THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO
I am passionate about IT. I am also passionate about leadership development. COVID has certainly made those two areas intertwine much more over the last year as we adapt our activities during the pandemic to stay socially distant and protect others. It's late January and right now I would normally be in full swing preparing for Camp Neidig, a four-day youth leadership camp I have been the director of for 14 years and involved with for almost 27 years overall. I'm fortunate to be able lead a great group of leaders each year who volunteer their time to the camp to help develop young leaders. It has been almost 2 years since we have all been together in person. Last year, our Camp Neidig experience was cancelled in wake of the emergence and quick spread of COVID in the Spring of 2020. However, as we approach this year's camp, we didn't want to miss that opportunity again to impact another group of young leaders. Clearly, COVID will still be with us come June and safety measures will make it near impossible to keep our traditional 4-day on-site overnight camp format. So like many other things, we are turning to technology to help us provide a different camp experience this year.
We are early in our planning stages of this year's "virtual camp" experience which will consist of a 1-day hybrid format focusing on community engagement and servant leadership. It will include a series of half-day virtual sessions followed by a regional community service event. On one hand, working with high-school juniors who attend our camp is easier to adapt to a virtual format because of their familiarity in using technology in the classroom and at home nearly every single day. However, based on what we see in the workplace and at schools, a certain amount of "zoom fatigue" makes it challenging to increase participation in yet another virtual event. As you start to plan virtual events like this, it is important to keep your focus not just on content, but also on how to drive engagement in your event! The last thing people want, especially a younger demographic, is to just sit in another zoom or teams meeting and hear someone present a series of slides. Many of them are getting that for school every day right now. So how do we plan to do that? It starts with having the right content for your audience. You want something they are interested in and passionate about. We are already working with young leaders and rising stars, so they are interested in leadership development (but different than what they are getting in school). Next you have to be deliberate about ways to engage them in the conversation. Just like in-person sessions, you need to have group sizes that make sense to foster that engagement versus getting lost in the crowd. The good news is that the technology offerings as a result of this digital disruption caused by COVID are evolving at a frenetic pace. Tools like Zoom and Teams allow you to create virtual break-out rooms where we can get more focused discussions. They are also getting better about how they organize the presentation of people and content. There are better tools for moderation, interactions, and Q&A. While our team hasn't been "together" since June 2019, they are very excited to be back together virtually this year. In fact, it will provide us a unique opportunity to engage guest speakers and some staff who would not usually be able to participate in person. Five years ago, I am not sure we would have had the comfort to even attempt this kind of event in a virtual format. Technology has changed that. While I look forward to a 2022 camp experience that is back to "normal", I am excited for our team of leaders to continue to help shape future leaders virtually in 2021.
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I spent the last day of 2020 in a bit of an unfamiliar place….my office. Like my real office. Not the home one I have been working from most of the last 9 months. I was reflecting a bit on the last year. A recent tech article I read estimated that we have probably experienced 5 years worth of digital disruption over the last 9 months as businesses have been forced to adapt to working in this pandemic environment. Those of us in IT are accustomed to constant change, but we have never seen quite the pace as we have in 2020. I am fortunate to be working for a company that has continued to weather the impact of COVID as we learn to adapt and adjust to how our industry and clients need us to serve them. Our ability to do that wasn’t by chance or luck, it was about preparedness and adaptability. There are two key takeaways from this year that have served us well during the pandemic:
People have asked me how I have adjusted to working remote. Personally, it wasn’t a big change for me. I already managed a national team where more than half of my managers and team were remote to me and I may have only seen a couple of times a year in person. I already relied on collaboration tools to engage with them. I utilized tools, reports, and metrics to stay connected to what was going on with my team and the rest of our organization. For the company as a whole, the shift to working remotely, either part time or full time over the last 9 months was a relatively smooth transition. Part of our business model was built around an engineering collaboration technology platform that allowed us to engage and leverage an already geographically diverse staff. Now instead of working at geographically diverse office locations, we could extend that secure environment to people’s homes or wherever they could get a reliable internet connection. People used technology to accomplish the same tasks they would have done together in the same room or with physical materials. Past events already had already shown us the importance of a mobile workforce and we were already nearly complete with a full transition away from desktops to laptops. This was part of the continuous evolution of disaster recovery / business continuity planning. While “global pandemic” wasn’t one of the first scenarios that comes to mind, our adaptability of plans to mitigate the risks of “losing” offices as part of a regional event proved very effective in responding to our changing work environment due to COVID 19. There will always be hiccups in any plan, but nothing we couldn’t overcome – like finding ways to still print and ship blueprints when physical copies were still needed. Disaster and business continuity planning isn’t always about trying to plan and solve for every possible disaster. It is more about a mindset of risk mitigation, resiliency, adaptability and impact modeling. Despite the lack of normalcy to our lives in general the last 9 months, there is a lot I have learned or reinforced my beliefs about the relationship between technology and business during this time. As we look forward to 2021, there is a lot for us to learn from 2020 in how we continue to adapt and prepare for the unknowns going forward. As the old military adage goes: Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome. The businesses out there that are surviving or thriving are the ones who have learned to adapt and improvise. They are embracing this digital disruption to do what they do in innovative ways to still serve their customers and partners. |
About Shawn:My philosophy as an IT leader today is that I believe you must first and foremost be a business leader. It is my goal to be a strategic partner with the business to help it make money, save money, and be the absolute best in the industry at what we do. Having the technology competencies and experience is just your entry fee to sit at the table. Every day, I am bringing 20+ years of IT experience to the table in the areas such as:
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