Decision Making Risk & Resilience Team Success

One Fell Swoop

Todd Sears

08.18.21

When the pandemic swept in, Todd and his network were quickly handed a very diminished world, losing conferences, summits, speaking events, and in-person networking. Rather than be crushed by the change, Todd leaned in and made lemonade with lemons.

Summary:

When the pandemic swept in, Todd and his network were quickly handed a very diminished world, losing conferences, summits, speaking events, and in-person networking. Rather than be crushed by the change, Todd leaned in and made lemonade with lemons.

Thuy

Among all the business leaders that you constantly talk to at Out Leadership, what are you hearing from them in terms of new strategies or additional strategies that they want to try out as they're trying to lead to change? What have you done yourself, perhaps?
Todd_Sears

Todd Sears

Sure, I'll start with the second half first. As an Out Leadership organization, prior to the pandemic, we had our global summits in New York, London, Hong Kong, Paris, and Sydney. They are all CEO-hosted, and they are CEO leadership attended, so between 150 to 250 leaders at each of the summits. We have tons of initiatives focused on young LGBT leaders, LGBT women onboard leadership and I can speak a little bit about what we've done just this week on that front, and then we have all of our advocacy programs and our research are all sort of interconnected, and in one week, basically, we have to go from all of those being very much in person and small and senior, and hosted by the CEOs to entirely virtual, and the opportunity that we tackled was, okay, as I said our team last March, obviously, this is not ideal and nobody really wants to be behind a Zoom screen for the rest of our lives, but in the shorter-term, how can we see this as an opportunity? How can we tackle and think about what we want to accomplish with our summits in terms of information, in terms of networking, in terms of advocacy, and see this is an opportunity to do more? In 2019, Out Leadership had 57 events around the world. In 2020, we had 136, and so we were able to dramatically scale everything we were doing by leveraging the virtual platform. We launched five new pieces of research in 2020 including the first ever global LGBTQ allied leadership research that we publish reports on for the US, for Europe, for Asia, for Australia, for Latin America, and a global peace. We engaged in for new advocacy campaigns all over the world, we launched and added 17 new member companies to Out Leaderships membership all because we took it as an opportunity, and so I think if you sort of take that outside of Out Leadership, I think we've seen so many companies do the same thing, really thinking about how they can approach really kind of getting back to the core basics, what does this company want to accomplish? What do they need to accomplish in the world and how in this sort of window in time, which I really do think this will be a window in time if the vaccines get to accelerate, etc., I would hope by mid to late this year, we would be in some sort of new normal, but how in this moment in time can these leaders and these companies think differently? How can they use it as an opportunity to experiment. I've heard so many leaders share that the opportunity to look at things differently and to try something is huge because no one's going to fault them. If it doesn't work out, well, it's the pandemic and you can chalk it up to that, and so I think really forward-leaning companies are looking at it in that way, how can they try something different? But really importantly, and I can't underscore this enough, how can they still support their employees?