If you sit one level below a leader who keeps changing direction, you already know the cost. Plans get half-built. Your team starts asking, "Is this still the priority?" And you spend more energy absorbing change than delivering results.

A senior executive raised this challenge in one of our Spark Circle™️ Mastermind sessions, where leaders from different companies and industries bring the problems they want to solve or see from a new angle.

The instinct is to treat every change as a problem. It isn't. Stability can be inertia with good manners, and a leader who kills a weak plan early is doing the job. In a 1989 study of eight microcomputer firms, Eisenhardt linked fast decisions to stronger performance. But the fast deciders were also coherent: their decisions connected to one another.

What doesn't help is making change a habit. Chatterjee and Hambrick studied 111 software and hardware CEOs (Administrative Science Quarterly, 2007). Those who changed strategy most often saw bigger swings in results, not better results on average. It is one industry and older data, but the pattern holds across the cases that worked.

I have come to see that the leaders who changed course and won did three things:

• They changed once. One decisive turn, not a series of them.
• They named it. People knew the old direction was finished.
• They held a core. Something important stayed still while the rest moved.

That gives you something useful: you cannot control whether your leader turns, but you can tell a correction from a turn, and respond to each differently.

It also helps to separate temperament from direction. An intense, demanding leader is not the same as an unstable one. A 2020 PNAS study followed 457 people for about 14 years and found that harshness did not help people rise faster. Still, tone is rarely what breaks a team. Direction is. When priorities keep turning, people tend to stop owning their work and start waiting for the next instruction.

That waiting is where you come in.

You may not control the turns above you. You can decide how much of the turbulence reaches your team.

Three Moves for the Executive in the Middle

1. Ask for the fixed core. In your next one-on-one, ask one question: "What is fixed for the next 90 days?" If the answer is vague, propose two or three priorities for your area and ask your leader to confirm them. You are not challenging their authority. You are asking for the ground your team needs to stand on.

2. Translate for your team. When direction changes from above, tell your people three things: what changed, what did not, and what stays fixed. You become the steady layer between the turn and the work.

3. Sort every change before you act on it. When a new priority lands, ask whether it is a single correction that will be named, owned, and held, or another turn.

• If it is a correction, commit fully and help it stick.
• If it is a turn, say so, and ask what it replaces.

Take one question into your next leadership meeting: Name the last reversal your team made. Was it a correction or a turn, and how would your people know the difference?