In March and April of 2020, very early in the pandemic, I had the opportunity to coach several dozen leaders from a large company in the aerospace industry. Most of them were in the first week of figuring out how to completely change the way they’d worked. Many of them had teams that were used to working together in an office. Some of them also had team members who did shift work on assembly lines or who were in sales. Of course, the sales people were used to flying all over the world visiting their clients in person. This was obviously not happening!
Each person I coached was scrambling to figure out how to enable their teams to continue being productive in a safe way. They were also trying to figure out how to lead effectively with young kids at home, find space to set up an office, and manage with limited access to necessary tools they’d had to leave behind.
Most of our conversations started with a personal inquiry: “What’s it like where you are? How are you doing?” But they quickly turned to learning conversations. One person was struggling to figure out how to adapt his leadership style to a remote environment. Another person was trying to find a strategy to care for his young child while both parents worked from home.
Each of them had a set of learning challenges that they simply had to address in order to carry on. Every time one challenge was successfully addressed others popped up. They seemed to be multiplying exponentially.
Over the past year, I’ve also had the opportunity to coach leaders in a large state agency serving people with disabilities. These leaders have been confronting similar challenges. In many cases, they’ve also had the added responsibility of protecting the lives of workers on the front lines and the lives of the people they support. For some, dealing with illness and loss of life became an almost daily occurrence.
Recently, this agency held a virtual meeting for their leaders with the theme of “reflect, rest and reframe.” There were powerful stories of courage, commitment and the capacity to learn and adapt in real time.
What struck me as l listened to those stories is that learning is the key to survival. But more than that, it’s the key to evolution and the capacity to thrive.
And so I invite you, before moving on, to take the time to pause and reflect on the deeper and more fundamental lessons of this time. That way, they’ll be accessible when the next big challenge confronts you.
During the meeting, I offered several questions for personal reflection. I’d like to share them with you:
Think of one thing you had to learn very quickly in March 2020.
With whom did you do it? (Because learning is richer when it’s collective.)
What was the most powerful lesson for you?
How do you intend to sustain and build on that lesson going forward?
Here’s a statement about learning that a colleague made in March of 2020. It’s equally relevant now, a year later:
“In “normal” times, we often hear that learning tends to get treated as an afterthought. As much as we pay lip service to the need to learn, it can be hard to make a case for prioritizing it… But now is different. We are sensing a new reality where …everything is new and nothing is known; that we need to learn our way through this together.”
Let’s take the coming months to learn together before we throw ourselves into whatever is next.
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