Pandemic Resource Guide

What a year 2020 has been! Even though philosophically, theologically, and professionally, I default to react optimistically to circumstances, I recognize that it has been far too easy over the last year to complain about what we have gone through and the limitations that the Covid pandemic has imposed on us as individuals, families, organizations, and cultures. Some of you have lost loved ones, jobs, homes, incomes, and whole businesses. It is only natural, I suppose, that we flinch and look around for someone to blame. Our reactions to the pandemic and the outright fear engendered by “experts,” the media coverage, governmental responses to it, and the data we are encouraged to obsess about can be overwhelming. We hear the numbers regarding deaths, hospitalizations, positive tests, vaccines available, shots in arms, and vaccines banned in European countries the first thing every morning and the last thing at night. All of this input is supported by televised and social media pictures of empty streets, closed signs on businesses, religious assemblies shut down, all too frequent mobs ransacking stores, and injections into arms. The aggregate presents a bleak picture of how individuals, organizations, and governments have responded to—or in some cases, taken advantage of—the pandemic. It will take us several years to assess the true impact of this year on all of our institutions, not the least of which are schools and organizational life in general. 

Let’s not wait that long. Since our organizational efforts at Executive Strategies International are always geared to helping individuals achieve higher levels of personal mastery and organizations attain higher standards of performance or production, we are well aware of the tremendous challenges 2020 has placed on all of our institutions and traditional ways of leading and managing. Many of these challenges have been harmful—they are the easy targets of our skepticism and disillusionment—but many have driven some of us to consider better ways of leading, managing, manufacturing, innovating, working with customers, and merely gathering.

As one valuable approach to dealing with these challenges, I suggest you consider capturing the high points and lower points of the last year in some kind of internal document you can use moving forward in the coming year(s). When we work with organizations, we suggest they call it a Pandemic Resource Guide, or maybe something a tad less officious and more creative. I know some of you have already thought about this issue, but if you have been too busy fighting alligators while sequestered in your “home office,” or even masked up and socially distanced while sneaking into your “real” office under the cover of darkness from time to time, I would encourage you to think about ways you can make the learnings of this year of the pandemic useful to the bottom line. Let’s profit from adversity.

A couple of our clients have been very resourceful in this area; one is actually considering writing a book to capture the learnings and take them public, and we are working with others to launch very creative internal projects to capture their learnings. What a great way, at the very least, of letting your Boards of Director (and maybe even your customers) understand the challenges you have faced and ways you have creatively met them. Use it as an advertising document. As you do so, the following are just some of the questions I suggest you think about and maybe task your organizations in answering; I am sure you can think about even more. If you do, please let me know (esipres6@earthlink.net. As only appropriate during this time of reassessment and wholesale business process realignment, consider at least the following 19 Covid questions. If you have more that I haven’t thought about, I’d be more than willing to ruin the all too easy metaphor of 19 and include them.

1.     Which of our current corporate Core Values have been the most important to emphasize and act on in the last year? 

2.     What have been the biggest limitations or handicaps we have experienced on our traditional way of doing business?

3.     How successfully have we addressed them?

4.     What do I wish we had done earlier to cope with these challenges?

5.     Moving forward, what Core Value(s) should we think about modifying or including?

6.     What flaws in our current culture have been exposed?

7.     How do we influence that culture in the future? How do we build culture while apart?

8.     What outside help might we need to achieve such changes?

9.     What can we as leaders do or what behaviors should we change to accommodate these changes?

10. What innovations have we made in response to the shutdown of our facilities and face-to-face work?

11. Which of the changes we have been forced to make should we institutionalize and reinforce in the future because they have been so helpful?

12. What have been the biggest personal learnings I have had during 2020?

13. How can we as leaders treat employees differently to show genuine empathy and understanding of what they have been going through?

14. How can we continue to build genuine teamwork while separated and / or sequestered? Are our traditional team or work group models still appropriate?

15. What key innovations have we instituted to help our clients, customers, and employees cope with the restrictions of 2020?

16. What have we missed by seeing just faces on Zoom / Teams / Facetime, etc. and how have we adjusted to such impersonal interactions?

17. We talk a lot about diversity and inclusion these days. How has 2020 demonstrated our need to do more than just talk?

18. How have we celebrated our successes during 2020?

19. How has my awareness of the need to be more emotionally intelligent when dealing with others influenced how I have led and managed during 2020?

Again, I do not claim to have a corner on this kind of approach. Some of you are probably well ahead of me and have begun similar internal reassessments; that is my hope. If you have, why not share your learnings? After all, as those media stars luxuriating in beachfront mansions and politicians living on decades of government (that’s actually us and our tax money) largess frequently remind us, “We are all in this together.”

 William Jeffries, President, ESI