Navigating Change with Floricane

Floricane’s Covid-19 Update #2 - March 19, 2020

As your organization works to provide clarity, support and direction to your employees, it is critical to find balance – between action and caring, reaction and strategy, personal and organizational. 

We recognize that every organization is weathering this storm in unique ways. The team at Floricane is available to help you chart a unique course that surfaces your organization’s best leadership, engagement and strategy in the face of change and uncertainty. We’re also focused on providing actionable, and tangible, solutions to help our clients, partners, and community friends move through the coming weeks and months with purpose.

Here are three specific ways we’re here to support organizations, leaders and individuals navigating our new, challenging reality:

Leadership and Change

  • How do you leverage your best leadership to support change and lead through uncertainty? Join us on Wednesday, March 25, at 12 noon or Friday, April 3, at 9am for “Emotional Intelligence, Leadership and Change,” a one-hour workshop for organizational and community leaders.

  • Whether your teams are working remotely or on-site, we know the nature of our work has shifted. Join us on Friday, March 27 at 9am and Tuesday, March 31 at 4pm for “Insights® Into Change,” a one-hour workshop focused on how Insights® Discovery can provide concrete steps to strengthen relationships with employees in order to build performance and drive results.

Strategic Jumpstart

Your plans need to change. Schedule a 30 minute, free call to sort through your short-term adjustments and your longer-term strategies. Set up a call to fit your schedule with John Sarvay to discuss your organization’s strategic needs.

Community Conversation

If you’re an individual looking for an organized, interactive, and purposeful space to focus, connect with like-minded people, and bring more intention to your week, join us for our Community Conversation series. These one-hour facilitated discussions are designed to help you manage change on an individual level, and will include opportunities to break into small group conversations to process and learn from others in your community.

  • Register Now for Thursday, March 26, at 11 noon (and the whole series)

Stay In Touch

Keep reading our blog for regular updates on how we’re navigating, and for new tools and tips to support your journey. As we move through the weeks and months ahead, don’t hesitate to check in with any of us directly.

We’re looking forward to seeing you virtually, speaking to you over the phone, or just staying connected by email. As we move our way through this new normal, we hope we can “sail through this to that” together as a community.

Leadership, Community and Coronavirus: A Floricane Update

“Hope is a discipline”

Credit for this affirmation goes to American activist Mariame Kaba, whose website boldly states the obvious, “We need each other.”

Hope is a discipline. And we do need each other. Especially in this moment.

During this week when Coronavirus seems to have changed everything around us – faster than we could have possibly imagined – it’s as easy to feel like you (or others) are overreacting.

You’re not.

Psychiatrists call this an adjustment reaction. It’s an emotional dress rehearsal, and it gives us the space we need to get psychologically ready for the change. It’s also a strategic rehearsal, one that helps us sort through data, plans and strategies to determine a course of action.

The impact of this new Coronavirus has barely reached our community, and it has already proven its power as a disrupter.

During times of disruption and change, leadership is a gift. Your best leadership is a catalyst for inspiration, courage and action. It is a gift, one that is badly needed by the people in your life. Your best strategic thinking, the conversations you choose to have, the guidance you give – it matters now.

Our small team of strategists, community facilitators, organizational change experts, and leadership coaches know full well the disorienting power of disruptive change. And we know that it is essential to anchor ourselves – and our families, teams, organizations, and communities – with clarity and purpose.

We believe that each of us, as leaders in our organizations and communities, have real opportunities to support, reassure, and inspire others with our words – and our actions. As we move through the disruption created by Covid 19, our team at Floricane is holding onto four powerful concepts to guide our work.:

  • HOPE: We agree with Mariame Kaba. Hope is a discipline. During times of uncertainty and anxiety, we must give hope room to exercise and strengthen. To move through change requires focus, determination, and faith. “Faith,” Martin Luther King, Jr. told us, “is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Lead with confidence, and lead with forward motion.

  • COMMUNITY: It is too easy to feel alone during times of disruption. When the prescription for a pandemic involves remote work, social distancing, and 14 day quarantines, we must find new ways of being in community, in relationship, with coworkers, clients, friends, and family. Start talking now with those around you about the ways you’ll stay connected. Make time to check in often, about things that matter.

  • ADAPTABILITY: The velocity we’re experiencing – even over the past 24 hours – can be paralyzing. But just as change closes some doors, it opens others. Your ability to continuously scan the landscape is critical. More important? Your ability to engage others to collaboratively uncover new ways to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. Ensuring that your team is sharing observations, perspectives and ideas regularly will help you navigate the inevitable rapids.

  • STRATEGY: We are, of course, fans of strategic plans. Smart planning, especially in times of crisis, provides the direction, guidance, and alignment that teams need. Knowing how you’ll stay healthy, address challenges, support the needs of your clients or customers, communicate, and sustain your organization through this period is no small challenge. Write this one in pencil, and make sure everyone has a copy.

 

The worst thing we can do in this moment is wait for the storm to pass. Our actions now will not only help our community navigate this immediate storm, but it will set the tone for what follows.

Our team is ready to help you and your team adapt, plan, and move forward. Let us know how you’re responding to Covid 19, and let us know how we can support you. Schedule a time now for us to strategize – by phone or Zoom.

