Smokey Bones

We were in free fall. It felt like a dystopian universe where there was pain, suffering, and disaster all around us. One of the worst parts of which was that we didn’t know how bad it would get, or when it would end. How do you lead leaders when you don’t have any answers, the world is collapsing all around you, and everything is on the line? This is precisely the situation we found ourselves in during the beginning of the pandemic. The one thing we did know, was that the only way we would get through it was together.  Which brought a new challenge. . .  pulling together 3000 employees in 16 states, in an industry with high turnover, rotating schedules, and rapid developments, and no system of direct communication.  It was this problem we were working to solve when we made a decision that significantly elevated our culture and leadership capability across our organization.

It was a simple communication app, that all our managers and employee representatives (now we call them brand ambassadors), executive and office team members could communicate on in real time. We were mostly concerned with getting information across accurately and timely.  It was unexpected how this tool, where managers and leaders from all parts of the organization could come together in real time could truly impact us.  It strengthened resiliency,  built business acumen, and enabled a learning, agile culture.  It empowered and engaged people as they saw their direct impact to the bigger picture.  It intrinsically built the “why” into everything we are doing.  It created very strong social and emotional support across the country as people shared words of support, recognition, and crowd sourced solutions.  That spirit, combined with the peer-to-peer coaching that followed on a daily and real-time basis, not only carried us through, but also ensured we emerged as strong industry leaders.

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One unexpected area of leadership development was for office team members and executives.  Learning how to receive, and act on raw feedback from field leaders in a high stakes, agile environment, grew office team members like no other time in our company history, or that I’ve seen in my 20+ year career.  Typically, this sort of feedback would take weeks and would come through more archaic channels, watered down, with personal twists and the emphasis of those carrying the message.  Strip all of that away and now initiative leaders get feedback in real time (and during real world operating hours) from end users.  Not only did leaders have to learn how to respond, and sometimes crisis manage, they learned how to improve performance,  better project plan, better communicate, ensure real field readiness of initiatives, and enable better escalation methods for case resolution.  More powerfully, they learned how to engage field leaders proactively during the creation of those initiatives in a way that dramatically increased engagement, adoption, and success rate of the initiative overall.  

Often times people think of leadership development as a class to take, book to read, webinar to participate in.  And those things do have value.  But I ascribe to the model where 70 percent of development comes from on-the-job experiences, and another 20 percent comes from coaching and feedback.  The approach we took in crisis enabled exponential increases in both those experiences of all the leaders in our organization.  We harnessed peer-to-peer influence which remains the strongest way to drive change and behavior in an organization.  Over a year into the platform, 4 of our field leaders promoted to higher levels, we are launching our mentoring culture through the platform, and at any point in the day you’ll see leaders coaching, supporting, recognizing, and celebrating each other across our organization.  Our teams point to this platform as a key differentiator in our culture, their personal and professional growth, and a crucial tool for us not only surviving the pandemic, but emerging as a strong, industry leader.