With only a few weeks left to 2020, I’ve noticed a growing sentiment of wanting to put this year behind us and focus instead on what the new year will bring. Granted, this makes sense when we consider the severity and extent of challenges and hardships we’ve collectively experienced or witnessed over this past year.
From the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise in divisive politics, and the growing reckoning of systemic racism and how Western nations view their past history, there’s no shortage of challenges that can leave many of us wanting to just do away with the past 12 months and move on to a new year.
While this sounds nice, the reality is we’re doing ourselves a disservice, something leaders especially need to be mindful of.
Consider, for example, the many success stories we share for inspiration or as a tool to help us find our own path. These stories evoke the story structure known as “the hero’s journey”, where the protagonist faces a challenge they can’t overcome until they surround themselves with a group of people whose experience and skills help them to not only overcome this challenge, but which helps the protagonist to evolve and grow in the process.
Sound familiar? It should because in many ways 2020 has presented all of us – both collectively and individually – with unforeseen challenges that we can’t overcome on our own. And that the only way to not just survive, but thrive in spite of these hardships is by looking out for one another. To know we have each others’ backs because in the end, we’re not only in this together, but we have a shared interest in overcoming these challenging times.
And this is also what we see in those leadership success stories we like to read about in order to draw some inspiration for how we can better our leadership craft. The fact that these stories end in success is not what makes them so powerful as an easy win is far from inspiring.
Rather, it’s what the people involved had to go through in order to transform their hopes and dreams into reality that makes these success stories a lightening rod for inspiring others to believe in their potential to do and be more.
Whichever leader’s example you look to for inspiration and guidance to improve the way you lead, their stories all reflect a common thread. Namely, what makes our successes meaningful is not just that we achieved our goals, but that we succeeded in our efforts despite the hardships we had to overcome [Share on Twitter].
So while we might want to put the hardships we’ve faced in 2020 behind us, the truth is how we faced them, how we responded to them, and ultimately how we will overcome them reveals something invaluable about ourselves. About what we’re truly capable of and whether we’re willing to put in the hard work to see things through, or whether we’ve opted to take the path of least resistance in the hopes these problems would just go away.
Of course, there’s another thread these leadership success stories share in common that’s worth noting. A common sentiment shared amongst those who underwent this journey together – we made it.
Granted, it’s hard for any of us to feel this way at the moment because while it’s heartening to see vaccines slowly starting to roll out in some countries like here in Canada, as well as in the UK and the US, we still have a long road ahead before we can put this global pandemic in our collective rear view mirror.
But here’s the thing – whether you found a way to overcome that hardship or not, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re still looking and consequently invested in trying to figure out how to improve, how you can do and be better. After all, that’s why you’re taking the time to read this piece.
Now that’s not to say you haven’t experienced any hardships over these past 12 months. I know I have and I expect there’s very few of us who can honestly say they haven’t.
But the fact remains 2020 has put all of us on our own version of that hero’s journey – and how we view this past year will not only shape our understanding of how we got through it, but what we’ve learned about ourselves that can help us do and be better in 2021 and beyond.
In some of my leadership keynotes, I talk about how if you want to rally your employees around your vision, around your change initiative, around whatever plans or goals you’ve set for your organization to achieve, you need to make people feel like they belong, that they’re a part of something bigger than themselves.
And the most effective way to do this is to remind them of the journey you’ve collectively been on so far. Of recognizing not just your successes, but your failures as well because together they shape and define how you see yourselves and your world view. These are experiences you’ve had together that no one outside your organization might understand because they weren’t there with you and your employees trying to find that path to fulfilling your raison d’être.
In January 1998, my hometown Montreal was hit by what we now call the “Ice Storm”, a series of freezing rain storms that set Montreal and the surrounding areas into a blackout that for some lasted days and for others, like my parents, weeks. Over 20 years later, Montrealers talk about the Ice Storm not just in terms of the hardships it created, but also in terms of how we endured, of how we made it.
Similarly, in a few years, we’ll be looking back on the COVID-19 global pandemic and we’ll recall the hardships we endured and regrettably for far too many, the personal losses their families suffered.
But we’ll also view it with a new sense of resolve, of how we managed to find our way through it, and hopefully, as was the case with the Montreal Ice Storm, recognize the blindspots and failures that allowed it to happen in the first place and what we can do to ensure it doesn’t happen again. And that collectively we end up in a stronger, healthier place than we were before this virus ravaged our world.
So as much as we might want to count down the number of days until we can put 2020 behind us, let’s not be so quick to dismiss the hardships we’ve endured and will continue to endure for a better part of the next year as well.
Instead, let’s use it as an opportunity to better appreciate our resilience, our duty to one another, and what we might learn from this to help us do better the next time a daunting challenge looms before us.