The Preparation
A few days before delivering the speech of my career, I met up with my mentor Charles at our local coffee spot, The Steaming Cup. I needed to prepare for this unprecedented time, and I knew I could trust his experience and counsel.
I shared with him that I needed to be ready to talk with my people and that I wasn’t feeling prepared or confident yet. His response confirmed that the situation was as critical as my instincts were telling me. (It wasn’t a source of comfort, but honesty was a good place to start.)
Charles shook his head and rubbed his hands on his jeans. “Will, in all my time, I’ve never seen anything like this.” He paused thoughtfully. “What you say to the team will be really important. The key will be to start by showing how you will begin this crisis.”
“Begin?” I asked, unable to hide my confusion. “It doesn’t feel like we’re beginning this. It feels like we’ve been thrust into it. There was no warning, for us or anyone! And we’re the lucky ones. We can work remotely.” I looked around at this cafe we loved. “Think about the people running this cafe...they’ll have to shut down completely!”
We were silent for a minute as that sunk in. Entire industries would be devastated by this crisis. Every non-essential business had been ordered to close down its physical operation in a week’s time. My clients in the travel and restaurant businesses were terrified.
“Of course, there is a beginning,” he said. “You and your company will have to start to deal with this crisis. There will be a middle, and there will be an end. Just like anything, I suppose.” Charles studied my response.
“And how exactly am I supposed to think about the beginning of this?” I asked. I am sure the stress and anxiety I was feeling were keeping me from fully realizing what Charles was trying to get me to understand.
“You need to show the team exactly how your company will lean into this phase. Share the things about the business that will allow you to have a strong start. Help them to picture the end. Actually, that’s probably the simple part. It’s the middle you really need to face. You won’t be able to tell them how you’ll get through the changes.”
He said all this without the faintest hint of sarcasm, which I found a bit unnerving. What the heck was he talking about?
“Okay, Charles. Before we tackle the ‘middle,’ as you call it, can we go back to the start?” I was anxious and motivated to do this right. I was picking up steam. “How does one start to face an unpredictable, unprecedented crisis?”
“How do you start to tackle any big problem you face as a company?” he asked.
“I guess we lay out the challenge and then begin to problem-solve,” I said.
He gave me a small frown, reminding me of the way my third-grade teacher used to look at me when I made a wisecrack in class. “Before that,” he said.
I took a deep breath, exhaled, and thought about it. And then it hit me. “We start with our purpose.”
He smiled at me. “Which is?”
“To inspire happiness. We always go back and remind ourselves to remember our purpose of inspiring happiness when we’re digging deep on a problem,” I said.
I was getting it. Our agency had a fully-developed Purpose, Vision, Tenets, and Values (PVTV) system. 1 It was a model that Charles had taught me years back. He had invented this framework and used it to successfully shape all of the companies he’d founded and grown.
“So that’s your start.” He sat back and asked two challenging questions, “How would a company whose purpose is to inspire happiness begin an unprecedented crisis? How would that company create a plan for survival when there is no real way to know how long the crisis will last nor how deep it will go?”
I took a second to think instead of giving into my gut reaction, which was to throw up my hands and say, “Who the hell knows, Charles? If you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me?” I closed my eyes and took another deep breath. “We’d start by thinking about the things that would inspire our team’s happiness. That’s how we always approach things. Is this going to inspire happiness in our team members? How can this make our team happier?”
“Right,” said Charles. “And how would you think about that in this situation?”
“I’d want to be as honest and open as possible with them. That’s what they’ll need. Even if that means admitting I don’t know exactly what will happen, I need to be honest with them.”
He smiled. “Bingo. Dig deep into how your team has prepared for this particular problem. Believe it or not, you have a lot of things in place already that will help you start strong. Explain your plan and how you and the leadership team are getting prepared. Remind them of your PVTV and how it’s going to help,” he said.
Key point: At every major decision point, go back to your company’s or team’s purpose. Having a credible, honest purpose is the key to building a great team, and it is required to survive in a real crisis.
I was nodding and writing in the notebook I always brought to my meetings with Charles. The value of the wisdom he had shared with me over the many years as my mentor was immeasurable. Now was no exception.
I continued, “Okay, that gets us started. I have no idea what we’ll look like after this is over. How can I show them a vision for how we’ll come out of this?”
“Let’s start with what you can’t predict,” he said.
“For one, I don’t know how long it will last. I don’t know if we’ll be able to retain our entire staff, or if they’ll have to take pay cuts. I have no idea if we’ll be in debt because we made some bad bets, and I can’t be sure we’ll be able to keep our office space.” I put my head in my hands. “I feel like I don’t know anything about how this will end,” I said, probably a little more dramatically than I intended.
Charles sipped his coffee, nodded his head, and said, “That’s true. You don’t. Nobody does. Put that aside. Think about what you can say will happen at the end of this.”
I paused and then shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.”
“Sure, you do. Let me ask it this way: how will you behave?”
“Behave? The same way, I hope.” I wasn’t getting his point.
He continued to prod me patiently, “Which is to say...”
“Which is to say, I guess I won’t become a heartless leader. I’ll still care about my team. I’ll still be me.”
“Because you have a certain moral character that won’t be changed just because things get tough?” he asked rhetorically.
“Right. Exactly.”
“And how will your company behave? If only you had already defined standards for your team...” He trailed, exaggerating a quizzical look, tapping his finger on his mouth as if pondering deeply.
I laughed. “Okay, yes, we have values. Good point.”
“Remind me what they are again,” he said.
“Our values are Team First, Think Positively, Celebrate Diversity, Do Good, and Have Fun .”
“Great. Do you think those values will guide your behavior during this period?”
“You bet, especially because now I’ll be remembering to reinforce them even more.”
“Okay then,” he said. “Spend time thinking about how that list will help you paint a picture for your team of what you can promise will happen at the end of this crisis.”
“Fair enough,” I said. I was skeptical, but Charles had never steered me wrong before. I made some more notes, and then came back to the really hard problem. “So what about the ‘middle’?”
“As we said before, the middle is the hard part because you don’t know what will happen. Ironically, that not knowing also kind of makes the middle the easy part. You can tell your team how you’ll start, and you can tell them how you expect things will end up. What you can’t tell them is what it will look like as you’re getting from one point to the other. That’s because it’s up to them. Make that clear. They are the ones who will dictate what the middle looks like.”
I was jotting notes as fast as I could. My brain was spinning. What Charles said made sense. We had a purpose, values, and guiding tenets. My team just needed to know that it was their plan for action. I always appreciated the ability to give my team a rallying cry, and this would definitely be one.
We finished our coffees, talked a bit more, and then headed for our cars. (Well, I headed to my car. Charles got on his bike. That guy.)
Key point: Tell your team how you’re going to start strong, what you envision the end will look like, and that the middle is up to them. Paint an optimistic picture and remind them of their strong foundation. They need something or someone to give them guidance and confidence, and something to act on.
I had worked hard over the last week to find the right words to say to the team. I thought it might be the most critical speech I ever gave to them because I couldn’t imagine that we’d ever face a scarier time than this.