December Connections video: How leaders move from isolation to resilience

I saw something interesting happen in 2021 — across our clients, my professional network, and even our own internal team.

Business leaders of all stripes experienced a unique type of loneliness: role-based isolation.

They say it’s lonely at the top. But in pandemic times, for leaders that loneliness can result in feeling like there’s no one around who is safe to have conversations with about the struggles and challenges of the role we’re in.

It’s not all negative, though. As I witnessed this happening, and as I talked to more people about it, I saw that role-based isolation begin turning into resilience.

Leaders began reaching out, connecting and conversing with people in similar roles.

I did this myself, in fact, by joining a CEO mastermind.

The CXOs within our client companies began reaching out to me and the Syte leadership team to have 1:1 conversations about the problems they were working through — from supply chain issues to employee turnover.

In such a challenging year, this has been so encouraging and exciting.

In my final video of the year, I share more deeply about what I learned from business leaders, and what I experienced as a business leader myself through this transition from loneliness to resilience in 2021.

It’s my sincere hope that this short message helps you spot the opportunities that are right in front of you.

Watch the video.

Video Transcription: 

Hi, friends. Erin Koss at Syte Consulting Group here. I can’t believe it’s almost the end of the year. I was thinking back on this last year, and a couple of themes bubbled up for me. One of those is isolation, the other is resilience, and the last is opportunity.

I want to talk a little bit about all three of those today and just see what resonates for you and what shows up for you as well. An interesting year as we went into 2021, where we were still being impacted by Covid, for sure. I know many of us still are. But as we went into 2021, what started out as maybe some opportunity that Covid might have brought for some of us, not everyone, but for some of us, the isolation that was created by Covid was kind of a welcome relief in some ways.

But by 2021, it started to feel just like exactly that isolation wasn’t so positive.

And it started to resonate, I think, a feeling of loneliness from many of the people I talk to. When I start talking about isolation in other contexts, I think about the leaders that we work with and how something I call role-isolation shows up. We’ve got kind of a culvert isolation, and then we’ve got role-based isolation. It’s kind of that term that we hear, which is it’s lonely at the top, right? So the CEOs that we work with and the leaders of our manufacturing companies, the family of manufacturing companies that we work with have talked about this a lot with me.

I’ve experienced this idea that when we’re playing certain roles in our lives, that there just isn’t people next to us or around us that we feel safe having conversations with about the struggles and the challenges of being in the role that we’re in. So this happens with the leaders that we work with. Like I said, it happened for me a little bit where I felt like I didn’t have that support system or a safe place to find support. But I also remember this when I was a mom of small children, where I felt like I was a working mom and I had young children, and I just didn’t feel like there was a place where I could really talk about the situation I was in or lend support to others in the same way. It just felt like it wasn’t okay to talk about that.

I realized as I look at this year, that the isolation from Covid, the isolation based on our roles continues to provide some feelings of loneliness around us. And it’s been tough. I think it’s been tough for a lot of us is what I’m hearing is similar to my own experience. The thing the next thing that comes to mind, though, is the resilience that I have seen among those same people. And honestly, I think at the end of the day, I have to give myself credit for having some being resilient as well, in ways that I think it took me a while to even realize we saw leaders of our family and manufacturing companies deal with supply chain issues, employee turnover.

The flip side of that is those of us, the individuals at home who are choosing to leave jobs, choosing to change jobs, to deal with the new reality that we’re dealing with. And there’s some really hard decisions being made and some really great decisions being made where companies have had to go inside themselves, which, yeah, has created again a little bit of isolation. But they’ve come together and addressed some really hard problems this year related to supply chain related to that employee turnover. So, again, the isolation has turned into something closer to resilience at home, where people are making hard decisions in response to some of these challenges, isolation or otherwise related to COVID and job changes. I think people are starting to look inside their own families and look inside themselves individually and start to make important, maybe hard decisions about where it is they really want to go in the future.

This is encouraging. This is exciting. It’s creating a level of resilience individually within the companies we work with, within the leaders that we see that I don’t think necessarily people expected or thought was possible. I see that as really exciting and I’m really excited about that for us here at Syte as well.

