Five Keys for Thriving When Times Are Tough

The American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters to what lies within us.” His words offer a good reminder about where we should turn when facing adversity even in the darkest of times.

Emerson could have easily been authoring a guide to crisis management.

In my last blog post, I spoke about the crisis management experience of my lifetime: leading Revera, Inc., an owner/operator in the senior living sector, through the COVID pandemic. We needed to implement measures that did far more than protect our highly vulnerable residents from this deadly virus. This meant adapting policies and procedures within the places that were their homes and do so in a manner that allowed them to thrive.

Not only were we responsible for our residents’ lives, but the logistics required for their safety placed intense physical and psychological burdens on our team members. They had their own loved ones to care for, children to educate, and personal safety to protect.

We suddenly entered a world where families were physically cut off from their mothers, fathers, and grandparents. We faced constantly shifting government regulations that were often a step behind a quickly adapting virus. And we did all these things while enduring inaccurate, inflammatory, constant media scrutiny.

Every one of you reading this suffered hardships and uncharted terrain during the pandemic. However, in the senior sector, where we constantly made decisions that literally held potential life or death consequences, we encountered a perfect storm of adversity.

This isn’t a post about COVID; it’s a post about leadership. None of us may encounter another global pandemic, but we most certainly will face adversity. The approaches we took to this unprecedented crisis have proven instructive.

Our decisions were imperfect, but we got better with each day that passed. As early as June of 2020 we formed an Expert Advisory Panel (EAP) to examine our response and make recommendations for moving forward. Moreover, we made their findings public.

The very formation of the EAP offers several vital aspects about leading through adversity, including: seek out diverse expertise, act quickly but not with panic, be transparent, and communicate with prompt clarity. (Our EAP report was titled, appropriately, “A Perfect Storm.”)

The report contains a lot of instructive material appropriate to any industry and to any adverse situation. I’ll highlight a few key takeaways from it and from my broader experience as a leader:

• Dedicate time and energy across your teams to strategic risk management planning that imagines potential future challenges.
• Develop deliberate reflection processes that create lessons for the formation of evolving best practices.
• Encourage insatiable knowledge appetites and open minds. (As leaders we must create cultures where the desire to apply learnings becomes locked into the cultural DNA).
• Apply innovation to problem-solving.
• Work constantly to solidify the importance of a cooperative, open culture.

This list is only five points long but represents a massive undertaking and an intensely intentional work culture that takes years to develop. It also represents five key elements to a blueprint for thriving in times of adversity.

For more ideas on how to accomplish them, I expand on all of these ideas in my book Leading with Humanity. Also, be sure to watch for more blog posts.