Like most business leaders, I suspect, I have very mixed feelings about the year we are about to close and the one we are ready to kick off.  But as with every time of transition, it seems important to acknowledge where we are and where we are going.

First, there is much to celebrate and we need to keep reminding ourselves of that:  slammed to an abrupt halt almost 24 months ago, our economy has recovered to a degree most didn’t imagine possible this quickly.  Not evenly or equitably, it is true – but then we’ve known for a long time that we need to work harder to ensure fairness in our economy.  We still have lots of work to do on that front.  And while it is undeniable that COVID-19 is still a menace to everyone, we have vaccines and treatment options that were developed in record time.  Again, more work to do, but much has been accomplished.  Enough progress made that I maintain my overall optimism that we can keep accomplishing things for the common good.  Lots more work to do.

I am lucky to be part of a small group that meets monthly for idea-sharing and support.  Each member of the group leads an organization and can both empathize and cajole the rest as we share our journeys; this week we talked about the perspective gained in this challenging year.

“I remind myself regularly about the oxygen mask message on an airplane:  you can’t help others if you are not taking care of yourself first.”

This was such an important offering from one of my colleagues.  Maintaining the confidence and composure to lead in uncertain times requires physical and mental strength.  Take care of yourselves.

“Staying nimble is a priority.” 

The days of having detailed plans that guide a whole year are gone forever and so finding ways to keep our teams ready to adapt but also feel focused and clear about objectives is an evolving leadership challenge.  Encourage your teams to be creative and empowered to develop new systems that will respond to these new dynamics.

“Leadership development is as important as management development.”

We all know that leadership is different than management; we know that management potential and leadership potential are different – and sometimes almost mutually exclusive, it seems.

Most organizations invest a lot in management development:  learning the systems and protocols that keep the operations running as smoothly as possible.  Leadership development gets attention, too, in good organizations…but perhaps not as seriously.

Yet the dramatic changes now occurring in organizational life scream out for effective leadership:  values, inspiration, motivation, empathy are all needed in unprecedented ways as our organizations strive to retain talent, maintain high morale and drive performance.  Invest in leadership development.

“Celebrate – even if the successes aren’t all you’d planned for; surviving the battle is worth acknowledging and recognizing.” 

Another important reminder as we close the books on 2021:  celebrating a year that we may wish we could forget is important for our teams and the precious individuals who make up those teams.  People worked hard, grappled with fear and confusion; they delivered on tasks large and small.

Mask up, maintain social distance, do it virtually, perhaps.  But celebrate 2021. And Happy New Year!

Ok, fair warning that this post is coming from a place of exhaustion and even foreboding.  I just got a vaccine booster shot and don’t feel great; my elderly mother who almost never leaves her house just tested positive for COVID-19 and is in the hospital (cannot fathom how she was exposed); and my state is now topping the United States in the rise of active cases.  Uffda, as my grandmother might have exclaimed.

This is the moment when we kick into another, higher gear and effectively overcome the challenges we face…right?  I keep thinking that that is what we will, collectively, do – and yet we do not.  As a society, we seem incapable of coming together to beat this continually-evolving threat to health, livelihoods and education of our children.  How can we redouble our efforts – or change-up our approach to increase the chances of success?

I don’t have the answers – oh, I wish I did.  But perhaps sharing some observations that seem worth considering is a step in the right direction.  As a professional who has counseled business leaders and public officials on effective communications for many years, I hope these ideas are useful for communities, organizations, and engaged citizens who are focused on our shared progress.

1. Demonizing others doesn’t help. People around you who are not vaccinated or do not wear masks have their reasons – you may disagree, but they have them.
2. You have a right to protect yourself. Do not be willing to subject yourself (and those you care for) to the potential for exposure.  If someone isn’t masked, depart.  If there is someone in charge responsible for enforcing masking or vaccination status, share your concerns.  But don’t become the enforcer yourself – it won’t end well.
3. This counsel above may seem to be giving in to those who are not respecting the rules of public health – and in the near-term, it sometimes will be the case. But it is essential that we find paths back to having civil ways to set and follow-rules.  ‘Citizen’s arrest’ has never really been a viable idea in our civic structure. In the longer-run, the loss of business and/or engagement because of lax enforcement will prevail.  Sick people are not great customers, colleagues or patrons.
4. Information sharing is key: not just about mandates and rules, but about results and stories.  How easy it has become to get a test or a booster; how people who were doubters have changed their minds.  How unsustainable the challenges being faced in health care facilities are becoming; how devastating the impact of innocent people being exposed because of others’ lack of transparency about their vaccine status.  We have a shared fate that keeps being undermined by information-sharing that separates us from each other.  So share, not to ‘win’ but to inform, as the realities and facts about this pandemic continue to be revealed.
5. Find the right ways to balance urgency with patience: where and how can you improve your safety and the safety of those you care about?  Do those things with urgency.  Where and how must you acknowledge the rights of others – and practice patience.

