Businesses have been shifting since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. Restaurants have had to quickly innovate to stay in business while still keeping people safe. Many retailers are having to quickly navigate processes like curb-side pickup. We’ve seen rapid changes at an alarming rate since the COVID-19 crisis. We’ve made rapid shifts in our own company to help create innovative solutions to not only help our students, but will give them ideas to help their own teams.
SHIFTING TRADITIONAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
What has occurred at the Simon Leadership Alliance because of this crisis shifting with the COVID-19 crisis is changes developing and delivering our programs. Usually in leadership development programs, the senior leaders attend one track, and the junior leaders attend a separate track. This year, we’re leading a two-track one year leadership program.
Before this crisis, trying to put 50 people’s schedules together just wasn’t going to happen. But because of the situation we’re in, and because of our commitment to making those shifts and changes, we’re bringing 50 people or move together on a call.
As a sales leader, or executive leader of a sales company, what training or meetings do you typically do separately, that you could combine right now?
What positive impact would that create in your culture to combine training with your junior and senior leadership track?
What we are seeing is a greater sense of cohesion and collaboration based on the unified learning track.
SHIFTING VIDEO CONTENT FOR DIFFERENT PURPOSES
Over the last six weeks, another way we are shifting with the COVID-19 crisis is creating one-minute videos on what it means to go on a leadership retreat, a mindset training that focuses on gaining more control through this crisis, and sending the training out to our clients and for free online.
As a sales leader, how can you leverage creating videos that would benefit both your clients and your potential clients online?
Micro-Learning
For our current clients, we also took a whole day seminar that we typically do, break it up into micro-learning content and provide access to it on our new app. The content is quick, six minute videos, two minute introductions with a white paper and written summary. Our students are on the go, and still learning leadership development in the small bits of free-time they have available to them.
The micro-content allows them to focus on a new learning objective before our Zoom sessions, so that when we interact face to face, we’re practicing principles instead of teaching principles. In the Zoom sessions we are connecting, the most important thing that people need right now. Through digging deep, we are supporting our leaders on a more meaningful level. This material and its intent to connect the reality of each person’s experience at home, is now more important than ever.
People everywhere are now in the question of, who am I? What’s going on? What’s important to me now?
We are all in our houses or apartments, either alone or with family. As leaders, we all need to start looking to those who are at home, who are struggling at managing priorities, and to support them to get better at taking control of their day.
We’ve been creating videos around topics like:
- How to take control of your day
- Identifying what you really care about
- How to manage your energy throughout the day.
- How to communicate in this new fully virtual working world
- How to make promises
- How to re-new commitments
I’ve been able to take my true insights and create the video lessons, offer them to my clients for free and have them make major moves in their business.
SHIFTING TO VIRTUAL COACHING
From a coaching standpoint, coaching has become much more real, and what I mean by real is that right now, people are suffering, people are scared, people are nervous, people are working on resilience. As we are shifting with the COVID-19 crisis, we’re finding ways for people to go really, really deep in the coaching and find who they have been, look at it and say that’s not working, and then they make commitments to themselves to show up in a different way.
In fact, what’s interesting is we coached someone last week, we went deep, and his boss said, “I don’t know what you did to this guy, but I don’t even recognize them anymore.” That was because we’ve had the space to go deep, to look at problems as something to really tackle and say “yes, I’m going to do this.”
Moving Beyond COVID-19
My hope is that when we get back, we become much more resilient to face all the difficulties that are going to be coming ahead of us.
Leadership Development really has to do with a mindset, your mindset about what is possible, and what you can do. How you bring value to yourself, to your environment, to the people that you work with, people that you love, the beliefs about how confident you are, how courageous you are, how much people need you.
Those are just the tip of the iceberg in the opportunity to come back to the workplace with an understanding of “you are wanted, you are loved, you have the skill set, and you can contribute.
Keys to Success: Accountability
One of the keys to success is making promises and keeping your promise. We have the opportunity, as we start to go back to talk to ourselves and say, “how accountable do I want to be? What do I want to be known for? What levels of trust do I want to build that others have in me? And how diligent do I want to be to keeping my promises?” Because we know that our personal identities are always tied up to the promises that we make.
And when we go back to work, how big are the promises we are going to make? And how much effort and how much diligence will we be putting into them such that we follow through on our promises before this pandemic?
The Leadership Opportunity We Have
For those of us with families at home, we were busy. We were really, really busy. And I think for many of us, myself included, we ignored those that were closest to us. We have now had the opportunity to really get close to our family. I’m very fortunate my kids typically are in four different time zones. During the pandemic, they’re all in one time zone and they’re right here in San Diego. Let’s not take this opportunity and waste it and go just kind of reboot and go where we were before.
This leadership opportunity is for you to dig deep and ask yourself, what kind of connection and commitment doyou want to have with the people that you love most? In fact, this is the opportunity to ask yourself, what type of relationship do you want to have with the people back to work? Right? We’ve seen their bedrooms, we’ve seen their messy hair. When we get back, my hope is that all of us will take the opportunity to come back, more connected, more intimate, more involved in each other’s worlds.
Dealing With Uncertainty
Most of us hate uncertainty. Most of us hate the unknown.
Well, guess what?
The unknown just came in and beat us across the head. Wasn’t it exhilarating? Look how capable we have become in the face of not knowing! One of the greatest leadership attributes you can take moving forward is actually looking at the unknown as the first step.
As we “go back…or in fact go better,” look at taking on bigger projects that can actually challenge you and your team to prove who you are and what you can contribute. Moving forward let’s take uncertainty and be happy and excited to have uncertainty in our lives. Let’s take it as our first step forward. Let’s take this new world as an opportunity to be shifting with the COVID-19 crisis, and have some incredibly creative moments that we probably wouldn’t have before. Let’s remember that uncertainty is a gift for us to tackle if we’re up for the challenge.
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