Keeping the Connection Alive

Well, now in the age of COVID-19, how do you think the challenges of leadership have changed? Are there things that you tell yourself to do now as a leader that you used to not tell yourself before the pandemic?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, quite a lot has changed. We have the benefit of being able to talk to people face-to-face, being in the office together. There is something that is not replaceable about that, the camaraderie that you build, the trust that you build, the rapport that you build, I do miss that, even as an introvert I miss that. I think it's really important to keep people motivated and inspired to have that level of engagement. And so now that we're in kind of the COVID world, I have to be really intentional about reaching out to people, you know, having more frequent one-on-ones, having more conversations about their lives and how they're doing and their families are doing, maintaining that bond is really important. I think the temptation with the Zoom meeting or the WebEx meeting or the Microsoft Teams meeting, is that you just go right to business, because really, nobody wants to be on a video conference. And so you just getting right to it and you miss all of that "about me" stuff, right?

Yeah.

How are you doing? How is your role? How is your family? Are you happy with how things are going here at work? And so I have to be really intentional about making sure that I'm reaching out to people, because I think people are feeling a lot of stress for good reason, right? I mean we've got an unusual set of circumstances these days, and so just being intentional about that and creating opportunities for us to come together. In fact, last week we did our annual conference, our national partners annual conference but we did virtually. We did a shortened version of it, but it was supposed to be this month, right? We've been planning for this event for a year and sometime in early part of Q2, we changed it into a virtual conference and shortened it. But I think doing that was helpful, that we did it was helpful, because it again, created an opportunity for us connect, for us to learn about what each other is doing, and an opportunity for conversation. So I think that's probably the biggest thing, people need to stay focused and motivated, and that interpersonal connection is a big part of it.