When Leadership Leaves You Guessing: Coping with Communication Blackouts

Ever walked into work and felt the silence from leadership? It's more damaging than you think! 

In this episode, we explore how leadership silence can breed burnout, wreak havoc on your nervous system, and diminish team morale. We'll tackle what uncertainty does to your brain and body, and provide actionable tips for coping and leading in the dark. 

Learn how to advocate, adapt, or know when it's time to exit. Plus, discover the five big reasons companies go silent and how you can protect your brain and stabilize your team through the chaos. 

Check out the detailed show notes (https://tarakermiet.com/podcast/) and leave your thoughts or questions about today's topic. 

00:00 Introduction: The Weight of Leadership Silence
01:04 The Impact of Uncertainty on Mental Health
03:53 Understanding the Reasons Behind Leadership Silence
10:08 Coping Strategies for Uncertain Times
13:20 Advocating for Clarity and Making Decisions
15:41 Conclusion: Taking Control in the Fog

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: The Weight of Leadership Silence
• 1:50 The Impact of Uncertainty on Mental Health
• 4:39 Understanding the Reasons Behind Leadership Silence
• 10:54 Coping Strategies for Uncertain Times
• 14:06 Advocating for Clarity and Making Decisions
• 16:27 Conclusion: Taking Control in the Fog

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Let me paint a picture. You walk into work on a random Tuesday and there's tension in the air. A meeting invite pops up with some vague subject line, like organizational updates or business priorities. Leadership joins says a few carefully worded things about change on the horizon or realigning resources, and then nothing, no timeline, no specifics.

Just a weird hollow feeling in your gut that something is happening, but no one's saying that quiet part out loud. That's where burnout breeds because that silence has weight. When you are left without answers, your nervous system goes into overdrive. You start scanning for meeting in half statements.

You try to lead your team without direction. You stay up at night running every possible worst case scenario, and slowly your [00:01:00] energy and sense of control start to completely unravel. Today we're talking about why leadership silence is more than just frustrating, it's harmful. We're gonna get into, what that uncertainty does to your brain, your body and bandwidth, and what you can actually do to cope and lead when you're in the dark.

And we're also digging into how to decide when it's time to advocate, adapt, or maybe even exit. Let's start with this. Silence is not neutral. It's not a leadership strength. It's not strategic patience.

It's a stressor, especially when you're already stretched thin and working from a place of emotional or mental depletion. There's this study where participants were told they might get a mild electric shock.

Some were told it was definitely coming. Others were told, maybe you'll get shocked, maybe you won't. And the people who were in the maybe group experienced way more stress than the ones who knew the shock was [00:02:00] guaranteed. The uncertainty was worse than the actual pain itself. That's what leadership silence does.

It hijacks your nervous system. It turns your brain into a full-time threat detention system. Suddenly, every slack message gets analyzed. Every leadership email is dissected. Every calendar update makes your stomach drop. You start prepping for the worst. You try to act normal while your inner world is stuck on high alert.

Your nervous system flips into fight flight freezer, fawn, maybe you snap at people. Maybe you just can't focus. Maybe you start people pleasing harder, trying to make yourself look indispensable. Meanwhile, your capacity shrinks, your decision making suffers and your creativity disappears. You are no longer leading from a grounded place.

You're not operating with clarity. You're managing fear, and you are surviving. [00:03:00] And the thing is, we're not generous in that survival state. We don't fill in the blanks with grace or optimism. We assume the worst. We prepare for bad news. We steal ourselves emotionally for impact because that's what our brains and bodies have been trained to do.

And if you've experienced that kind of silence before, especially more than once, it gets wired in, your body remembers. So the next time leadership goes quiet, you don't just wonder what's going on. You relive every previous time that silence meant bad news. Some may think you're overreacting in this moment, but you're not.

You're reacting to an unsafe information environment and that reaction is wired into your biology. It's protective. But why does this happen? Why do so many companies just go dark?

Here's the [00:04:00] truth. Silence always serves someone, and it's not you, friend. There are five big reasons, and most companies fall into more than one at the same time. The first is narrative control. Leaders wanna wait until they have the perfect story. Something polished, buttoned up, free of complexity, controversy, or emotion.

But while they're workshopping messaging, people are spiraling. And the irony is that by the time the message is ready, trust has already dwindled. People want honesty, plain and simple. What builds trust is clarity and candor, even if the story is still unfolding. I've seen this up close. Entire teams paralyzed while leadership draft statement after statement behind closed doors.

