How Your Isolation Makes Restarting Your Business More Challenging

“This changes everything.”  That’s the refrain we hear with every cataclysmic event.  We heard it after 9/11; we heard it after the worldwide financial meltdown, and we’re hearing it now with the Covid-19 contagion. Only this time, it’s true. That’s because the pandemic and lockdown have not only changed many ordinary business activities, they’ve also wrought some deep-seated changes in our psyches. As reopening begins and you prepare to restart or rev up your business, you need to understand both sides of that equation—the new normal and the new you. 

First, the new normal: 

Customers now have an entirely new spectrum of wants and needs. Virtually every customer and every business have new priorities. Health and safety top almost everyone’s list. But so does rebuilding financial stability. Other priorities may not be so obvious. For instance, some of your customers may have reprioritized the importance of family and friends. Others may have become more risk-averse, while others have become less so—“eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Other changes may be subtle and hard to detect. Have you been in touch with your customers? How do you know, or will you know, how their priorities have changed? And what will you do about it?

Suppliers are more constrained. Many suppliers are hurting. At least for a while, they won’t be able to function as they did before. How they are constrained and how they plan to operate differently will affect your operations, whether you like it or not. How are you going to adjust? How can you help your suppliers recover faster and in a way that strengthens your relationship with them?

Employees have new priorities and issues. Even if you call everyone back to work to do exactly what they were doing before the lockdown, many of them will have changed. They may be rusty at their jobs; they may be struggling with personal issues—financial difficulty, childcare, strained relationships.  Great leaders understand their employees as whole people, each with different challenges and needs, and adjust the workspace and work tasks to accommodate them, as much as possible.

Second, the new you:  

This may be the bigger leadership challenge. Consider how your time in isolation, whether with family, roommates or alone has changed you. Have your priorities changed? How?  What about your behaviors? In general, behaviors are very hard to change—except when you’re under intense stress, particularly for long periods of time. We don’t need to reflect on how we’ve changed very often, but now is that time. To identify how you’ve changed, ask yourself these five questions:

What would you want to be known for if had just five more years to live? Morbid perhaps, but it’s the fastest way to figure out if your core motivations have changed. Understanding core motivations is essential for being a great leader. They explain what you will be most effective at achieving, where you have the greatest “grit” and how you can best get those around you to help you succeed. If your core motivations have shifted, if you’ve got something else you want to be known for now than you did last year, you need to adjust your business and leadership goals to align with your new essential desire. You’ll need to let your team know how you’re shifting your business and leadership goals. You don’t necessarily have to explain why, other than to acknowledge that everyone has changed during these times; and, as a leader, you have changed, too. 

What have you missed most during isolation? The answer indicates what new explicit short-term motivations you may need to satisfy before you can fully concentrate on your business goals. You may have been separated from your significant other for many weeks, you may miss family or you may crave some kind of meaningful group experience. It’s important to satisfy these needs because they’ll gnaw at you if you don’t, and you’ll appear to be a distracted leader.

What’s made you mad since you’ve isolated? Assuming your anger is reasonable, the answer to this question can tell you what changes you want to make in your environment and how you behave. 

What’s made you the happiest in isolation? When asked what makes us happiest, we often reply with generic answers like beautiful sunsets or deep relationships. But by restricting the question to your period of isolation, you can get at some highly specific answers that tell you how you personally create happiness. That tells you how you can be effective, and it provides valuable insights about how to reward yourself for successes going forward. 

What will I do to excite my team about the opportunities ahead and help them succeed? Being isolated has likely made you more self-reliant—maybe too self-reliant. The three questions about the new normal for customers, suppliers and employees can be answered only by you and your team together. How you re-engage with your team will largely determine how successfully you re-engage with your customers and suppliers.

Because so much has changed during isolation, you know less about your business than ever.  But you should know more about yourself. And that knowledge can go a long way toward making up the difference.