Category Archives: leadership

Keeping In Touch

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NaBloPoMo 2020 – Today’s Lesson

How have you maintained and nurtured your ties this year? 

As the days get shorter and colder, I feel the annual personal regression set in.  In 2020, this carries new and important implications.  The busier I get, the more I value quiet and solitude.  But my soul sings in connection—broad, frequent, and deep.

Since March I count at least six new, recurring engagements with friends and family, occurring over phone, Zoom, and snail mail.  They have all held me up and calmed me down through tumult.  And they all occurred organically—all of us seeking comfort, connection, and meaning through the chaos and morass.  All signs point to these as my social and emotional beacons through the coming winter.  What will your beacons be?

At work, this year has tested our teams.  Even the most resilient ones have strained under the stress of complex and prolonged uncertainty.  Though we returned to work in June, we are still not together like before.  We’ve had to find new ways to stay connected, including weekly video calls and now the possibility of daily, one-song, video dance parties.  I see more clearly now where I can connect more regularly one on one, and how individuals may need me to show up in different ways.  I would have told you for many years now that I understand this concept; today I feel at least one step closer to living it for real.

Relationships are already hard.  Cultivating and sustaining healthy ones in the midst of crisis, in an increasingly Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world, takes extra attention and effort.  I must constantly attune and retune. 

Every encounter is an opportunity to try; it makes me better, and I’m grateful.

Up and Accountable, You Hold Me

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NaBloPoMo 2020 – Today’s Lesson

What if Yoda sang love songs?  Does it not brighten your day just thinking about it?

Who holds you up?  Who holds you accountable?  Do they do it with love?  If you’re lucky like me and the same people do all three, you possess a rare gift.  I learned this again today and the realization sustained me, even through some hard conversations and decisions.

* * * * *

“I feel like garbage after I talk to her,” a friend told me today.  We commiserated around our mutual acquaintance, Dolores*.  Dolores constantly focuses on the negative—how we could always do this or that better, how this or that thing is never right.  She nit-picks and dissects.  It’s hard to be around Dolores; her positive to negative interaction ratio is 0 to infinity—or at least it feels that way. 

We like Apollo* better.   He consistently notices and shows us the good we do.  He points out our strengths to others.  And it’s not lip service—he truly sees, appreciates, and acknowledges how we contribute—we feel his sincerity and gratitude.  His ratio approaches 5 to 1, which is an important sign (driver?) of healthy relationships.

And Apollo’s 1’s, what are those about?  He tests us, makes us uncomfortable sometimes.  We clash with him sometimes on how to walk the talk, on the methods we choose to manifest our mission.  But because our relationships are healthy, because we know our ties are stronger than our tensions, we can negotiate in good faith.  We challenge one another to live up to our ideals—to defend our methods–we hold each other accountable, and we all benefit.

Like I said, lucky.

*not their real names

Exponential Risk

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NaBloPoMo 2020 – Today’s Lesson

Things are looking really bad again, folks.  Illinois saw more than 10,000 new COVID cases for the fourth day in a row.  Between the first and third weeks of October, COVID inpatient census rose 500% in one metropolitan hospital system, and it’s still climbing.  At this rate, we may run out of ICU beds by Thanksgiving.

I had more calls today about COVID (symptoms and/or exposures) than any day since the pandemic started.  Every call takes time to explain the profound importance of distancing, masking, and minimizing contacts, then the logistics of quarantine, testing, and contact tracing.  It’s totally straight forward in some ways, and completely convoluted in others. 

With rapidly escalating disease prevalence, every unmasked contact with a non-household (or ‘pod’) member carries exponential risk.  You breathe on me, I breathe on you.  We have now exposed each other to everybody we have each contacted in the past 14 days—we have merged our bubbles irrevocably in this one encounter, endangering everyone in each bubble and all of their extended contacts.  It cannot be undone.  This is the nature of a pandemic. 

I understand how hard it all is—how inconvenient, fatiguing, disruptive, and maddening.  Our masking and distancing, missing friends and activities, restricting our kids’ social lives, is all immediately and concretely costly to us, and only distantly and abstractly beneficial to others (and us).  Still, it is what we can do to slow the spread of a deadly virus that has infected more than 10 million Americans, and will have killed more than 240,000 of us by tomorrow.

Avoid these 9 pitfalls to stay safe.

If you want to pod, follow this guide closely. 

We can stop all paths of the virus through us.  But it takes all of us.