I suspect it will be a long and dark winter in the coming months for me.  I’m stocking up on candles, will get fresh air whenever I can.  It is not my nature to be a pessimist, so I’ll keep fighting for our shared fate.  Take care and let’s connect if you are in the same boat.

I have the good fortune to live in a place with usually glorious fall seasons – this year included. We’re mostly famous for our winters, even though they are not as long or as cold as our reputation would have someone believe (really!). But in a year like this one, when each coast of the United States has been battered first by drought and then by horrific rains, we are feeling grateful for our weather reality: after a beautiful summer, we are enjoying a fabulous autumn…all in preparation for the winter season we know will come. We know not only how to survive it, but how to thrive through it.

I belabor this setup to make a point: having the benefit of predictability is something we have now learned is not guaranteed. The pandemic has upended the rhythms of retail, of work life, of entertainment. Climate change is upending our seasons, our real estate and our infrastructure. So, for me and others in the upper Midwestern United States, experiencing our usual seasonal realities feels like a particularly valuable gift, at least for now. We are experiencing life as we have come to expect it.

But we only need to watch the news or scroll our preferred social sites to be made aware that so many people here and around the world are grappling with challenges fueled by dynamics beyond their own control—even beyond their imagination. It is one thing to have made decisions that undermined your own security: bad career or educational choices. It is something entirely different to have your context create catastrophic damage all around you, whether via climate change, pandemic or political disruption. And once people have recovered from devastation, how to prepare for a changed sense of opportunities going forward?

At the very least, I hope recognition that predictability is slipping away causes each and every one of us to consider our capacity for empathy and for granting grace to others. Can we reclaim our collective inclination to catch people when they fall, have people’s back when they most need us there? The ongoing debate about the role of government causes me to be pessimistic.

But even beyond that instinct to offer support, we also need to find the collective courage to re-imagine aspects of life – and then double down to move forward, innovating to ensure success in the future.  How will our economy change faster than we might have thought possible just a few years ago: what work is valued differently? What work is valued less? How do people transition through those changes?  How will use of space be changing as we move forward: in housing, in commercial workplaces, in retail?  Which sectors of our society will be changed only modestly? Which sectors will be transformed?

I find myself appreciating this late autumn time even more than most years. For me, winter is the time to hibernate: to slow down, reflect on the year ending and then on the year ahead.

This year, it strikes me that organizational leaders need to be digging deep to think about leading their colleagues through a period of extraordinary disruption. Helping people adapt to the loss of predictability will be key: without effective leadership, it will too often be experienced as loss, rather than opportunity. And there IS great opportunity in this time, if we can rise to the challenges around us.

Enjoy the falling leaves; take advantage of the time to reflect; be ready for spring!

“Now is the winter of our discontent…” Shakespeare’s insights for our time

I can no longer find helpful contemporary context for my daily journey through this crazy time we are living in. So, I have gone to the classics. Shakespeare, specifically.

First, I must acknowledge that we are enjoying glorious autumn days here in Minnesota, for which I am truly grateful. We are extending our October days given the warm afternoons and evenings as the leaves overhead turn yellow, orange and red: the explosion of ‘heat’ before we-know-what-comes-next. Leaves fall, skies turn gray, and soon enough, cold descends. We cannot act surprised – anymore than my friends in Louisiana or Texas can be surprised by hurricanes. But we can be excused for sadness as the cycle comes around. Winter is coming.

I confess that I’m dreading it more this time than I can recall in many years. The pandemic has been like a grueling test, drawn out and making scarce the opportunities to really celebrate life’s milestones.  How many birthdays, anniversaries, concerts and weddings must we postpone? Being able to gather outside the past few months – albeit with masks – has been wonderful and, again, I am grateful. But I have begun to wonder: can we think of this coming winter as the nadir of this collective experience? Are better, brighter days ahead in the spring of 2022?

