16 Dec Exhilarated and Intimidated
Suddenly, I find I have so much on my plate: new opportunities for challenging and rewarding work, supporting clients in pursuing their goals, learning new platforms, and discovering new technologies. Sometimes I feel as if I’m racing the clock, wondering how much productive time remains to do everything I want to do in this life!
Every so often I get a huge bucket of cold water over my head and remember that every client I touch has their own network of challenges and projects, and their own ticking clock. Sometimes it starts to look like multiple reflections in a hall of mirrors, multiplying themselves over and over into oblivion! Hence, the exhilaration and intimidation all wrapped up together.
Recent client work has been a litmus test of where businesses are at during this stage of the pandemic. As you all know, the Chinese symbol for crisis is composed of two characters: danger and opportunity.
Most of the CEOs I’ve worked with in the past month are no longer in survival or danger mode but rather in the opportunity phase. That opportunity, however, has come with brand new challenges: re-energizing and re-engaging with staff and customers; finding new ways to work and re-establish or re-invent corporate culture; or continuing to pursue new mergers and acquisitions.
One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is the significant role effective communications plays in overcoming obstacles or pursuing dreams. If you single out one thorny issue or challenge that you face, right now, and pull apart the threads that comprise it, be they structural, financial, organizational, political, etc . etc. etc. you will find the thickest thread that connects, and possibly addresses, all the rest is communications.
Some people are grudgingly embracing video as a tool to reach staff and other stakeholders; others are creating smaller groups of employees and scheduling face to face meetings with them, something they would never have made time for in the old world, and others are setting an example by working really hard and showing themselves willing to try new things and discard the old.
What are you doing to pursue your vision of the future? Who do you have to influence and how are you going to do it? Would love to hear some of the things you have put in place that are working for you.
