When the Announcement Came Before the Answers: Leading a Team Through Open-Ended Uncertainty

Saying "Change Is Coming" Before You Know What It Is

When the group of teams I led within a larger IT organization went through a change in ownership, everyone understood, from day one, that disruption was coming — that's simply what a change in ownership means. What nobody had, for months afterward, was any specifics: what would actually change, how deep it would go, or on what timeline. That gap between "something is coming" and "here's what" is where the real leadership challenge lived. That honesty was the right call from a disclosure standpoint. It was also, from a team-leadership standpoint, one of the harder environments I've had to manage. People didn't know what would change or when — only that eventually, it would reach them. This is the environment a lot of IT leaders are operating in right now, regardless of what's driving the change: an owner, a board, a market downturn. High-performing teams can tolerate difficult news and incomplete answers. What wears them down is open-ended uncertainty combined with silence — when the normal ways of hearing from leaders, seeing the work, and feeling connected start to disappear.

The instinct in that moment is to wait it out — to say as little as possible until there's something concrete to say. We already had communication mechanisms running well before any of this started. My move wasn't to invent something new — it was to keep them going, and lean into them harder, right as the instinct to pull back would have been strongest.

What the Surveys Actually Said

We ran regular employee surveys, and one question kept surfacing above the others, in the results before the ownership change even entered the picture: people wanted more transparency and more visibility into what was happening across the org, not just within their own team. It wasn't a complaint about compensation or workload. It was about feeling cut off from the bigger picture — not knowing how their work connected to anything beyond their immediate manager.

Rather than have leadership decide what to do with that finding, we put together a tiger team of employees to review the survey results directly and come back with recommendations. That distinction mattered. It wasn't leadership interpreting what people meant and prescribing a fix — it was the people who raised the concern deciding what would actually address it. Their top recommendation became an org-wide OKR: build out more communication channels across teams. Once the transition hit and uncertainty spiked, that infrastructure was already running, not something we were standing up from scratch under pressure.

Building the Communication Cadence: Four Channels, One Purpose

"More transparency" is easy to say and hard to operationalize. None of what follows will be unfamiliar — quarterly all-hands, skip-levels, and AMAs are common enough that most experienced leaders have run some version of all four. The differentiator was never the format. It was showing up to run them, quarter after quarter, specifically during the stretch when it's most tempting to let them slide. In practice, it became a specific set of habits:

Quarterly all-hands, where we reviewed what got done against the objectives we'd set, and where the new objectives were going — so people could see how their work rolled up into org goals and, above that, corporate goals. We used part of that time to demo actual work in progress, so the connection between "what I did this quarter" and "what the company shipped" wasn't abstract. We brought in leaders from elsewhere in the company to talk to the team directly, including an open Q&A session with the CEO — no script, no pre-submitted questions.

Group skip-level meetings, structured so that people across the teams I led had direct access to me at least once within a given year, not just their manager.

AMAs. These started during the pandemic as a weekly open forum for the whole org — no agenda, just questions. The cadence changed over time, but the format stayed: people could ask anything, and while not every question could be answered, the ones that couldn't be were told why they couldn't be, rather than dodged.

Rotating team updates. Directs took turns sending informal updates to the wider team on what was happening in their corner of the org — a low-effort way of keeping the "larger cause" visible without it becoming another mandatory meeting.

None of these were revolutionary individually — that was never the point. What mattered was that they ran consistently, on a cadence, through the entire period of uncertainty, not just at the start when attention was highest and showing up was easy.

The Metric That Isn't the Lesson

It would be convenient to end here with a number — engagement scores held up, survey results stayed strong. And they did. But that's not really the lesson, and leading with it risks making this sound like a management technique rather than what it actually was: a decision, repeated quarter after quarter, to keep treating people like they were part of something rather than just executing tasks under a new owner.

The clearest signal of that came after I left, when a number of these efforts were scaled back. Quiet should not be mistaken for connection. Broader workforce data backs this up: Gallup found U.S. engagement reached an 11-year low in early 2024, while Glassdoor's 2025 Worklife Trends report found 65% of professionals — and 73% of tech workers specifically — felt stuck in their current roles. That's why consistency matters. When people stay without feeling seen or informed, retention isn't the same thing as trust.

Culture can be mandated from the top in the sense that leadership can set the tone. But it can't be sustained by mandate — someone has to keep doing the unglamorous, recurring work of listening and responding, especially when times are difficult and it would be easier not to. The moment leadership stops treating that as a responsibility rather than a nice-to-have, it doesn't collapse dramatically. It just quietly stops being there.

The goal was never to announce the change well. It was to make sure the team never had to wonder if anyone was paying attention while they waited for it.

If your organization is navigating a team through acquisition, restructuring, or sustained uncertainty and needs steady leadership through it — not a one-time fix — that's the kind of thing Fractional CIO engagements, and a scoping call, are built for.