Managing in the Age of Uncertainty

Great Managers Know How to "Read the Room"

How good are your "anticipation skills”?

How you react in the moment to a situation, with your own people or your boss, can turbocharge your career as a manager — or bring it to a halt in just a few seconds.

What makes reading the room so important is the fact that nearly all conversations with your team are unpredictable. You never know what questions are going to be asked or what concerns your people may convey.

But, at the same time, your reaction to every question is predictable — it’s really a question of your “anticipation skills” according to my friend and former Cisco colleague Brian Panosian, author of How to Master the Art of Being the Worst Sales Person: Funny Failings to Future Success

I write this newsletter to help managers succeed in what I call the Age of Uncertainty — as AI reimagines work. I regularly talk to experts to help managers build their toolbox.

I think every manager’s toolbox needs a chapter called: “How I ‘show up’ in meetings where something important is at stake.”

With so much changing so fast in the workplace, managers are going to find themselves in high-stakes meetings about the near-term future — the next quarter, the next year. Your presence in those meetings may be the most important factor to influencing the outcome. I’ve learned many tough lessons in this regard.

I’d known for a long time that Brian was a champion seller at Cisco, but I didn’t know his secret sauce: reading the room.

Anticipation Skills

I had never heard the phrase “anticipation skills” until I spoke with Brian.

“It’s all about reading the emotional vibe of the room,” Brian says.

I know from my own experience that later in my tenure at Cisco I wasn’t always great at reading a room’s emotional vibe. My emotions got the best of me several times in budget discussions toward the end of my career at Cisco as the company restructured annually — meaning I was laying off employees year after year. In my last couple of years at Cisco, I tried different strategies to anticipate how to react “in the room” during these budget discussions.

At one point, I used a yellow sticky note with these words written on it: “Don’t be emotional.”

Brian has really thought this through. “Everybody has scar tissue and failures,” he tells me. “You can learn from your experiences, just like the NFL cornerback who has anticipation skills he didn’t have in high school.”

Each of us, including younger readers, has a body of work in the world. We’ve all been in situations where tough choices had to be made or when a new direction was required.

Take a minute of self-reflection right now and ask yourself this question: when was I at my worst in a group setting? When did I not read the room properly? Conversely, when was I at my best?

Experience is another word for preparation.

Brian says every manager needs a gameplan to get a room to “yes” and how to react when the room says “no.”

“How do I read the emotional vibe of the meeting and either go with it, or course correct it before it is too late,” Brian tells me.

In many ways, anticipation is pattern recognition. Every manager needs a “mental library” of situations they’ve been in or will be in.

Think about yourself, and what it’s been like trying to influence an outcome in meetings that sound like these:

• Delivering bad news to your team Undoubtedly, any conversation considered “difficult” — including performance issues, behavioral problems, compensation and promotions, upcoming organizational changes or layoffs, etc. — is going to be emotional Read my issue “The Most Difficult Job of a Manager: Difficult Conversations” for frameworks on how to show up prepared, not reactive.

• Presenting to senior leadership As Cassie Divine from Intuit told me, great communicators “read the room and adjust their approach accordingly” — explaining things differently to a peer than to a senior executive who cares about specific outcomes. See my issue “Executive Presence: The Three Pillars That Make People Listen to You” for her full framework.

• Navigating team conflict or tension The rule I’ve written is simple: don’t let tensions fester — when two team members aren’t working well together, get in the room and facilitate resolution. My issue on How to Manage a High-Performing Team covers why teams that work through disagreement productively consistently outperform teams that avoid it.

• Managing through organizational change The Six Drivers of Consistency — especially Listening and your Mindset — are your anchors when your team is anxious and watching. See my issue on “The Six Drivers of Consistency” for tips on what people look for in a manager, even as everything around them is shifting.

• The critical negotiation or client meeting Several sales gurus I interviewed, including Brian, told me the top 1% don’t rely on scripts — they win on empathy, trust, and the ability to read what the other side actually needs in the moment. My issue “Lessons from the Best: the most human of skills is what defines a winning salesperson in the age of AI” goes deep on this.

Manager Homework: Make a Plan

I’m convinced the one job AI can’t replace is managing people. Navigating interpersonal dynamics is a uniquely human experience.

Start investing in your “anticipation skills” by doing these three things:

1. Make listening a consistent priority. Your people want you to know when things are working and when they’re not. In fact, your people are already talking about it. Find your way to tap into your team’s conversation. I love the “skip level” meeting where you meet front-line employees layers below your direct reports.

2. Develop a “pre-game” routine. My little “sticky pad” was my effort at a consistent way to show up when the stakes are high. Do the same for yourself. What balances you best? What puts you in the mindset to receive information and think about it — before you react to it.

3. Try to learn the “tells” of the people who matter most Every person has a set of behavioral signals that telegraph their internal state — a particular executive goes monotone when they’re skeptical, a colleague crosses their arms when they feel cut off, your boss checks their phone when they’ve mentally moved on. Cataloging these tells over time turns anticipation from guesswork into something close to a system.

Earlier in the year I wrote that the best managers have uniquely human skills: Nuance, empathy, communications, intuition, integrity.

I’m adding a new skill to the list: anticipation.

In Summary: Principles of Managing in the Age of Uncertainty

• I left Cisco to answer this question with research and evidence: What does the manager of the future look like? What are millennials and gen-z seeking in a manager? Which behaviors, tactics, skills or processes matter? What’s it going to take to attract and keep the best people over the next decade? In short, how to be a great manager.

• Based on this research, the core philosophy of this newsletter is rooted in one idea: successful managers in this moment in time, for this generation of talent, need to be “career dot-connectors.” The next-gen doesn’t expect to spend their entire career on your team — that’s an idea boomers grew up with. A job on your team is like a chapter in a career story to the current generation. If you want the best people on your team, you have to connect the dots between roles on the team and the career opportunities of the people working on the team.

• What is the“Age of Uncertainty”? If the industrial age was about taking predictable steps up the ladder, the age of uncertainty is about finding or discovering the path of a career without any predictable steps, without an obvious ladder — it’s why being a career dot-connector will differentiate you as a manager.

• How to be a Great Manager in the Age of Uncertainty: Be a Career Dot Connector is available on Amazon.

• What kind of manager are you? Take my free self-assessment and learn about yourself.