Picture source: 16 Personalities
Personal reflections of leadership during COVID19
You know your colleagues and teams need your support now more than ever, not just professionally. You are conscious of this and you care. You feel you are never quite able to reach the standards you set yourself in meeting everyone’s needs and wants in the way you would wish to.
Your networks and contacts are likely to have grown considerably. Suddenly you are working with and for people or organisations, you may previously never have. Cultures are different. They may not fully understand your role or remit. They are looking to you for help and wanting to give it too.
Your capacity is pushed to the limit as you take on as much as you can to support your service in its response, as well as maintaining whatever of the ‘business as usual’ as you can. You won’t always get everything right. You will make mistakes. There will be good days and bad. You have to accept the ‘good enough’ more often than you would like.
Things aren’t static. New guidance is being issued constantly. You try to keep on top of it all, implement and respond to it. You know the same is true for all those around you.
You worry about the sustainability of the services you rely on and the people dependent on that care and support. You want your communities to thrive and survive.
You are likely doing all the above in a virtual or distanced way. Your days merge into one another, spent in teleconferences and back-to-back meetings, often talking to faceless icons on a screen without the benefit of body language cues or the camaraderie you get from being in person. Your miss your colleagues despite talking to them every day.
People are tired. You know this. You are tired too. You do your best to keep positive, keep energised.
There are opportunities everywhere you look. You want to embrace them all. It feels important. You need to be realistic and selective in what you can prioritise and achieve for now.
Much of what you do will go silently under the radar.
You know that despite all the hard work, all your combined efforts and activity, there is more that needs doing and ‘winter is coming’
You have probably never achieved or delivered quite so much in such a condensed period of time or in so many varied strands of work. And yet somehow feel you are never quite as productive as you wish to be.
It is vital to remember that the challenges facing leaders, managers, and staff today, during COVID-19, are likely to be the toughest conditions you may face over such a prolonged period of time.
The skills you are honing are making you stronger, more capable, more resilient, more aware, more reflective, more engaged, more prepared.
The boundaries being broken and red tape being cut is delivering enormous innovation, and allowing leaders to emerge at all levels and deliver great things.
So, be kind to yourself as well as to others. Remember the value of empathy. It matters now more than ever and will get you through tough times. Keep persevering; don’t give up. You are doing a great job.
Niki has worked as a Strategic Manager within Adult Social Care for 4 years, and for Somerset County Council for 12. She has overarching responsibility for Quality and Performance. Since the start of the pandemic, much of her time has been spent supporting the vital independent adult care market in responding to COVID related challenges, interpreting and keeping up with the latest guidance, responding to queries or issues, and working in partnership with colleagues across health and the voluntary and community sector, to seize the opportunities presented by the pandemic. In August 2020, she wrote the above to reflect on and capture her experiences and thoughts on leading during a pandemic on Twitter and was happy to share it with my to publish on ThinkTheory19. Niki is a Defender ISFJ-A / ISFJ-T via the 16 Personalities test.