Get grounded to be more agile and resilient.

In my recent conversations with a company’s leadership team, one sentiment kept echoing: “Enough is enough.” These seasoned leaders, battle-hardened by multiple rounds of restructuring, had reached their breaking point. They’d watched as roles shifted, teams were shuffled, and plans got tossed aside time and time again.

One leader said: “We keep adapting, but it feels like the ground beneath us is always moving.” Another put it bluntly “I can’t keep asking my team to stay motivated when they don’t even know what’s coming next.” This wasn’t just about tackling market challenges; it was an internal storm eroding morale and performance. Stability was no longer a pressing desire but an urgent need.

Sound familiar? In today’s world, we all know that change is our everyday companion. The ground rules are constantly shifting, and it feels like just keeping up is a feat in itself. But here’s something that might surprise you: the key to surviving this whirlwind isn’t just about being agile or moving fast. It’s about finding stability—a solid ground from which to spring forward.

Think about it on a personal level. When you feel safe, confident, and grounded, you can tackle anything life throws at you. But when you’re anxious, vulnerable, and unsure, even the smallest obstacle can knock you off course. It’s no different for companies. Stability gives teams the security and confidence they need to take risks, innovate, and bounce back stronger. As organisational expert Elaine Pulakos puts it:

The most agile companies counterbalance the chaos of change with practices that create simplicity, clarity, and focus. Stability provides the foundation that fuels risk-taking, change, and recovery.

So, in my post this week, let’s explore why stability matters, and how can we, as leaders, cultivate it without falling into the trap of complacency.

Stability: The Secret Ingredient for Agility

Organizational stability creates the optimum conditions for agility and resilience — the two keys to thriving through tumultuous times. Within a secure work environment, employees remain engaged and continue to perform at a high level without getting bogged down in fear and confusion, despite being surrounded by external uncertainties. In turn, this allows the business to withstand shocks, pivot strategically and recover quickly.

Stability also has a darker side. Keep in mind that traditional organizations are already hardwired for operational stability. Structure, policy, procedure, routine — these touchstones of business education and practice are designed to maximize consistency.

While such systems are crucial for any business to survive and thrive, they are naturally resistant to change. When stability degenerates into status quo, we are left with an unyielding bureaucracy and endless red tape. New ideas are stifled and innovation comes to a grinding halt. When faced with sudden change, such an organization may be rendered obsolete.

"At its best, however, a stable system creates safe ways to unleash creativity and disruption from within, enabling the business to remain relevant and thrive."

“Stablerupting” leaders treat stability not as an end in itself but as a critical path to agility and innovation. They lean into the tension between inertia and dynamism, strengthening opportunities for novel ideas to emerge, progress through the organization, and become formalized.

Building Stability

Here are five recommendations for leaders to foster greater stability within their organization

1. Create transparency.

Openness and trust are essential to a sense of stability. Leaders would do well to share the reasons and thinking behind critical business decisions with their team members. Invite them into an open discussion so they can understand the why, instead of filling in the blanks with half-truths and conjectures.

The rumour mill is an extremely destabilizing force in any organization, so don’t leave a vacuum for gossip and hearsay, especially during a crisis. Even when the news is bad, employees generally feel more comfortable being in the know, rather than being left to imagine catastrophic scenarios or play the blame game. It also helps if leaders communicate information in clear, everyday language — not dense jargon or tired cliches.

2. Provide grounded reassurance.

In the midst of crisis, we are called upon to perform the ultimate balancing act — a tightrope walk between realism and optimism. Team members turn to leaders not just for facts but also for hope and strength.

When you communicate tough news, help to put it in perspective. Dispel anxiety by sharing positive information and boost morale by identifying newly uncovered opportunities. Don’t undermine trust by sugarcoating matters or making false promises but do communicate your confidence in the strategy for moving forward. Strive to be a calming presence in the storm.

In the case of a serious disappointment or challenge, realign expectations to provide a stabilizing influence. For example, if resources have been heavily slashed, don’t drive your team to achieve the same targets with practically no support. Making impossible demands at a time when people are already struggling increases instability and the risk of burnout. Instead, recalibrate targets to fit the available resources.

3. Be crystal-clear on priorities.

When operating in crisis, distractions are everywhere. Pre-existing ambiguities are amplified, and new distractions appear every day. Team members feel lost, scattering their focus and energy in a hundred different directions. Chaos reigns and performance plummets.

The antidote to distraction is a culture of clarity, where priorities are consistently reviewed and reinforced. This exercise should ideally be launched while things are relatively calm. From C-suite to frontline managers, leaders at all levels must draw a clear distinction between must-have’s and nice-to-have’s, so employees understand which initiatives are critical to keeping the business afloat.

When turbulence hits, leaders will need to review, realign and recommunicate top priorities repeatedly so team members know exactly what is expected of them. (This is even more important in remote-work scenarios like the pandemic, where communication was severely hampered.) Creating clarity also removes a large amount of stress, leaving people free to devote their precious attention to work instead of worrying.

4. Foster pockets of innovation.

To prevent stability from turning into the status quo, strengthen institutional support for new ideas. Instead of dismissing bottom-up challengers as troublemakers (as is often the case), carve out spaces for healthy dissent and bold thinking.

When tension sparks between “stabilizers” and “disruptors”, don’t shut it down. Make it safe for both sides to express their views and encourage the debate to unfold constructively. From such scenarios emerge some of our best innovations: daring ideas become more robust when examined, challenged and tempered with a dash of realism.

Embed experimentation and entrepreneurial activity across departments, either through specific teams or collective forums. Failures should be used as teachable moments: avoid blame, glean vital lessons and use them to the organization’s benefit. This way, when change comes, you will already have the mindset and mechanisms to move quickly and adapt fearlessly within a framework of overall stability.

5. Safeguard workplace predictability.

While some changes are inevitable or beneficial, others can do more harm than good. In his article in the Harvard Business Review, Ashley Goodall outlines the value of psychological stability at the workplace:

The science is clear: people do best at work when their environment is predictable, when they have some sense of control over their immediate surroundings, when they are part of a stable set of relationships, when they feel connected to place and ritual, and when the point of their efforts is readily apparent to them.

Constant, unnecessary change is the enemy of performance. Here, I am referring to change for the sake of change. This could include frequently reorganizing teams, altering schedules/spaces, restructuring processes, and so on. As leaders, we must resist upending our team members’ core working environments and support networks at the drop of a hat. Day-to-day stability can further be nurtured through collective rituals, which help create a sense of constancy. (You can read my recent post on workplace rituals here.)

To maintain predictability through crisis, develop contingency plans for potential emergencies. Pre-planning for disruptions has a stabilizing effect: employees feel confident about dealing with the unexpected and can handle shocks more calmly. Remember, crisis playbooks don’t need to be perfect. Their primary value lies in providing assurance and getting the ball rolling — the specifics can be tweaked along the way.

We’ve been so focused on moving fast and staying agile that we’ve forgotten the power of stability. But it’s stability that gives people the confidence to innovate, adapt, and keep going, no matter what. So as leaders, let’s not wait for the next crisis to wake us up. Let’s proactively build the kind of stable, supportive environments that empower our teams to thrive in the face of whatever comes next. The more stable we make their ground, the higher they’ll be able to leap.