What happens when we wake up as usual, and suddenly, the order we know, is over? When all you have meticulously planned seems like empty pages of nonsense.
This is what we faced the last few months, as events occurred as fast as a roller-coaster. All the strategies, the advice, the lessons, the books, the manuals we once could turn to, seemed outdated and inefficient.
For the first time we are in front of a real challenge.
The challenge of rethinking how to continue in front of a huge Global Crisis, a challenge we never met before. One nobody prepared us for.
New and unexpected things were happening, and after the initial shock of fear, despair, and uncertainty, we needed to take a big breath and become the most creative we had ever been, if we wanted to survive.
When we are leading a Team in such a situation, all eyes are on us. How do we encourage and give hope? How do we shake everyone to start all over, to avoid the paralysis that the events have brought about?
First off, we must deal with the issues that sit right in front of us, what I like to address as "the low hanging fruit”. Those issues that if acted on immediately, will have a significant and rapid impact.
We need to be aware of what our resources are. And among these and most importantly, the state of our Human resources. The most valuable asset in any organization.
This is not an ordinary situation, and as such, it is necessary to act in a non-ordinary way.
This is where resilience comes into play. We must very quickly learn how to be resilient.
Resilience is the capacity to recover fast from difficulties. As Leaders, we must come up with new ways of solving those problems these exceptional circumstances present us.
Throughout the last few months, those organizations that are "still standing", still playing "the game", the ones which survived, did so because they quickly realized that old recipes were not going to work. At that point, all the business models we were used to were now “out of fashion”. The need for new ideas were not just necessary to continue, they were imperative.
Resilience is the ability to adapt to new situations in order to survive in front of the unexpected. It is the opportunity to find creative solutions, innovative ideas, new spaces of action.
As Leaders, we have the great responsibility of changing, first OUR way of thinking, in order to give birth to new approaches, new thoughts, new opportunities, new decisions, and with this, to empower our Team to do the same. At the end of the day, it is the collaboration of our entire Team, which will move the needle fast.
As Leaders, it is in times of crisis more than ever before, that we must let personal interests aside and think of the well-being of all.
It is with this mindset that we discover that our team is cohesive, we discover the advantage of working in collaboration. We discover the strength of all pushing forward, towards this new beginning.
And one day, not far in time, we will wake up and feel the new order, things will be settled, and we will look back and smile because thanks to our team-work and our resilience we are once again part of the game.
From the bottom of my 🧡 and in hopes that I inspire you to find resilience and promote collaboration,
Yours truly,
MICHÈLE C. KLINE
06/17/2020
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