always will be unknowable. This is why understanding that you and your team are in it together and making the conscious choice to go forward with hope is so essential. Post-pandemic does not mean an automatic return to the world before the pandemic, but regardless of the challenges that lay ahead, your team can lean on each other and lift one another up.
L e a d e r s hi p
How leadership can move past the pandemic with integrity Clear and effective communication is essential: When I was diag-
Trust is too essential for relationships to risk compromising it by being opaque. If you aren’t open and honest in every aspect of your company— especially your relationships—you're planting seeds of distrust nosed with COVID-19 (both times!), the only way my company survived was because I used clear and transparent communication. Each time, I was sure to let my team and my clients know about the diagnosis, how I was feeling and kept them updated so that they knew about any effect my illness would have on my work. By doing that, my employees and clients
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could make informed decisions about their needs and communicate those with me as well. Honesty: In some ways, it would have been easier to not be so transparent and honest with my employees and clients about my diagnoses. Disclosing health and medical issues often isn’t done in a professional setting, at least not traditionally. Also, by being so open, concerns arose that understandably needed to be addressed, even though I was very sick. However, by being honest initially, both my team and clients knew I would be truthful
| July 2021
going forward, and that if I said something, I meant it— my words and my actions were in line with each other. So while being open about my COVID-19 diagnoses may have caused some initial concern, in the end, it also helped alleviate it because my employees and my clients knew they could count on me to be honest, even when it was the harder thing to do.
Cultivate inner peace: The real goal and the true measure of success is creating inner peace. Being happy with yourself and your life will help you to seek and cultivate the good in others. While having money in the bank is easier than not, it can’t buy you anything that truly matters—love, happiness, or good health. Realize this sooner rather than later, because life will teach you this lesson eventually— what matters most is just not for sale, and it never will be. Inner peace and knowing yourself, your strength, your resilience, and your principles is also what allows you to navigate all of life from a place of calm and integrity—you have survived the hard times before and you know that you will again. While being able to gingerly speak about a post-pandemic world feels encouraging and better than when we were in the darkest days of the pandemic, the truth is, life has permanently changed, and your employees and clients will continue to need you to be the light in the storm. The hope and positivity from your inner peace can easily and generously be shared with employees and clients to help them when they need it the most, which they inevitably will in this new unpredictable world. Eric Yaverbaum is the CEO of Ericho Communications.
