Finding Inspiration When You Are Leading Through A Pandemic

The New Normal

What I want to talk about is YOU. I’ve been doing a bunch of coaching with different clients of mine during the week, and this has been the running theme, you know like we’ve kind of you’re sailing along you know with general ups and down of business life, and life in general and then this hit and it was like… Oh man! This is bad. This is hard. And then we kind of have been through that for 4 or 5 weeks, and things have started to normalise, but as it started to normalise there’s this feeling of “Oh no, this is never going away.”

And part of that new normal it’s kinda like “how do I need to show up for my business?”, so that my people, my clients and partners and suppliers all get the sense of confidence from me. So if you get this right, what happens is that the team read your signals. You are almost like  a symbol for the business, not that things are going to be perfect but you know, you’ve got their back and there is a confidence that things are going to be okay. 

If you get this wrong, they kind of feed off the badness, they feed off the negativity, the feed off the anxiety and that becomes contagious. So it’s on you. This is the challenge. This is a little bit on you. 

The Challenge

Let me just share some of the work I’ve been doing. You guys know the big picture, the problem I’m talking about today is the problem of you and your mindset, and your thinking, and how do you lead through isolation, cancellations and distractions.

What I will do is show you so that you can follow through with me. You may relate to this so this is the way we typically think about our business and running a business and working with the people beside you is you got a kind of a dollar ambition from the business, and you have the vision of into the future of where you want to get to. 

You know that it doesn’t have to be about just money, it’s often about impact, freedom, whatever that vision is in your mind, and you know a lot of the work I do is helping people work out what that is, and then share it amongst the founders and the team so that they are clear on that. Either way you would have kind of had that in your mind. And what you’ve been trying to do with your staff members is connect them to that vision so that they buy into it, they own it as much as you do.

Then what’s happened is come a big external stake, which kind of puts this into question. I meant that we kind of you know you’ve been on this ride. Well, you know I don’t know whether it’s coming after you, could be just for the down here and wondering when you come out now. As I said, if you get this kind of right, you can lead through this and still have people as connected and committed as they were beforehand, but if you get this wrong, what happens is that people kind of feed off the anxiety and not the confidence. 

The Ecosystem

One of the things I was talking about this week is I do a lot of work with people in their ecosystem, which is just a fancy word for “who are all the people that your company interacts with and relies on the need of relationships with, for it to be able to achieve its vision. 

And so you think about this being internal, all those relationships with staff members, managers in your business and it could be you bookkeeper or all the people that you rely on to deliver the services to your customers and your employees is also an ecosystem, an external ecosystem. 

So there’s internal and there’s external. External seems like partners of the company that you have connections with that service the people you service or you go to market together and consortium, could be suppliers but most importantly is your clients and customers. These are the people that you have the relationships with that use your service that you’re trying to develop and deliver an amazing experience for.

Losing Space

I don’t know about you, but first of all, a couple of problems seem to have occurred for many of the people because they’re working from home and they are disconnected. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they don’t have meetings but the reality is that for many of them because they are disconnected, they are having a lot more meetings internally. Where before they can see people in the hallways then they could run into people have coffees, now there’s actually a massive amount of meetings and it’s taking up all the time. And the impact to that is that people are losing space in their days, space to be able to think, space to be able to think of the big picture.

So that vision or that making sense of the vision and what does it mean, some of that stuff are going out the window. And the second bit you’re missing is you’re spending less time externally out into the world for good reason because we’re locked down, we’re spending less time with all those external stakeholders.

And for many of you this is where you get that market Intel and you get the insights that you then can take back to the team and even fuel your own juice. So think about the fact that we’ve been riding along with a sense of where we’re going, and that’s been all disrupted by this and because we’re working from home most of who we are exposed to are our internal stakeholders, which is good. But the meetings are gone through the roof and you just got less space and at the same time the time used to spend thinking about the future, you don’t spend as much time doing that anymore. And these market Insights or that connection used to have externally just doesn’t happen as much. 

What Can You Do About It?

Here’s what we’re talking about,

1. Try to delegate or free up 2-3 hours by attending a few less meetings. And the insight was maybe I don’t need to attend all those, maybe someone else can attend on my behalf.
2. Try to shift the NOW to the FUTURE. The first thing that we get to do to start by is just a little bit of freedom, and it’s important to stay connected, do get me wrong. You just need a little bit of time to think, and then when you get that freedom try to think you know the planning horizon, a year ahead, but just think what would the end of July look like for you and your team? But importantly, what do you want to get out this next 2- 3 months? Free yourself up, start thinking about the end of July.
3. What we talked about was a really interesting one, which is you know to what extent have you got booked in meetings, and this could be group or individual with your external stakeholders. There’s a lot about empathy, to what extent are you out there in the market understanding what your clients, customers, suppliers, partners need.

And if you go external, often that’s the thing where you get the creativity and the juice. This is on you, right this moment IS ON YOU.  You’ve been stalling along, there’s been a big change, but what we want to come across is confident and engaged, not anxious if we can. I’m not saying anxiety is bad, we all have anxiety at times, but what I’m doing here is helping you see where you fit and how you feel you spending all your time internally working from home in internal meetings, or have you got that nice balance in your ecosystem.

Summary

The three ideas:

• Just a free up a little bit more time 2- 3 hours,
• Plan until the end of July and get a really clear sense of what you want to achieve by then to give you some focus and some inspiration
• To get out and be empathising and engaging with people out in the external world. Either Facetime meetings or these types of meetings, zoom meetings is a great way to do it. 

Leave me a comment or Get in Touch

If you run a business, and you need help with this stuff right now doesn’t have to cost a lot or you know people that need help with the strategy or coaching help. Just mentioned them to me. Send them, share this with them. I’d love for them to either join in my group or joinThe Reason and The Road, so I can help them out. I hope this has been useful. 

Talk to you soon. Bye.