The Age of Fear

If you’ve led through the past few years, you don’t need anyone to tell you that fear has become a defining force in the workplace. Economic swings  and political shifts hit overnight. Social media can turn a rumor into a crisis in minutes. And as Solomon and Srivastava recently wrote in Harvard Business Review, “The age of fear is real, but paralysis is not destiny. This time calls for leaders who admit what they can’t predict, but who plan anyway… <employees> want honesty about uncertainty and a story that connects daily work to a durable mission.”

That line has stayed with me, because it captures the tension leaders are living in. Fear doesn’t just unsettle people—it steals the most precious resource inside any organization: attention. When every hour feels like crisis time, strategy collapses under the weight of urgency. Leaders get pulled into churning reaction cycles where the inbox, the latest headline, or the newest policy shock dictates the agenda. Before long, vision gets replaced by vigilance.

But here’s the truth: strategic clarity won’t appear on its own. Leaders have to create the conditions for it. That means rethinking the workday, not as an endless list of tasks, but as a rhythm that protects time for reflection. Blocking standing time for strategic thinking—on your own calendar and for your teams—signals that long-term focus is not a luxury; it’s leadership. When leaders model that discipline, others follow.

And in this climate, trust becomes a kind of organizational currency. Stakeholder ground are looking for more than a balanced budget -they’re looking for psychological safety. They want to know that the leader can name reality without sugarcoating it, and still offer a path forward. Leaders who practice empathy, clarity, and transparency don’t eliminate uncertainty, but they offer something just as important: stability.

One of the most destabilizing sources of fear today is the constant flow of new information—financial, legal, political, technological—often arriving through chaotic channels like social media. Leaders can’t stop the waves, but they can stop the swirl. One practical, powerful way to do this is to turn anxiety into intelligence. Write a brief for your team outlining what happened, what is confirmed, what is probable, and what remains unclear. Then explain what it might mean for operations and whether anything needs to change. In a noisy world, clarity is a competitive advantage.

Every leader today stands at a fork in the road. One path leads to permanent firefighting—reacting to every shock, every headline, every hint of disruption. It’s exhausting, and it erodes the very leadership qualities people need most. The other path requires something harder and braver: building new systems, skills, and mindsets that anchor people in purpose rather than panic. It asks leaders to reclaim vision—not as a lofty ideal, but as a daily practice.

Great leadership in this era won’t be measured by an absence of fear. It will be measured by our ability to transform fear into clarity, courage, and shared purpose. Uncertainty isn’t going away. But how we meet it—how we steady ourselves and the people who count on us—will define the leaders who not only endure this age of fear, but rise within it.