Finally, as I talk about, we look at that isolation and we look at the resilience that’s showing up. One of the things that I think about is how do we use this as an opportunity to take kind of what’s been bubbling up in 2021 and turn it into something even more meaningful going forward for us. We talk about the three C’s for us that is connecting with one another, collaborating together and communicating with one another. One of the things that I started to see as again, isolation turned into resilience was people started to look around, and I’ll just use the role based example here and say that the CEOs that I work with, the leaders that I work with started to look around and say, Gosh, I can’t do this by myself.

I need support. I need a place where I can share. I found that to be true for myself. For me that looked like a CEO mastermind for some of my clients. They reached out to me. They reached out to other leaders they worked with and started to have one on one and maybe small group conversations about the things that they were experiencing and the challenges that they were having and so they connected. They connected with others that looked and smelt like them, and maybe the people that were enrolled like they were who could connect and resonate in the same ways. The thing that I see is that the experiences that we have in one role is often the same experience somebody else is having in that role as well. And so by connecting with those that maybe have the same roles that we do, we start to find a resonance and creative resilience by having important conversations together.

So that is something that I saw among the leaders that I work with and I did that myself. The opportunity that I see is for us to connect with one another in our roles is maybe the most intimate way to do that, to collaborate together in those roles and just to communicate more frequently and in more intentional ways. So this brings me to the opportunity for 2022, as you look at the role that you’re in at your company. Maybe you’re a company leader, maybe you’re a mom or dad that’s at home with kids, still young kids, Covid or otherwise. Maybe you’re still working from home a little bit.

I know a lot of the folks that we work with have gone back to the office, but not everybody. But if you look at the role that you’re playing, recognize how meaningful it is, how important it is to the people around you and start to ask for and look for support, ways to connect, ways to collaborate, ways to communicate with people around you, to sort of move past the loneliness that you might be feeling, the isolation you might be feeling as a result of this last year.

There are lots of ways that this can look, as I mentioned earlier, one of the ways that I have found meaning and to get a rate around some of this isolation myself has been a CEO mastermind, essentially a group of people who do something similar to what I do for a living, maybe have some of the similar roles that I have in my world, and it’s really helped me to find support and a place to share and realize that I’m not alone in the work that I’m doing. I’ve also found this really meaningful to participate, one on one with other CEOs people in my role.

I don’t do it a lot, but I do it in a couple of times a month where I’ll reach out and have meaningful conversations with others in a similar role, and that has helped. It’s helped a lot. One of the things I want to go back and mention is, I know for a lot of us, the isolation we felt initially felt like a little bit of freedom, felt like a break, felt like a breath of fresh air. But as I mentioned, it turned into a feeling of isolation and maybe some loneliness. But going back to the way it used to be, where we were all out in the world all the time and busy, as can be, doesn’t feel quite like the right fit. At least it doesn’t for me. And yet I find that the connection and the collaboration and communication is so important to our ability to be resilient. And so I encourage you to think about the role that you’re in and where you might find connection and collaboration and communication with those around you so that you might not stay isolated, maybe not be as lonely as you might be as you could be, and look at where those opportunities might be in 2022 for you. And honestly, if you’re looking for ideas, reach out and connect with us.

I think certainly in the business leader, owner manager area. This is an area that we’ve linked in with our clients a fair amount and just helped point them in directions where some of these meaningful connections can be made. We’d sure love to be a sounding board for you and add value to you in that way. And if you have found ways where you can connect and collaborate and communicate in a meaningful and supportive way with people in the role that you’re playing, we would sure love to hear what you’re coming up with and how is it working for you?

So as we go into 2022, we have this great opportunity. We’ve been a little isolated, but we’re resilient, right? We’re resilient, and we have an opportunity to collaborate, connect and communicate with people around us in maybe a new way in the new year. What are those for you? How are you going to go about doing that? And I encourage you to look around you and see what’s happening, see what you can find and see what you can do. And so with that, I wish you a very happy holiday as you end this year and maybe can make some time to think about some of the things I talked about today and share what you come up with with us.

And with that, I wish you just a very prosperous and successful 2022 and I hope you do take good care. Talk to you later.