, workflow redesign, and model governance.

At a large, global retail company, the CEO heard growing anxiety about AI replacing middle-office roles. Rather than letting fear grow in the shadows, leadership published a one-page AI doctrine. It spelled out three “red lines” (what AI would not be used for), three priority use cases (where AI would assist workers), and a clear commitment to reskill before any role redesign or overhaul. Business heads nominated AI stewards in each function to run small experiments and share outcomes in a monthly forum. The effect was not to remove all fear, but to replace rumors with a shared, evolving blueprint.

Clarity and guardrails make experimentation faster, safer, and more compliant, which reduces fear and accelerates value.

4. Protect leadership vision time like a critical asset.

Fear steals the scarcest resource in any company: attention. When every hour becomes crisis time, strategy suffers. Leaders must rethink their workdays to allow time for strategic thinking:

• Schedule fixed blocks of time for strategy. Treat them as immovable. Use them for long-horizon choices, design reviews, and portfolio shaping.
• Separate operating diagnostics from vision. Don’t let incident reviews consume strategy sessions.
• Build reflection into calendars. Leaders need space for reading, thinking, and renewal. Tired brains never design bold futures.
• Model the behavior. If the CEO protects vision time, others will follow.

The president of a major book publishing imprint realized that her entire week had devolved into incident calls, stakeholder management, and internal team escalations. She redesigned her calendar so that two mornings a week were blocked for strategy: no status updates, no crisis meetings, no email. Those blocks were used for reviewing the portfolio, debating long-term bets with a small group, meeting external experts, and developing future roadmaps. She also asked her direct reports to create their own “vision blocks” and report monthly on what decisions had emerged from that time. The content of the work didn’t change overnight, but the message was clear: Designing the future isn’t an extracurricular activity, but part of the job itself.

The organization takes its cues from the top. Guarding where attention goes is leadership in action.

5. Strengthen geopolitical and supply-chain resilience, together.

Geopolitics is not background noise. Treat it as a shifting stage that demands active design:

• Aim for resilience with thoughtful redundancy. Diversify suppliers, manufacturing sites, data hosting, and talent sources.
• Segment supply chains. Build regional footprints where appropriate to reduce exposure to cross-border shocks.
• Run “war games” and stress tests. Simulate embargoes, policy shifts, cyber incidents, and export controls. Pre-plan rerouting of shipments and substitution of suppliers, materials, or routes.
• Align resilience with cost and service. Explain trade-offs clearly. Some redundancy is an insurance premium worth paying.

We worked with one global materials manufacturer that convened for quarterly geopolitical drills. In each session, a small executive team walked through scenarios such as sudden export or import control on a critical component, a regional data localization law, or a cyberattack on a logistics partner. For each scenario, they identified a primary response, a backup plan, and the cost of each option. Finance leads sat at the table with the operations and communications teams to make the trade-offs explicit. Then, when a real import restriction eventually hit one of the key materials, they were prepared to pivot. Production still took a hit, but the business avoided a full shutdown because the decisions had, in effect, been pre-planned and made.

Resilience is not inefficiency, but foresight that’s baked into tangible plans.

The CEO’s Role: Courage Over Certainty

The age of fear is real, but paralysis is not destiny. This time calls for leaders who admit what they can’t predict, but who plan anyway. Their job is to maintain focus amid operational chaos and to build resilience without abandoning ambition. Employees don’t expect the CEO to predict every twist. They want honesty about uncertainty and a story that connects daily work to a durable mission.

Trust then becomes a vital currency. Employees, investors, and customers look for more than financial results. They look for psychological safety in turbulent times. CEOs who practice empathy, clarity, and transparency build cultures that can ride out waves of disruption.

Leaders stand at a fork in the road: One path leads to permanent firefighting, reacting to daily policy shocks and long-term technological and geopolitical change. The other path leads to building new systems, skills, and mindsets that restore the core of leadership: vision. Great leadership today won’t be measured by the absence of fear, but by the ability to transform it into clarity, courage, and shared purpose amid uncertainty.

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