As I wandered the streets of Amsterdam filling the time I had between meetings and wanting to enjoy the first day of spring, I was drawn into an unassuming book shop that I must have passed hundreds of times before. It was full of treasures and I could have spent the rest of the afternoon getting lost in all the jewels (books, zines, prints).

After having recently run several women's programs with female founders and executive leaders alike, I was struck by the amount of self-doubt there was in the respective rooms. Here you have A-players of their business/industry and they are constantly having to work against a loud voice of doubt.

How amazing was it to see legendary performers such as Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Eminem, 50 Cent and Mary J. Blige at the Super Bowl halftime show this year?

Well, it actually depends on who you ask.

🤓 As a leader of a business, I have had to hold a lot in my head and have developed a specific way of doing things. My experience has given me great context, subject knowledge, and clarity. It can appear that solutions come naturally and easily to me and my team naturally come to me for my thoughts.

Although tempting, we can’t look forward without looking back. Like a project retrospective, it’s important to take stock of what we did well, could do better and maybe shouldn’t do at all.

I was recently on a call with a founder/CEO who stated:

“I used to have team meetings with my (global) team but no one found them to be any good, so I stopped them and now just have 1:1s with everyone.”

As we come towards the end of the year and reflect on 2020, it has become clear that there are some companies that have done a particularly good job at leaping to the next playing field while others have floundered in the face of crisis. What did these companies do to strive in uncertainty?

In your leadership its important to level up your decision making by communicating clearly, widening your circle of decision makers, and leading with focus, resilience, and compassion as you execute your plays.

Becoming human-first as a leader requires a deep level of self awareness – emotional intelligence, cognitive empathy, and control. Find out more about building that connection with yourself, about dropping into a level of consciousness and understanding with yourself as you take stock of what it means to lead from a place of compassion, what it is to be truly human first.

It can be tricky to give hard feedback when you aren't face to face to alleviate the discomfort that comes with a difficult conversation. And, on top of this, in an already challenging time, you have to be cautious of not sinking employee morale too heavily. After speaking with our community of executives, founders, and managers, we have discovered five strategies to help you deliver this hard feedback in an effective and encouraging way.

With many companies understanding the long term gravity of this distributed environment, riddled with continued uncertainty, we turned to our network of manager, executives, and founders to brainstorm together, 5 Values for leaders to lean on to anchor their teams in the midst of uncertainty.

As many leaders found themselves navigating new technologies and ways of working, leaders demonstrated increased attention on their people, focusing on everyone’s safety and well-being, and then moved to incorporate remote tools into their team’s skillset in order to enable effective remote work and collaboration.

There are five leadership qualities that you want to avoid as you begin to foster increased curiosity in your organization and make the move to high quality collaboration in this remote word:

Gillian discussed how personal values play a role in our work life as, for founders, they are intimately tied to company values. It is important that you don’t react to situations, instead, learn to respond and reconsider, do not override your energy either, as doing so will put you in the danger zone of burnout. This kind of self-mastery starts with you understanding your values and how you approach them, these values can be anything from your behaviors to the things that guide you.

Victoria Stoyanova is a “People’s Architect” or a community and ecosystem builder who has been curating communities for coworking spaces, startups, and corporate companies and helping them understand who they need to be talking to and how. She joined our founder, Gillian Davis, in conversation to address the best ways to build community and generate growth within a company.

Leadership during this time of change is a tricky subject, Ross Allmark, head of events and ticketing at Dice– an upstart mobile company–held a conversation with our founder, Gillian Davis, elaborating on how having a failsafe process and framework for uncertainty in crisis can build resilience within a company during times of great change.

Being a product leader can be an isolating role and at the beginning of this year, I started to think about ways to support product leaders. I wanted to bring product leaders together to show that one point rings true across the board: no one has it all figured out. The undefined nature of the PM role is part of the process. It’s likely that you’ll never find “the way”, so being able to work through uncertainty is the name of the game. I wanted to create a space for product leaders to share their challenges, learn from each other and feel less isolated and more supported.

Keji Mustapha– Head of Network and Brand at Connect Ventures–a VC firm that is singularly focused on founders who are obsessed with innovating and solving hard problems at scale, “Where Product Founders Fit”, held a conversation with our founder, Gillian Davis, surrounding the importance of implementing a generalist strategy for team building and first-time founders. Keji seeks to add value to her investment companies, growing their capabilities far beyond those they had when they arrived, while at the same time connecting founders to one another to create a community of growth.

Today, we’re seeing uncertainty not only in tech but in our daily lives with the changes brought on by COVID. When we think about leadership in uncertainty, the need to adapt stands out. Leaders don’t react, they respond - with a considered choice. 2020 has reinforced that anything can happen, and when it does, leaders have to do what’s best, even if it means letting their plans go.

Product leaders don’t get enough credit. They carry a lot of responsibility within an organization but are often left by the wayside, or their role isn’t fully understood, creating tension. Organizations need strong product leaders to pull together their product and engineering teams and non-technical stakeholders. Don’t believe me, listen to my interview with Seb Saboune, Head of Product at Founders Factory.