The Leadership Skill of Holding: What Neuroscience Tells Us
One of the most impactful pieces of feedback I ever received came early in my leadership career.
I was leading a newly formed team through a messy debate about priorities. There was real disagreement in the room. As the leader, I stepped in quickly and pushed us toward alignment and decisions. I thought I was doing what leaders are supposed to do.
A team member saw it differently. They told me I didn't always need to fix things so fast. That I might try staying longer in listening and understanding before moving the team forward.
That comment exposed something uncomfortable: my own relationship with ambiguity.
As someone wired for activation and empathy, my instinct is to make things better fast. For a long time, I confused that instinct with leadership. In reality, it often shut down debate, learning, and ownership before they had a chance to develop.
That moment started a shift I'm still conscious of today. From "my job is to find the solution" to "my job is to create the environment where the team can find the solution."
The old neural pathways don't disappear. I still feel the pull to jump in. That's exactly when I pause.
A recent Harvard Business Review article describes this capacity as holding, the ability to stay present with uncertainty, tension, and disagreement without rushing to fix or control. It's not passivity. It's not avoidance. It's choosing to stay in the discomfort long enough for real thinking to happen.
As a coach grounded in neuroscience, that framing landed differently when I read the NeuroLeadership Institute's updated SCARF research from 2025. SCARF maps five social domains, Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness, that trigger either reward or threat responses in the brain.
Here's what surprised me. Certainty, once the top driver of feeling safe at work, now ranks last. Fairness and autonomy now lead in activating reward circuitry in the brain.
I don't think people have become comfortable with ambiguity. I think that after years of relentless uncertainty, certainty has stopped functioning as the primary signal of safety. People may not be comfortable with uncertainty, but they are becoming more practiced at functioning within it. What they're watching for even more now is whether they're being treated fairly and whether they still have agency.
Which means clarity alone is no longer enough to hold a team's trust. When real clarity is available, leaders should absolutely provide it. The challenge is knowing when certainty helps and when it prematurely shuts down thinking.
This is where holding stops being just a relational skill and starts shaping how people experience safety at work. When leaders rush to certainty, they can quietly erode autonomy and undermine fairness, the two things people most need right now. When leaders can hold, they preserve agency, signal respect, and give people room to actually think.
I've watched this shift change teams. Conflict surfaces earlier in the room instead of leaking into side conversations. Decisions improve. Ownership increases. Leaders stop carrying everything themselves.
So what does holding actually look like in practice?
Three things I come back to:
Name what's unresolved instead of resolving it. When tension is in the room, try saying it out loud. “I know we haven't landed this yet, and I think that's where we need to stay for now.” You're not abdicating, and you're not avoiding a decision. You're signaling that the discomfort is intentional and productive, and that you trust the team to work through it.
Ask one more question before you offer a solution. When you feel the pull to step in, that's your cue. Instead of answering, try: "What do you think is getting in the way?" or "What haven't we considered?" One question buys the team room to think. It also usually surfaces something you wouldn't have seen on your own.
Debrief the process, not just the outcome. After a difficult conversation or decision, spend five minutes asking the team what it was like to work through it. Not just what you decided, but how you got there. This builds the team's tolerance for future uncertainty and makes the hard work visible.
Developing this capacity means unlearning some deeply held beliefs, that speed equals competence, that reassurance equals care, that control equals leadership, and staying present long enough for the real issue to surface. Trust is harder to build right now. Holding may be one of the few leadership capacities that actually helps.
Holding is uncomfortable. That's usually how I know it matters.