In our most recent Global Women in Leadership conversation, Tiffany Green, our Managing Director, sat down with Victoria Vrana, CEO of GlobalGiving, to explore a question many leaders are quietly wrestling with:

• How do you lead with clarity and courage when everything around you feels like it is shifting?

Over the hour, Victoria shared honest reflections on navigating complexity, holding both urgency, patience and staying human in the midst of it all. What emerged was not a neat formula, but a grounded, deeply practical view of leadership in turbulent times.

Below are a few themes that stayed with us.

Holding external urgency and internal patience

Victoria named a tension that many of us recognise: the skills needed to respond to external disruption are almost the opposite of those needed for internal transformation.

• Externally, disruption demands quick decisions, agility and the willingness to pivot fast.
• Internally, meaningful change needs time, patience, trust and space for people to process, question and adapt.

When change is driven by external forces, you do not always have the luxury of a long internal runway. That is where strong foundations matter: a shared purpose, clear priorities and leadership relationships that can hold honest conversations when decisions need to be made quickly.

(1) From data to wisdom: building a “village” of insight

Victoria describes herself as a “massive data nerd,” but she uses the word data broadly. For her, it includes numbers, stories, lived experience, sector trends and the quiet signals you only pick up in conversation.

The work is not just about collecting information, it is about asking:

• What does this mean?
• What are the implications?
• What might happen next?

Victoria deliberately seeks out perspectives that differ from her own, through leadership communities, sector peers (including “competitors”), online conversations and reading and relies on a trusted circle of people who will tell her when she is missing something. 

As she put it, the higher you go in leadership, the harder it is to get honest pushback, so you have to actively create those spaces.

(2) Alignment, not uniformity

Tiffany asked what alignment looks like in practice, Victoria came back to two anchors: a clear North Star, and a leadership team that can be honest with each other.

Most organisations have a mission and vision; fewer have a shared understanding of what those words actually mean day to day. At GlobalGiving, a 23-year-old organization, there are still areas where the “why” feels fuzzy and naming and refreshing that has become important leadership work.

Tools like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) help create clarity, but only if they are treated as living. For Victoria, a good sign is when OKRs change during the year as context shifts. If the world is moving and your goals never move, something is out of sync.

Alignment also does not mean everyone agrees with every decision. It means there is enough trust to disagree openly, then commit once the way forward is set.

(3) Communicating when you do not have all the answers

In times of change, communication can either build trust or quietly erode it. At GlobalGiving, Victoria and her team are leaning into a few simple practices:

• Transparency where possible: Sharing quarterly financial information with staff, along with what it means and what the board is seeing.
• Repetition over novelty:  Returning to the same core messages (priorities, financial reality, key goals) rather than introducing a new storyline each time.
• Naming the knowns and unknowns: Being explicit about what they know, what they do not know yet, and what cannot be shared right now, including when more clarity is expected.

(4) Trust lives in relationships, not reports

The conversation then shifted to trust in a global context. Victoria noted that nonprofits currently sit among the most trusted institutions in the US, a privilege she takes seriously in her role at GlobalGiving, which partners with local organisations in more than 170 countries.

For her, trust rests on three things:

• Clear, accessible information: Fees, vetting processes, how funds are used and what partners can expect.
• Time invested in relationships: Emails, calls, webinars and patient back-and-forth with donors and partners. That human time is often what we label “overhead”, even though it is at the heart of the work.
• Starting with the person, especially in crisis: When reaching out to partners in emergencies, the first questions are: Are you safe? How is your team? How are your families? Only then does the conversation move to programs and responses.

Victoria also cautioned against collecting endless feedback without closing the loop. If people take the time to share their input, leaders have a responsibility to show that it was heard,  whether or not every suggestion can be implemented.

(5) Staying grounded: small practices, not grand fixes

When an attendee asked how she stays grounded when “so much is coming at leaders all the time,” Victoria’s answer was disarmingly human.

“Some days”, she said, “I manage it better than others”. A few practices help:

• Mentally “sorting” what comes in:  Grouping issues into buckets and sketching out simple “if this, then what?” scenarios so her brain has somewhere to put the swirl.
• Letting family life keep her honest: Her three daughters take up time and emotional energy, but also keep her connected to what matters beyond work.
• Time in nature: A regular walk along the Potomac River is one of her anchors. When she recently created a vision board with her daughter, hers was full of trees, a reminder that quiet and headspace are not luxuries; they are fuel.
• Looking for small embers of hope: A shift in a partner’s work, a moment of solidarity, a new idea that feels possible. “They can feel tiny,” she said, “but they keep me going.”

(6) Balancing stability and innovation

Finally, Tiffany asked how Victoria balances stability with innovation when everything is shifting.

At GlobalGiving, that has meant:

• Being clear on what will not change the mission, core values and a few key organisational commitments
• Creating “adjacent” spaces for experimentation that do not require new systems or structures, but allow teams to try nearby, lower-risk ideas
• Explicitly naming when the work is about doubling down on the core versus when it’s about exploring something new

As Tiffany reflected, effective leadership often means holding two realities at once: the need to be steady and reliable and the need to adapt and evolve.

Closing

This conversation with Victoria reminded us that leading through change is less about having perfect answers and more about how we create clarity, transparency and connection in uncertain times. One of the most powerful insights she shared was the importance of being honest about what is known, what is still emerging, and what is not yet shareable, a practice we regularly use with clients at EIC to reduce anxiety, avoid speculation and build trust without pretending to have certainty.

Ultimately, Victoria’s reflections offered a grounded reminder that leadership during complexity is profoundly human work: staying curious, listening deeply, investing in relationships and making space for the small practices that keep us steady.

As you reflect on your own leadership, you might ask:

• What is one small practice that could help me stay both grounded and open to change in the months ahead?

The full recording of this session is available on our website (www.emergentconsulting.co) for those who’d like to revisit the conversation or share it with colleagues.