While schools and workplaces close in one country after another, you, like many people, might be struggling with the sudden reality of having to set up your home office. And that’s not all:
Work and home life have suddenly become room mates.
Before becoming independent, I used to love working from home. I found focus and creative flow in the quiet of my home office. I recharged my batteries and enjoyed the day without meetings. A creative introvert’s heaven.
Home Office = Productive Office!
Alas, back then all was quiet and serene at home. At present, I am writing this blog next to an only child who finds himself in a limbo between home schooling and long holidays, without friends to play, and worried about just how long this will last.
As a regular meditator, I am also noticing lately that my body is in a state of hightened nervousness which I physically feel in my stomach area. So there is plenty of distraction within and without.
What’s the good in this bad situation?
In a world where we are expected to leave the private at the office door, we are collectively awakening to what has always been a fact:
We DO bring our home life to the office. All of us!
We’re so much more complex than machines. We carry our mood, our thoughts and our energy with us all day. And everyone around us is aware of it. If we leave our home with worries and obligations, those worries and obligations accompany us into the office. And just to be clear: This is not about caring for younger children. This is true for everyone.
What’s the leadership challenge in this Covid-19 emergency state? When it presently looks like we all carry on individually as best as we can and hop on virtual meetings instead of face-to-face ones?
It is a leader’s job to work with both her own emotions and mental distractions and with her staff’s mental and emotional state. In a twist from Dr. Joe Dispenza’s recent post:
It is a leader’s job to surrender to possibility when the rest of the world is trying to control outcomes.
It is a leader’s job to cultivate a feeling of wholeness when we’re diagnosed as sick. The good news is that as a leader, you don’t have to find solutions for your team or you whole organisation alone.
Covid-19 is a stress test that allows everyone to practice leading in a VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous). No one expects you to solve this on your own. Everyone knows that this is a hard nut to crack. And cracking it requires tapping into your team as a creative resource.
This is the time to harvest collective intelligence without the shame of not having the answers.
This is the time to co-create solutions in powerful virtual meetings.
Heck, this is a time to turn dreaded information sharing meetings into interactive, co-creative, heart based get togethers!
In short, this is our chance to explore how we can create connection and focus when the usually hidden distractions are becoming visible and audible while everyone works at their dining tables, because they don’t have a real home office.
Like every personal crisis, this collective crisis is an opportunity:
for having more productive and better connected team meetings,
for choosing what’s essential for serving your clients well.
You may ask yourself how to best come together in a virtual team meeting and get beyond the “coping and surviving” state into a creative state of “What’s the opportunity for us? How can we best serve our clients?”
We invite you to a 2 hour webinar to explore how to turn your remote team meetings into connected and creative meetings.
