Stepping up when you can't step out!
I’m not sure how everyone else in Melbourne is feeling right now, but I think the reality of this new lockdown is truly frightening. It’s certainly not a shock to me that we are in this situation once again, and we won’t be the only state in Australia to suffer at the hands of our own underestimation of this enemy.
Over the past 4 to 6 weeks, I have witnessed and heard of:
people shopping as if their wallets needed to be freed when many of them are on the cusp of unemployment
IKEA and other retailers not even doing counts on entry
Families gathering in groups of 30
Teenagers hanging out in gangs of 10 or more as if nothing had changed, their parents clearly not feeling the need to encourage them otherwise
We are in the grip of a life-threatening pandemic. In the midst of a tug of war, clutching on tightly to a life we believe we need, whilst obstructing our ability to have a life at all. It is a battle of grand stupidity, of political irony, one where “leadership” is so fundamentally necessary and yet somehow so elusive, even to those who are directly remunerated to lead.
We can only move as fast as our slowest runner, and people we have some serious stragglers out there. People are hobbling through a minefield of misinformation trying to ensure their children are not endangering themselves and others while others’ prerogatives are outweighed by wondering when the next football game will be played. .
This unfortunate observation is just like George Orwell talked about in his book 1984, a kind of drone-like mindlessness. It seems like dear George was more of a futurist than an author being able to so accurately forecast our kinds’ shortsightedness and our race for a dollar over a life.
But the first question that comes to my mind is not why this is happening, instead, I wonder what have we learnt from the first wave that will change the way we lead into and through the challenges ahead of the second?
I made specific reference to the role of leadership back on April 7th, when many of my friends remarked I was being pessimistic and that we would bounce back from this as if the pandemic was akin to getting a bad batch of tomatoes.
I had asked in my webinar on April 7th, demanded actually, that the business community stand up, that we needed leadership, we needed the brave and the strong to rise up. This was followed by the deafening noise of crickets in the night echoed, the reality of our situation that had heavily dropped into my comprehension.
At the very end of that video, I cried, I was overcome with emotion, not because I may not be able to buy plants from Bunnings, but because I had thought through the worst-case scenarios, and I had felt the overwhelming emotion of our possibilities and suffering. As a result, I was compelled to act, to engage in solutions, and we are still up to our necks in that every day. (hit me up if you want to join in)
I do strategy, a lifetime of experiences good and bad has taught me vigilance over detail, to reach in with empathy and to understand. It is the cause of my thinking and insight and my demands for more data points and my frustration over the utter lack of mindfulness we have observed.
Now, leaders of commerce, government, community and family, this is maybe better considered a second chance than a second wave. This is our opportunity to embrace our employees, customers and communities with strength, direction and reassurance, this is our chance to redeem ourselves from the silence of denial we suffered the first time around.
What can we now do together? Now that we know of the evidence of this pandemic. Now that we know that this thing reaches well beyond a football season and that Australians and people all over the world are suffering in ways we couldn’t contemplate just last Christmas.
How will we respond to the fact that services like Foodbank, Good Shephard and Domestic Violence agencies are overwhelmed already, well before the current government stimulus disappears. That Australians are truly suffering right now and that our actions as leaders will seriously matter to someone else, no matter how big or small they are.
As Bill Taylor says in his 2010 article:
The true mark of a leader is the willingness to stick with a bold course of action — an unconventional business strategy, a unique product-development roadmap, a controversial marketing campaign — even as the rest of the world wonders why you're not marching in step with the status quo. In other words, real leaders are happy to zig while others zag. They understand that in an era of hyper-competition and non-stop disruption, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special."
How will we stand up for something special? Something special, like supporting the disadvantaged? “How will we step up, when we can’t step out?” What will we do for others, for our teams, our communities and our families? What will we do to restore hope through courage and conviction? How will we now lead differently, that we have been given this second chance?