Coronavirus: How Floricane Can Support You

In the next week, we will be rolling out a full suite of solutions to help our clients move through this period of change. Below is a list of the services we will providing specifically to help leaders and organizations stay engaged, aligned and focused during the Coronavirus disruption.

  • Strategic planning: We can help you and your leadership team map out a clear, actionable plan to move your organization through this disruption with more clarity, focus and alignment. Sessions can be an hour, or several hours, and can be facilitated in-person with individual leaders, small groups, or remotely.

  • Leadership Coaching: One-time or multiple coaching sessions with individual leaders and managers to ensure your key influencers are bringing their best leadership to work during this challenging time.

  • Virtual Team Meetings: Maintaining a sense of community and connection with teams who suddenly find themselves working remotely is important. We can help managers co-design and co-facilitate regular team check-in and connection sessions for remote employees.

If you want to talk about these or other ways we can help you, leaders in your organization, or other stakeholders transition strategically, effectively and authentically through this time of uncertainty, please drop us a note. We’ll respond immediately to find time to diagnose and help you move forward.

Coronavirus: Changes at Floricane

As we hit the first week of serious Covid 19 whitewater in Virginia, Floricane — like many businesses — is making some immediate changes to how we are doing our work.

  • Our team has both a liberal leave and remote working policy to maximize our health, and we are taking advantage of our shared space with Punch to practice social distancing in the office.

  • We are wiping down our work environment twice daily.

  • We are contacting each of our current clients to better understand how their organizations are responding to the new Coronavirus, and where needed realigning our work together.

  • We are canceling all of our scheduled workshops for 2020, except for our Insights® Discovery public workshops. We had a cascade of more than a dozen new skill-based learning opportunities ready to unveil this year, and we’re looking forward to re-launching these in the future.

  • We will keep registered participants informed about the status of our April Insights® workshop. Currently, we plan to sanitize the Highpoint training room (doors, surfaces, tables, chairs) before and after the session, and establish CDC-recommended guidelines for social spacing in meeting environments for this workshop. If we cancel this session, we will let participants know.

As circumstances evolve, our approach to work will evolve. We anticipate an increasing number of our meetings — and work engagements — will happen electronically in the weeks ahead. We take our work seriously, and we take our responsibility to do our part to change our behaviors to help our community move through this challenging period.

If you have questions, or ideas for us, leave a comment or drop me a note.

Doing More with Less: a Non-Profit's Dilemma

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Change is the watchword of the 21st century. For nonprofits, the word takes on a particular urgency. There’s been a paradigm shift, says Lorri Powers, executive director of the Sarah Bonwell Hudgins Foundation, a Hampton-based organization that coordinates and supports disability services in the Virginia Peninsula. Much of state and federal funding has been stripped, and nonprofits have to do more with less. “We’ve been operating for 50-plus years under the same guidelines. That’s not feasible anymore,” she says. A new strategic plan needed to be slotted into place.

Powers recently took over as executive director, and instead of feeling that change was a challenge, she wanted the board to see it as an opportunity. “I’m the first person to roll my eyes when I hear about facilitator sessions in other places. But John [Sarvay] and I have fun together, and that’s the key to alleviating the dread people may feel.” That’s the way real work can get done, she says. 

 

It was important to Powers for the board to be actively engaged, despite the daily tasks that still needed their attention. In addition to a series of work sessions with the board’s strategic planning committee, Floricane also facilitated a focused, four-hour session with the full board. It suited the foundation’s needs perfectly. Instead of getting derailed, as is often the way of many strategic planning efforts, Sarvay kept the group on track. “We managed to get everyone thinking differently and stretching their vision,” she says.

 

The work with Floricane was also an opportunity for Powers to clarify her part in moving the organization ahead. “I needed a sounding board — someone to help me get out of my brain space. John brought a great toolkit with him.”

Written by Brandon Fox, a Richmond-based freelance writer.

Leadership: An Attitude

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As chair of professional development at the Virginia Academic Library Consortium, a group of ten university libraries in Central Virginia that share resources, Patricia Sobczak was looking towards the future. Libraries today are a very different animal than they were even a decade ago. She needed leaders to help push the libraries in the consortium forward.

 

“Leadership isn’t a title but an attitude,” she says. “It’s believing you can make a difference, step up and lead a project, or lead a presentation.” She wanted library representatives to understand that you can lead from anywhere you may be sitting.

 

Floricane’s John Sarvay took a deep dive with members of the group in January during a workshop focused on leadership and effective influencing. With a focus on their work, “he made everyone feel comfortable and open to the questions he was asking. It was a supportive environment.” People, she felt, were able to share things that they may not have expressed in a large group under different circumstances — they shared moments of disappointment or challenges they weren’t sure how to overcome. It was risky, but, she says, there was no “gotcha” moment.

A facilitated debrief of conductor Benjamin Zander’s TED talk helped participants see ways to translate creativity into their daily work, and how to take the lead even when they aren’t the designated leader on their team. The group explored Floricane’s own Manifesto — built around a series of beliefs that guide Floricane’s work, such as Conflict is change waiting to happen and The work of a leader is to bring voices from the margins to the center — and discussed ways in which these beliefs applied to the library setting.

 

“People left feeling like they had real tools they could take with them,” says Sobczak.

Written by Brandon Fox, a richmond-based freelance writer.