How Great Leaders Bridge the Chasms COVID Revealed

Business as usual is not enough. No matter your industry, as a leader, you’ve no doubt spent much of the year responding to the challenges of the new normal.

As we approach the last quarter of 2020, one thing is clear: the COVID-19 pandemic has stretched our work lives in powerful ways. From education to digital marketing to food service, leaders of all kinds have been forced to reckon with the flaws in their industries. Systemic cracks that we’ve learned to live with are widening into chasms, and it will take all our creativity and strength to bridge the gaps and build a stronger foundation for the future. Fortunately, we don’t have to do it alone.

Over the summer, we teamed up with colleagues across the country to host Future Look, a series of bi-weekly virtual events designed to help leaders process this moment and ask better questions. Over and over again, we gathered to discuss leadership in the new normal, tackling a new theme every month. From digital marketing and media consumption to personal economics and education, our conversations revealed that every industry has its own flaws and challenges to reckon with. However, all leaders can survive and even thrive when we learn to ask better questions.

Exposing the Cracks

When we talk about COVID revealing “the cracks,” we mean those systemic flaws we have learned to tolerate. Consider digital marketing, where content creators adapt to big tech’s algorithms to serve up highly targeted content. These systems were imperfect but the stress COVID placed on them turned a harsh spotlight on the polarization, echo chambers, and personal privacy concerns related to social media.

Or think about the education system. For decades, public school teachers have learned to innovate with what they have, even if that means crowded classrooms and tight budgets. The barriers to equitable learning stand out even more as schools try to balance the physical, mental, and social needs of children with community safety in their reopening decisions. 

These problems have always existed, but in our old normal, it was easier to coast along and ignore them. COVID, however, has strained our cracked systems to the breaking point. Suddenly, finding a way to educate kids safely and care for their well-being seems like an insurmountable project. And as people distance from social life, they find themselves spending more time on screens, hungry for human connection and accurate information, and leaders in tech spaces must reckon with the health effects.

Business as usual is not enough. No matter your industry, as a leader, you’ve no doubt spent much of the year responding to the challenges of the new normal.

We can decide not to waste this crisis, but rather leverage our insights to create real, lasting change.

Respond, Reset, Renew

The way we see it, every leader has to go through the Respond, Reset, and Renew cycle. At every Future Look event, we took a little time to address this and acknowledge where we are in this cycle.

When COVID forced businesses to adapt to safety guidelines or close their doors indefinitely, leaders had to quickly Respond. Think of it as patching up the cracks. For teachers and school administrators, this meant a quick pivot to online learning. For leaders in all kinds of industries, it meant guiding their teams toward working from home, or creating extra safety measures for essential workers. Responding is quick and messy, making fast decisions with a little bit of information in order to hold things together.

After the quick response comes the Reset, time to take a breath, survey the situation, and examine the cracks that have become chasms we can no longer ignore. The Reset phase is a space for leaders to ask better questions and learn to solve the problems COVID has uncovered. This is where we ask questions and stay open to learning, where we weigh the options and plan our next steps.

Finally, we have to Renew, to shift our thinking, meet our questions head on, and work toward bridging our industry’s chasms and turning them into a stronger foundation. This is where we choose to see the challenges of COVID as an opportunity to stop patching problems and make lasting changes. We can decide not to waste this crisis, but rather leverage our insights to create real, lasting change.

How you lead matters. Your Leadership Brand sets the tone for your team.

Great Leaders Seek to Ask Better Questions

Our Future Look gatherings began as a sort of support group for navigating life in a pandemic, but over time, a clear theme emerged. The real purpose of leaders meeting together was to help each other learn to ask better questions.

Asking questions is an essential part of the renewal process, because it frees us from falling back on old methods just because they worked in the past. When you as a leader can admit what you don’t know, you are free to seek the wisdom of colleagues, to innovate and collaborate. You empower your team to generate ideas and work together to solve problems, without losing sight of their mission.

We are all better together, so consider this an encouragement to ask questions. Look outside your industry for insights. Learn from people who are different from you. A global pandemic reveals the flaws in the way things have always been done, but by working together, we can turn our chasms into strong bridges that lead the way into a better future.

Need help navigating your own questions? Helping you grow in leadership is what we do. Contact us to schedule a free consultation.