Like many people, March of 2020 wasn’t my best month for sleep. I was anxious about the quickly-spreading coronavirus, both as a husband and father, of course, but also as the head of a business. How would we adapt to working from home? How would we keep our products running and customers satisfied when no one could say what the next month held?

I didn’t have answers. No one did. I was as nervous and on-edge as everyone else. But what I had to figure out, fast, was how much of that to admit to my team.

Being totally candid risked stoking fear—the opposite of what I wanted in an already stressful time. Being too confident would surely ring false.

That period taught me a lot about being a leader, and one lesson in particular has stuck with me: that there is such a thing as the right amount of transparency. Here’s how to find it.

Undersharing Vs. Oversharing

We are living through uncertain times. But to what extent should leaders voice their thoughts out loud?

Oversharing has obvious pitfalls. A leader who is constantly processing their worries out loud is liable to spook everyone else. Without ready answers, it just creates more anxiety. This isn’t to say you should never confide in a trusted right-hand, but on the whole, the crew does not want to hear that the ship’s captain is flying blind.

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