The pandemic changed all of us. How you led changed your culture.
I will never forget standing in front of my team for the last time in March of 2020.
My IT colleagues had made impressively quick arrangements to shift our nearly fully in-person team to remote. Several of us had shown up early to learn the new system to demonstrate it later to our teams. We’d had discussions about what to do for team members who didn’t have adequate tech. Someone asked how long we would be out of the office. “Plan for a month,” I’d said with an optimism that in hindsight was laughably naïve.
In the study of anthropology, there is a concept called “liminality”, which is a period of significant transition, where there is a previous state of being, a future state, and one of fluid uncertainty in between where you’ve lost your previous sense of “normal”. Victor Turner, the British anthropologist who originated the concept, calls it a state of “neither here nor there” .
For a year, we’ve globally shared a sort of liminality, where we don’t yet know where we’re going, but it isn’t back to where we came from. To say it’s been unsettling is an understatement.
For many of us, pandemic life has been not just one liminal experience, but an array of several stacked upon one another. Behind the Zoom camera, separation from friends and family, death of loved ones, loss of jobs, divorce, alcoholism and addiction, political instability, and our collective reckoning with racial injustice are just a few of the traumas that people are grappling with amid the stress of trying to keep themselves and their families safe.
As we leave behind our pre-pandemic selves, we must realize that our relationship with nearly everything will shift, including how we work. Figuring out what “normal” will look like, and how we will respond to the changes, is one of the many challenges that lie ahead.
Reckoning with change
Your culture is the interconnected experience of everyone in your organization, and understanding it means understanding individual experiences. Pressure has an uncanny way of revealing who we really are, and the pandemic has been a type of uncertain and sustained pressure unlike anything else in our collective experience.
How have your leaders adapted over the past year when things were uncertain and hard and then, later, even harder and more uncertain? Did they show up with vulnerability, trust, and empathy? Did they work with their team members to adjust expectations and timelines? Were they transparent about the challenges of the business, and did they bring their team along? Did they brainstorm first on ways to lessen the impact, like senior level pay cuts, doing away with unnecessary perks, or voluntary temporary reductions in hours?
Or did they harden themselves and push for more, take advantage of “flexible” schedules with evening and weekend work calls, push for teams to come back to the office, implement new tech to monitor productivity, and keep their teams in the dark about company financial performance and potential layoffs?
As a whole, the workforce has taken notice and some cultural shifts have begun to occur. Increased expectations and job instability due to furloughs and layoffs have caused some to reevaluate their relationships with work, taking breaks without having another job lined up, reconfiguring finances so that only one partner is working, and seeking out freelance or part-time work in lieu of replacing lost full-time work. While it’s yet to be seen how long-lasting these changes will be, it’s likely to cause talent shortages for those seeking to hire as the pandemic wanes.
Mending fences
If your leadership team failed to respond with empathy and transparency, you may be experiencing disengagement and high turnover from a team who is feeling distrustful. Facing this reality and turning it around can seem daunting, but it isn’t impossible. In fact, being self-effacing about your bad boss behavior and apologizing can be an important first step in repairing the damage. Seeking to understand the needs of your team when it comes to returning to the office, schedule flexibility, and workloads, and really listening and implementing what you’re able, aiming for a quick win to jump start positive momentum.
Final thoughts
Watching the daily case numbers go down and the vaccination numbers go up gives me hope. Hope that what’s on the other side is more predictable and recognizable as normal, although very different. To be sure, COVID-19 has changed us forever, and our experience living through it will become a defining part of who we are. My hope is that we sustain the positive behaviors--the vulnerability, transparency, and empathy--and work to reconcile with our teams by acknowledging the ways in which our leadership fell short. It isn’t too late to fix it and move forward.
