Adam Petrick: I’ve definitely had to learn to trust my team to deliver information, and I think that trusting that the transparency is there and that my team is doing everything that they can do. That’s something that I think is an important lesson I’ve learned from being at home and being at a distance from everybody.
Bret Werner: One, I love having dinner with my family more than ever before. But two, as a leader, you have to learn to inspire and motivate a team when you don’t get to interact with them, and that’s a different skill set. Because it’s one thing to walk around the office and get a pulse on everyone and read it, but when you’re constantly on a Zoom, that’s something, a skill set, you need to evolve, and I think we’ve all adapted to that well and I’m inspired how my team has reacted.
Chris LaPlaca: I would say the importance of humanity and leadership. We tend to show up and be cheerleaders for our teams and provide guidance and support and rah-rah and keep the energy level up. And we’ve been doing that for two months. And we’re all social animals, and we haven’t been around our people in that amount of time. If we were not social animals, we’d be doing something completely different. But about a week or so ago, I hit a wall. I was exhausted, and I was honest about it with my team. And that led to an unbelievably cathartic conversation, which has, strangely enough, re-energized all of us. And I was honest about my desire to be an energetic, enthusiastic leader for them, because I know we were all struggling, and we were honest about that.
But what I learned is, it’s OK to be human, even no matter that you’re in a leadership position. And when you do, you just build better bridges with your group and make it OK to not be OK in a moment, and so that was kind of a revelation for me.
Chris Widmaier: Well, I wish I could say I was as deep thinking as some of my peers here. The thing that I’ve learned is that, oddly, I’m not going to mind commuting back to my office.
Barry Baum: Every day, waking up and finding the words to keep my team motivated, to keep us excited, and keep letting them know how much we appreciate what they’re doing. It’s really important to share those feelings. And also, like Chris said, we’re all struggling in some way, and it’s great to be able to share that and talk about your day with your team and some of the struggles you’re having, or what you’re thinking about and how you feel and to be open and honest and transparent. And I think that goes a long way when your team sees you as a human being on a regular basis. I think that’s really important.
Mary Scott: The word that comes to mind for me is perspective. I think that being at home for these last 10 weeks and having to adjust to work and to different client situations, I think it’s just perspective. … It’s looking at it differently and looking at healthy and let’s be happy with what we have and just a perspective, overall, gaining more time with my family, more time for myself, and all that. That’s something that I think I lose often in the day-to-day of agency life, especially. So I’m hoping that sticks and continues when we get back to whatever the next new phase is going to look like.
Brett Jewkes: A reinforcement that my mom was right all along. My mom always said, “Surround yourself with great people who share your values and you can do anything.” And I cannot be more proud of our leadership team or my core team and what they’ve pulled off over the last nine to 10 weeks. And that has been reinforced to me very clearly.
Joe Favorito: One is, as someone who’s been in some form of social distancing for 12 years, I can really appreciate everyone coming to my side of the fence. But I lost a pretty close friend of mine early on to this, and I think the amount of empathy that came toward me and the people around me was incredibly valuable. And that’s something that I’ll never forget. And doing the little things. I mean, I think that’s something that anybody who’s in this industry does really well and is very successful at, is they’re able to do the little things, and those little things really add up really quickly. The hellos, the Facebook mentions, the how are you doing. That matters to a lot of people, and sometimes we kind of forget that when you’re interacting with people on such a large scale, but it’s really, really, really important. The other thing that I want to make sure that I acknowledge is, this is the largest Zoom chat that I’ve been on with the least amount of beards in at least three months. So congratulations.
