Isolation, Cancellations, and Distraction: Responding To These As A Business Leader

Hey guys, how are you? How are you feeling today? How are you doing? What’s happening? So, I’m going through my expenses from the top to the bottom, and working out, contacting them all and see what deals can be done. Working with a team, reducing some of the hours and reducing some of the cost, I’m just making sure I got that right.

And the other side is designing this new program to support people going through this crisis. So what I’ve been doing over the last two weeks is I’ve been having a virtual coffee or a virtual meeting everyday with either a client or a  friend, someone I know who runs a business, who are friends of mine or around the community as I do.

I’ve just been listening and trying to understand really and just and be in here and through that I’m just trying to work out how I can do a bit to help. So I think what I would love from this is your feedback because what I’m trying to do is design a program to help, that I can deliver virtually. 

I can help people with leading business through this and I would love your feedback on which part of this resonates with your business, apply to your business, are relevant for you business because I built a draft framework to kind of help you out and I would love that feedback from you.

The Framework and The Mindset

This is kind of the draft framework that I’ve been working on. Last time I did a training like this in the group. I talked about essentially 3 mindsets and I was hoping for you, that you could get too.

• The first one is the mindset of Step Up, not Step Back. I think it’s a time in which if we do hibernate, and I know you know Scott Morrison’s using those words, but I think if we do hibernate we can go out of business. And as leaders we really get to up and a bit of a plan about in the short-term how we deal with this and then a long term what it means.
• And the second mindset is you’re gonna serve right, get out there and help, communicate, be with your clients and be with your community, be with your people and try to help as best you can but you got to do that virtually, so step up serve.
• And the other one is create. So rather than survive, we need to use this time to be able to create.

The Problems

Here are the four problems that I talked about up above there that I’m basing my ideas around and this is why I love your feedback on.

1. The first problem I’m consistently hearing is that the team are distracted. Spoke to a client of mine at the moment, and he said it’s essentially like a spectrum. There’s a spectrum of people and some just sailing on through. They’ve got focus and they adapt pretty easily to working from home all the challenges out there.

Others are spending their time on the desk when they got work and talking about COVID-19 about the crisis, and at the same time everyone’s got kids at home, and we’re working virtually. So what are the team needs rather than be distracted? What we need is to focus. 

Now, on that what I would recommend is that if you are done already, I would aim to give your team my weekly focus. However you structure that you could you could be an activity, or a current project focus, it could be a money vs. the cost focus. However that focus is I would aim for a weekly and daily focus.

2. The second problem is your stakeholders. So what do I mean by stakeholders? I mean all those people who rely on you,, your clients, customers, your investors, staff, your partner’s. I won’t go into complete absolute detail about everyone of them.  The reality is that I know you know 80% to 90% of those would have seen 50 to 60% of their business go away straight away when the lockdown happened.

So the physical lockdown means that there’s an economic lockdown and if we don’t adapt what we got to be able to do is adapt to what they need right now. So rather on the project’s we were working on which stopped or stalled, we’ve got to create new offers that can be delivered virtually and address their problems. This is exactly what I’m doing, and I believe that’s the right thing to do. 

We also need to do another thing, we need to adjust our message. So, if your content, what you’ve been putting out there is all about things being perfect and okay, and everything being normal, it’s not. You need to adjust that message for now, for this COVID time. 

3. The problem is this Physical isolation and what’s that causing is a sister problem called virtual meeting monotony. I think this is an amazing opportunity for us, by the way to move from physical meetings to virtual meetings, but we aren’t trained for it.

So one little tip what I’m including in this, by the way, is how you run your teams, your clients and stakeholders that you get grade engagement. Use breakout rooms and all sorts of stuff so that you can stand out.  What I want for you is that you stand out and just a simple technique, such as how to use the chatroom. It makes a massive difference when you’re in a meeting.

4. This is the one that is personal. Whether you like it or not, you’re the one that’s going to lead your business out of this. So, three things that I’ve been talking about, but one, in particular, is self-care, your health, your support with family, your nutrition more than ever that matters.

So what I would love for you to do is down underneath here leave me some feedback.

Summary

There’s four problems I’ve talked about that I think link to these mindsets of stepping up, being creative, and serving.

1. Getting your team focused on the short term things that they can do that address the problems you’ve got in your business. 
2. Changing your messaging with stakeholders and working with them differently, relevant to what’s important to them right now with this COVID crisis. 
3. Get on board with these virtual meetings and try to be really good at them, so that your business can continue and make an impact and make money. 
4. And the fourth is looking after yourself so that you can serve, so that you can make a difference.

Leave me a comment or Get in Touch

Please provide me with some feedback down below. Let me know what you think.

Look out for the program I’m about to launch. You’ll see a link to it. It’s basically gonna be virtually delivered like this, but it’s going to be you, I and fifteen other people interacting around these problems and what we can do about them to make our business survive, and then thrive.

Talk to you soon.