That was Shakespeare’s construct in the opening of Richard III, which begins with the famous quote: “Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this son of York.” He was saying this is the trough, the worst of it: things are going to get better when my brother becomes King. Interestingly, the context was not a pandemic, it was a power struggle, which of course we are in the midst of, as well. In addition to fighting our path to the conquering of a viral disease, we are engaged in an exhausting battle to determine the future of our Republic, and perhaps even the future of other democracies around the globe. Is government a force for common good or a menace to be resisted and minimized?  Do we believe in the potential of people to determine their fate or do we believe there are those who know best and that they should have power to determine the future for the rest of us? I frankly have trouble interpreting the fights now being waged across the United States about access to voting any other way. And I am an unapologetic believer in the importance of people having a voice in their future.

Richard III was a study in the Machiavellian notion that the most successful path to power was to harness the use of fear. I am no expert on Shakespeare but even I understood as a student that Richard (and everyone around him) saw the pursuit of power as a justifiable reason to cheat, to lie, to kill. At the risk of sounding shrill, I must say I see some parallels in the contemporary pursuit of power. The efforts to limit people’s access to votes is one concerning trend; another is the disparaging of government’s potential to serve the public good. How can investing in infrastructure be a bad idea if you believe in our collective fate? Another contemporary tactic is to demonize the citizenship of those who came here more recently than one’s forefathers: somehow, ‘new immigrants’ are less virtuous than those of us who are here because of immigrants who arrived earlier. Frankly, I can’t make the leap.

I am preparing for the inevitable winter; but I will use all the energy I can summon to be optimistic about the spring. God Bless America; God Bless us, everyone.

All of the truisms and catch phrases about change and how it is good for us come rushing in when I am dealing with a particularly unwelcome change for our organization. None more so than when we lose a talented colleague. But as life in pandemic has dragged on, we cannot really be surprised that people’s relationship to their work – and even to their valued colleagues – will be impacted. The statistics of people moving, or even leaving the workforce over the past year are remarkable.

So, I have learned not to take such changes personally (though I’ll confess I sometimes need a day to process): we’ve operated successfully for thirty years, had the opportunity to work with a long roster of fantastic, talented people. Sometimes they make transitions that seem premature; sometimes they are truly overdue. But I’ve learned that it is most important to fully value the time we have with colleagues; genuinely wish them well when they make a move…and then waste no time finding colleagues who enable us to ‘raise our game.’ And I believe it is critically important to first look inside: are there colleagues ready to stretch into a new level of responsibility? Taking a risk on existing talent is for me always a first instinct. It was a long time ago now, but I really DO still remember being a young professional frustrated by the inability of leaders in my organization to see different possibilities. And I learned to speak up. I was fortunate to be given opportunities – sometimes thrown into the deep end of the pool. I know they were the most formative experiences of my career.

Complicating these change management opportunities, of course, is that beyond the challenges of pandemic, we are also all grappling with the overall pace of changes – to our marketplaces, to the business models that we’ve built, to the expectations of employees and customers. I don’t recall who said it but one of my favorite ‘change’ quotes is: “the pace of change will never be slower than it is today.” Wow. Thankfully, one of the things I have come to understand is that some of the colleagues around me are more open to change than I am; they are seeing possibilities that I have not yet seen or recognized. And there is no better time to show openness to new ideas, to taking new risks, than when a departing colleague creates a new space for innovation. These are the moments when organizations take bold steps forward, transition successfully, maybe transform dramatically.

So, to my colleagues at Tunheim and to my peers and friends leading other great organizations: Let’s celebrate change as great opportunity to have some adventure, to learn the scale of our potential, to accomplish great things together. Here’s to the next part of our journey!

It is a great word: resilience. Just saying it out loud causes you to want to sit up straighter, breath a bit deeper, look to the horizon. Some of us were born with the roots of resilience woven into our DNA; some of us have had to work lifetimes to hone it. But we all need it these days. In the early weeks and months of 2020, I know that I kicked into a different gear to navigate those challenging times. Each of us was challenged to power through. Resilience is about our capacity to recover, to be restored.

Dr. Kenneth Ginsberg is a pediatrician in Philadelphia, credited with naming seven crucial elements for building resilience, the ‘7 C’s’: competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping and control. He writes about this in the context of helping parents raise resilient children, but I think the list is informative and helpful for each of us as we battle racism, pandemics, climate change and hyper-partisan political landscapes and challenging business conditions.