Something to remember is that clarity delayed. Is clarity denied, and in that gap, morale [00:05:00] slips. Another reason is executive misalignment, and this one's big. Behind the scenes, the execs might be battling over strategy, fighting for resources, or just unsure of what direction they're even headed in, which happens way more than we think.

And instead of owning the mess and telling us that they're not aligned yet, they go silent because for them it feels safer. No contradiction, no mistakes,

But to the people watching from below, it's abandonment, it sends the message that they don't trust them enough to be real with them. When leaders aren't on the same page, the people who suffer most are the ones trying to execute without a map. The third reason is crisis containment. Some organizations are still stuck in this legacy mindset of command and control.

They treat communication like a liability instead of a tool. So they ration information, they hold things close to their chest and share only when they have to.

But people aren't dumb. [00:06:00] They feel the shift. They read between the lines and see the meetings disappear and priorities change. And by the time leadership confirms what everyone already knows, it's too late. The damage has been done in how long people sat in that silence making up their own stories. Now, recent number four is emotional avoidance.

This one's personal for a lot of us. Some leaders, and I say this with compassion, simply don't have the skills to hold space for discomfort. They don't know how to deliver hard news with empathy. So instead they vanish, they cancel check-ins, they delegate the announcement, they literally disappear. And while they may think that they're protecting the team by not making things worse.

What they're actually doing is increasing anxiety because that silence feels like being ghosted and being ghosted by your leader, especially during change. Breeds distrust that's hard to repair. And the [00:07:00] last reason is lack of infrastructure. Some organizations genuinely don't have the bones for good internal communication.

There's no agreed upon cadence for updates. No cascade strategy for messaging. No one tasked with internal transparency. So even when good leaders want to share, they don't know when or how messages come late or only to some teams, or they're full of jargon. And that results in confusion, chaos, and a whole lot of guessing and assuming.

And you know what happens when you assume, right? When communication depends on individual initiative instead of systemic structure, it's going to break under pressure. And that pressure always shows up during times of uncertainty. Plus, when there's no system for cascading updates, silence then becomes the system the default.

And that means the people on the front lines, like mid-level managers, [00:08:00] hr. Learning and development and ops, they're left to translate, absorb, and manage the fallout. They become the human buffer. I remember in the weeks after the layoffs at my last company, there was a lot of quiet, no one was really explaining how the decisions were made.

No one at all addressed the emotional toll that it had on all of us, and my new boss didn't even reach out for weeks. And actually HR never followed up with me. So during that time, the burden didn't go away. It just shifted to those of us that were still there. We had to carry the weight of morale, answer questions that we didn't have answers to, and make things feel stable when nothing actually was.

That's the cost of organizational silence, because the work doesn't stop. The metrics don't pause. [00:09:00] The expectations don't lower. In fact, it all gets more intense. But now you're operating in a vacuum trying to meet those expectations without the tools or context that you need. You're still leading your team, still being looped into projects still expected to perform, deliver, and to support others.

But now you're doing all of that with half the picture and twice the emotional labor. It's like being asked to drive a car through heavy fog with no headlights while your passengers keep asking when you'll get there. Those in middle management are carrying the weight of their own uncertainty while managing everyone else's reactions to it too.

They're trying to lead through a lack of leadership and that gap between what they're responsible for and what they're resourced to handle starts to widen, which is where the resentment creeps in. And then when you finally do get an update, it often comes too late, or it's so sanitized that it barely acknowledges what you've been holding.

There's no space for [00:10:00] debrief, no real recognition for the strain, just a polite mention of patience and an expectation to move on like nothing happened.

All right. Now let's talk about what's actually within your control when that fog does roll in. Because no, you can't force leadership to communicate. You can't magically create transparency or rewrite the org chart overnight. But there are things that you can do. And it's not about toxic positivity. This is about tactical clarity.

I want to give your nervous system, your team, and your own leadership muscles, something solid to anchor to when the ground starts shifting. So let's start with protecting your brain. When things feel chaotic, our brains default to filling in the blanks, and that's usually with worst case scenarios. So instead of going off the deep end, I want you to get it out of your head and onto paper.

Make three columns. The first column is labeled known. What facts do you actually have? The [00:11:00] second column is labeled unknown, what's unclear or unanswered? And then that third column is labeled, assumed. What are you guessing, projecting, or fearing? This helps you separate the real from the noise, and it gives your brain some boundaries.

And if your nervous system is still revving, consider using box breathing where you breathe in for four seconds. Hold for four. Breathe out for four. Hold for four. Repeat that for a few rounds.

