Caroline Fairchild, LinkedIn’s Working Together, April 15, 2020
On the night of March 11, Anna Maria Chávez made an urgent call to her CEO. Chávez, who was the chief growth officer of the National Council on Aging, was watching President Trump announce to the nation that travel from the United States to Europe would be suspended. She told her CEO that the council needed to move its nearly 100-person team to remote work, and they needed to do it now. The next morning, no one on the non-profit’s staff was in the office.
Chavez’s quick reaction didn’t come out of nowhere. It was a skill she developed while working as a policy advisor to the Arizona National Guard early on in her career. And that quick thinking is exactly what crisis expert Davia Temin says every leader — and every worker, really — needs to embrace right now.
Whether you’re the CEO of a large organization or an employee who is part of a smaller team, it’s likely that your job looks very different right now. As we settle into this new normal, the quicker you can get out of denial that your industry, career and role have changed, the better off you’ll be.
“The first thing we do is that we say this can’t be happening or it won’t be that bad or no one will notice and it is just a cascade of denial,” Temin said. “The longer you wait in denial, the worse it gets where you can’t put in fixes anymore.” […read more]