How Assertive and Turbulent Personalities Can Lead Better in Uncertain Times
Is your response to pressure helping your team? Or just yourself?
What’s Coming Up
Why Assertive leaders’ steady confidence sometimes prevents them from seeing what’s actually wrong
What happens when your team mistakes your comfort with uncertainty for having things under control
How Turbulent leaders’ self-doubt can actually catch problems others miss – until it doesn’t
The uncomfortable truth about when your visible stress becomes everyone else’s stress
A way to recognize when your response to pressure is helping your team or just managing your own state
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We’re in the home stretch of our personality series on Leading Through Uncertainty. So far, we’ve explored:
How Introverted and Extraverted leaders navigate the unknown
How Intuitive and Observant leaders see different possibilities
Today we’re looking at the final trait pair: Assertive versus Turbulent. This one’s different because it doesn’t change how you think or what you notice. It changes how you experience the weight of it all.
When uncertainty hits, Assertive leaders tend to stay steady, confident they’ll handle whatever comes. Turbulent leaders feel it more intensely, questioning their decisions and scanning for what might go wrong.
Neither response is wrong. But your relationship with doubt shapes not just how you feel internally – it shapes how your team interprets the entire situation.
Let’s look at what that actually means.
P.S. For more information on how to lead your team (rather than yourself) through stress and uncertainty based on their personality traits, check out our past Managing Stress series.
How Assertive Leaders React When Uncertainty Hits
If you’re an Assertive leader, you probably remain pretty calm even when things get complicated. You’re genuinely comfortable with not knowing exactly how things will turn out.
Your team probably sees you unfazed and assumes things must be manageable. But sometimes that calm isn’t because you’ve accurately assessed the situation. It’s just your baseline response to stress.
You might find yourself dismissing concerns or warning signs because you feel confident you’ll figure it out when you need to. The problem is, by the time you feel you “need to,” you’ve often missed the window where early action would have mattered. Your comfort with uncertainty can mean you don’t prepare as thoroughly as the situation actually requires.
And once you make a decision, you’re less likely to second-guess yourself or actively seek input. This decisiveness keeps things moving, which is valuable. But it also means you might stick with a failing approach longer than you should because changing course would require admitting you got it wrong.
How to Stretch
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