I know it's boring, but it does work and kind of settling things down. It's also okay to give yourself some space to process. If you need to vent about the rumors, do it but limit how much time you do it. So set a timer for 10 minutes, rant away, speculate, say all the things, then stop. This allows you to let it all out without letting it take over your day.

You'll also need to focus on [00:12:00] stabilizing your team. Start by creating a predictable cadence. Let your team know when they'll hear from you, whether there's news or not. Simply telling them that you'll share any updates every Friday, even if it's just to say you haven't heard anything, can go a long way This way.

You're not promising answers necessarily, but you are promising consistency and in times like this, consistency is safety. Then think about how you can normalize the discomfort. You don't have to fix people's emotions, and in fact, you shouldn't try to do that. Instead, you have to create space to name their emotions.

You can say things like, I know this level of uncertainty is exhausting, or It's okay to be frustrated. That kind of acknowledgement is disarming. It diffuses the panic. That silence usually stirs up when people feel like their emotional experience is valid. They stop spinning and then they can start coping.

Once you've done that, shift the focus to [00:13:00] short-term clarity. If the big picture is still foggy, zoom in, shrink the timeline, ground the team and what's right in front of them. Bring attention to this week's focus, and then remind them that you'll revisit priorities regularly later on. This gives them something solid to move toward, which helps to stabilize things a bit.

But even with the best efforts to study your team, there comes a point when the silence above you starts to interfere with what's possible below, and that's when it's time to speak up.

This part can feel tricky, especially if you're used to making dew or if you've been conditioned to avoid rocking the boat. But you don't need to have a dramatic confrontation. Sometimes all it takes is a simple direct nudge that frames the ask in terms of what your team needs to function. Mention that you're noticing the lack of updates is increasing stress and making it harder to plan.

But even a quick weekly, no new info yet would help you manage priorities and stay focused. It's respectful, it's reasonable, it's rooted [00:14:00] in care for your people and performance. Now how leadership responds tells you a lot. If the answer is thanks for raising this, we'll find a way to keep you in the loop.

That's a good sign. If the answer is more silence or defensiveness, or indifference, that's also a signal. Either way, you're gathering data and that data help you decide what kind of leadership environment you're in, and whether it aligns with how you wanna lead, because chances are this might not be the first time you've been here.

You've done the stabilizing, you've stayed calm through the storm, you've asked for clarity with professionalism and care, but the blackouts keep coming. The silence just feels baked into the culture. That's when it's time to step back and look at the bigger picture. Is this how leadership always handles uncertainty?

Is there a sign that this will change? And what toll is this taking on you? One communication breakdown might be an [00:15:00] oversight. Three, that's a pattern. And patterns tell you what's normalized and what likely won't change without significant effort. Once you name the pattern, you start seeing that your burnout is a response to chronic misalignment, not a personal failure.

And from that place, you can make real choices. Do I keep adapting to this? Do I escalate again, but with firmer boundaries, or do I start laying the groundwork for a possible exit? There's no one right answer, but there's power in naming the truth because the longer you stay in guesswork, the harder it is to trust your own clarity.

When it finally does come. Now when leadership goes silent, it's not just about poor communication, it's about what silence steals from you. It steals time because you spend hours interpreting instead of executing. It steals energy because your nervous system never gets to rest, and it steals [00:16:00] confidence because you start questioning if it's just you.

In a perfect world, your leaders would recognize the weight of their silence. They'd offer steady updates, real transparency, and space to process change like human beings.

But you might not work in that world. So in the absence of that care, I want you to remember that clarity isn't just a workplace perk. It is a form of care. And when it's not offered to you, you have every right to create it for yourself and your team. Like, here's what I know, here's what I don't, and here's what I'm assuming.

Or this week, here's what we're focusing on. That's what I can control. Or I see how heavy this is, and it's not just you. I get that. That might not feel like much, but those little anchors do add up. They give people something to hold onto when everything else feels unstable. And maybe most importantly, they remind you that you still have some agency.[00:17:00] 

You still get to decide how you show up. You still get to decide what you normalize, and you still get to decide when enough is enough. Friend, you deserve better than the fog. You deserve leadership. That doesn't make you guess, and you deserve communication that doesn't make you panic. But until you get that, I hope this gave you some tools to lead yourself through it and a little validation that you're not crazy, weak, or dramatic for feeling the way you do.

Take care of yourself and make good choices. I'll see you next time.