People can handle a lot of uncertainty when they’re treated like adults.

If one more leader tells a team that’s about to be restructured to “stay positive,” I might scream.😱

Everywhere I look right now, someone is running a workshop on mindset. It’s become the answer to everything. Burnout, disengagement, culture problems, change fatigue. Shift the mindset, shift the outcome. And leaders start repeating it, mostly because it’s the only language anyone has handed them.

I’ve been in organizations where the budget was falling apart, people were afraid for their jobs, and decisions had to be made that nobody wanted to make. I’ve made some of those decisions myself, including taking a region from ten sites down to two.

So I can tell you what happens to mindset talk when the pressure is real. It falls apart in about a minute.⏰

You can hear it when a leader starts borrowing the workshop vocabulary. “Stay positive.” “Choose your mindset.” “Control what you can control.” “Let’s keep the energy up.”

It’s meant to reassure, and it does the opposite. It sounds coached.

It sounds like someone reading from last quarter’s offsite to people who are lying awake at night. That’s the moment people stop believing what the leader says, and it’s very hard to get back.

Optimism is fine. Using it to sound calm when you’re not is the problem, and people can tell immediately. A shaky leader with a polished message makes the whole building nervous. A steady leader who says it straight calms it down, even when the news is bad.

And here’s the part nobody in the workshop mentions.

The leaders being told to keep everyone positive are often the same ones delivering the pressure. They’re asked to cut the budget and then coach everyone through how they feel about it. Middle managers get it worst. They’re passing on messages they don’t believe to people who can see right through them.

People can handle a lot of uncertainty when they’re treated like adults.

They don’t need you to pretend it’s fine. They need to know that you understand what’s happening and what it means for them, and that you won’t hide behind nice words.

You don’t need every answer. Sometimes there aren’t any good ones.

What you need is to be able to say, “This is hard. I know it is. Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know yet, and here’s what we’re going to do.” And then do it.

That goes for everyone in the building. You can be worried about your job and still do excellent work. You can disagree with a decision and stay professional. You can be angry or scared without letting it decide what you do next. That’s the kind of steadiness worth teaching people.

I’ve never seen a struggling organization recover because everyone learned to put a positive spin on it.

I HAVE seen them recover when people stopped pretending, looked at what was actually wrong and made the decisions that needed making. Some of those decisions hurt, and no amount of positive thinking would have made them hurt less. /Ulrika