I have been spending a little time looking for inspiration on resilience; here are my role models so far:

1. The staffs in emergency rooms and COVID units around the world; it is hard to imagine how deeply some of them are needing to dig for the resiliency to respond as the pandemic takes another scary turn in its path through our lives. The competency they collectively exhibit is inspiring; their capacity to cope has had to be stretched, largely through relying on their connections to each other and the confidence they have in each other. Collective resilience.
2. Teachers who have been thrown so many curves in the past 18 months: there is no way to overstate their impact in keeping students at the center of the learning process even as the ecosystem was blown up. Like medical staffs, there are aspects of ‘team sport’ for teachers in a school – the sense of connection and collaborative coping. But there is also something entrepreneurial about resilient teachers: competence for sure, and a confidence that enables them to present as controlled when so much is really not under control. Creative resilience.
3. Communities ravaged by wildfires or flooding; having people with the character to come together, pick up the pieces and rebuild is awesome to follow. I have never experienced having my home or business burned down or extensively flooded: I honestly cannot imagine how heart-breaking it would be to go through. And yet millions of people each year do go through it and build the next generations of those communities and neighborhoods. Civic resilience.
4. Olympians! Athletes have always been remarkable examples of the resiliency potential of human beings – but watching the Tokyo games takes the observation to a whole new level of awesome. Simone Biles is a poster child for all of the ‘7 Cs’: competence, check; confidence (in her teammates), check; connection, check; character, check; contribution, check; coping, check; control, check. And that her teammates (two from Minnesota!!) rose to the occasion is as important an example as Biles’ own—every member of that USA women’s gymnastics team ended up with a medal of one color or another. Competitive resilience.

I have no illusions that I can be a world-class athlete any more than I could be a beloved teacher or a life-saving nurse or physician. But I so appreciate the opportunity to learn and explore my capacity for resiliency in my own spheres of influence and accountability. Good luck in your journey.

I really love it when some big news breaks and I can say ‘I was just thinking about that!’ It happened earlier this week, when President Biden issued Executive Orders that are aimed at spurring innovation, much of it by making it harder for the largest of our private sector companies to have such commanding control of their competitive eco-systems and an overall tax system that has been groomed to enable powerful financial protection of the status quo.

I have not made a careful study of the specifics of POTUS’s orders, so I do not intend to defend or applaud them here. But it is hard to argue against the basic rationale of his economic team: the pace and impact of innovation has been slowing in our economy for more than twenty years.

Of course, we have seen introductions of amazing products and services – but the economic value of those innovations as a percentage of our economy has been falling. In part that has happened because it is easier for companies to ‘buy’ their growth via acquisitions and marginally-innovative extensions of existing products (i.e. how many varieties of instant oatmeal or Cheerios are in your cupboard?). Investing in real innovation requires research and development; market analysis; audience segmentation; manufacturing ramp-ups; distribution, marketing and sales channels. There is real risk in dramatic innovation – but there is also real impact potential.

Think not just of Amazon – but of the innovations that are happening in the eco-system created by Amazon. The genius of Bezos and his team was not just the construct of their online destination; it was how quickly they also took control of the value propositions in the ecosystem around their destination. They accomplished in twenty-five years what it took more traditional manufacturing sectors a generation or more to create: an ecosystem of vendors and suppliers that can be manipulated by sheer scale. I doubt what Biden’s team is looking for is more Amazons; but the phenomenon of that company is a powerful illustration of the potential of innovation.

Saying it that way sounds bad – it is not inherently bad to be big. There is a lot of good about scale. But the insight from Biden’s economic team is important to reflect on: how do we incentivize innovation that creates real growth within our economy and our opportunities? Not just for some, but for all of us collectively? Economists talk about it this way: how do we make the pie bigger, not just fight over who gets the biggest pieces of the existing pie? So far, Amazon has not so much grown the pie as they have overseen the redistribution of the pieces. The idea now is to find ways to unlock the potential for growing the pie that is an inclusive economy.

What does a communications consultancy have to do with all this? We believe in the power of communications to inspire people about possibilities; to illustrate the need for dramatic change and innovation; to illuminate the path of innovation and its consequences.

Let us know if we can help you imagine the possibilities, or make the case for change, or navigate the process of change. Be brave…here we go!!