Build High-Performing Teams in Complex, Ambiguous Times: 4 Insights for Human Resources

I’ve been connecting with many Human Resources (HR) leads at the workshops I’m facilitating. While each company is distinct, just about every person I’m working with is struggling to navigate nuanced and messy challenges that make for choppy waters.

Think of cross-functional initiatives that no one department fully owns; responsibly integrating AI into work and people processes when employees are already feeling exhausted; and creating a consistent company culture when strategies and priorities keep pivoting. In our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environments, these challenges are not going away.

We need to help teams ride the waves, so they feel empowered to perform even in turbulent times. In this new era of work, HR professionals have an opportunity to reshape workplace conditions so that staff can still thrive.

Let’s look at four themes to support team performance through complexity and ambiguity, and three actionable practices you can adopt right away.

1. Design for Clarity, Not Just Efficiency

When employees aren’t sure who owns what, initiatives often stall. It’s not always possible to write perfect job descriptions that capture every consideration, so instead, HR can focus on providing the infrastructure to improve clarity.

3 Practical Steps:

• Share frameworks to identify responsibilities. At Emergenetics International, we like to use RACIs to determine who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed of different initiatives. Just remember: These are living documents. Revisit them whenever scopes change.
• Promote decision matrices. High-performing teams understand what they have authority over and what needs to be escalated. Collaborate with leaders to map decisions by type and establish authority levels.
• Normalize ambiguity conversations. Not all uncertainty can be resolved, so it’s important to provide forums for personnel to turn to when they’re stuck. Help departments and project leads build in structured check-ins and asynchronous platforms to surface ambiguity.

2. Cultivate Psychological Safety

Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety was the number one predictor of team effectiveness above talent, experience or even clear goals. In challenging conditions, it’s even more important. When staff don’t have a clear answer, they need to feel safe enough to raise their hands, test their best guesses and make mistakes.

3 Practical Steps:

• Train managers on meeting facilitation. You’ll be amazed at how much time you can save on rework down the road when people leaders create a safe space to share ideas and concerns. I recommend using our Attributes in Action guide in Emergenetics+ to run an effective meeting where coworkers can offer their authentic inputs.
• Turn mistakes into data points for learning. Embed brief post-mortems as part of your action steps in any major project and decision. Frame these discussions as operational reviews to improve the next initiative.
• Use engagement data with precision. Track safety indicators, like employees’ willingness to make difficult decisions or to admit to mistakes. Splice the data by department, manager and tenure. That way, you can intervene early if you need to.

3. Invest in Sense-Making

One of my favorite takeaways from our webinar Recalibrating Leadership in the Age of Human-AI Collaboration came from our Co-owner, Annie Browning. She shared that one of the most important shifts that a leader can make is to become a sense-maker. Most training programs are designed for a world where problems have known solutions. Dealing with the unknown requires an ability to read incomplete signals, cultivate shared understanding with your team and collectively act with regulated confidence.

3 Practical Steps:

• Introduce scenario planning into leadership development. Integrate facilitated exercises, where participants work together to handle business challenges that don’t have clear answers. The groups can offer peer feedback to provide constructive critiques and use their collective cognitive diversity to improve the outcomes.
• Create cross-functional learning cohorts. Complexity is often hard to see in silos. Rotating employees through cross-departmental projects can create shared understanding and strengthen systems thinking. Plus, it can support internal mobility, which is increasingly important in today’s workplaces!
• Make “learning agility” a performance expectation. Update your competency frameworks and performance management tools to promote and track a person’s ability to adapt, unlearn and iterate.

4. Strengthen the Connection Between Staff

Ambiguous environments require coordination that extends beyond org charts. Effective collaboration across multiple layers and departments is often the difference between achieved targets and stalled projects. HR can help keep distributed staff members aligned by investing in solutions to elevate team building.

3 Practical Steps:

• Establish cross-functional communications channels. Work with operations to design forums where employees share project updates, obstacles and dependencies. At Emergenetics International, we use Teams channels to update one another on department initiatives, highlight challenges and connect across the global company.
• Map internal networks. Conduct a survey that asks employees who they go to when they’re stuck, who they consult before making an important decision and who keeps them informed about things that affect their work. This activity raises awareness of staff members’ informal networks, allowing HR to identify the information brokers, siloed teams and leaders who may be more isolated than they think. That way, you can cultivate connections proactively.
• Turn managers into culture champions. In ambiguous conditions, people typically look to their direct supervisor for interpretation and direction. Pair up managers and host peer-sharing opportunities for supervisors to discuss obstacles as well as share ideas about rituals and practices that help personnel feel united and supported.

The HR Opportunity in VUCA

There’s a tendency to view VUCA conditions as an interim state that we simply need to manage until we return to normal. The reality is that, with economic pressure, workforce shifts and rapid technology change, complexity and ambiguity are our new normal.

The HR leaders who create the most value don’t wait for clarity before taking action. They proactively design the structures, capabilities and connections that allow their organizations to perform productively even when things are unclear.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How does Emergenetics help teams navigate complexity and ambiguity?

Complex problems rarely have one right answer, and ambiguous situations require teams to consider multiple perspectives before acting.

Emergenetics makes those different perspectives visible and productive. When a team understands that one colleague prefers Structural thinking (methodical, practical, risk-aware) while another leads with Conceptual thinking (pattern-seeking, big-picture, possibility-driven), they stop misreading each other as rigid or scattered. Instead, they can use that cognitive diversity to identify multiple approaches to a challenge and achieve a better outcome.

Q: How would we start using Emergenetics to support our HR initiatives?

Typically, we have staff members complete their Emergenetics Profile as part of a Meeting of the Minds workshop. In the session, participants explore their preferred Thinking and Behavioral Attributes, discover the benefits of cognitive diversity and learn to communicate and collaborate across different preferences.

These tools support stronger team connections, provide a foundation for psychological safety and empower colleagues to use each other’s strengths to boost productivity and make better decisions. Then, we expand on this knowledge with additional tools based on department and organizational challenges.

Q: How do we measure the ROI of something like Emergenetics?

Emergenetics connects most directly to metrics like productivity, employee engagement, manager effectiveness and retention. Internally, many organizations use pre- and post-tests to assess improvements in team collaboration, a reduction in decision bottlenecks and time-to-productivity.

Emergenetics International also provides ROI calculators that allow HR professionals to model expected savings based on specific pain points like communication breakdowns, disengagement or self-awareness gaps.

Q: Can Emergenetics help with leadership development specifically?

Yes, leaders in complex environments need to understand their own preferences, how others experience those styles and how to flex to meet team members where they’re at.

Emergenetics helps leaders recognize their natural tendencies across seven Attributes and gain practical tools to communicate, collaborate and motivate people who approach their work differently. For HR leaders building succession pipelines, it also provides a structured way to elevate the in-demand people skills, like self-awareness, emotional intelligence and perspective-taking, that are needed to handle VUCA conditions.

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