The Rise Phase: Pivot to New Ways of Working

With the foundation established, take the time to reflect on how you’ve been affected by this experience, the costs and benefits of supporting yourself and others, and setting aside established expectations. Before moving forward, appreciate the ways you must adapt your own role to continue making progress. To help orient yourself to the new reality, test your perceptions by inviting reflections and insights from trusted external stakeholders.

Take time to re-knit interpersonal connections into a new team fabric that builds on, but is not beholden to, the past. Help your colleagues articulate a new group identity, and discuss how you strive to collaborate and communicate going forward.

Build on the energy that exists within your team to promote rapid experiments and safe-to-fail innovation. Encourage subgroups to explore ideas that animate them, quickly launch new pilot projects, collect data, reflect on what they observe, revise hypotheses, re-contract, and then move forward.

Help the organization acknowledge and embrace the new organizational context, making note of what’s been gained and lost, and what is being learned from this experience. Although it’s never easy to change established ways of doing business, it is essential now to remove whatever internal obstacles exist that will slow nimbleness and innovation. Of course this will create resistance; acknowledge and respect these objections, and work to minimize them as they occur. Despite the difficulty of managing change, it is crucial for the system to replace stale policies with practices that provide clearer value and added flexibility.

Now is the moment when effective leadership is crucial. By honing your emotional intelligence and building stronger connections, you can help yourself, your team, and your organization Steady, Ready, and Rise together.