My whole team walked into the auditorium along with the rest of the company to hear an announcement from our CEO, We assumed that it must be something big because this wasn’t the normal way she would share information with us. She announced that we were going to split our company into two companies. In that moment, my head started spinning. What would that mean for everyone? Which company would I end up going to and where would my team go? That was only the beginning of the thoughts I had, because then she said that we had one year to make it happen. I’m sorry did she just say one year?
Splitting a company up of any size is a huge amount of work, but in one year? There was so much to accomplish on such an accelerated timeline. This is one of the moments where you have to anticipate all of the things that are going to come at you as a leader. I knew that to do this we would all have to come together and focus on the work. The decisions about where we would all end up would come later. So many questions that were yet to be asked and answered. We were faced with so much ambiguity and yet decisions had to be made quickly.
This is no time to hide out and pretend it isn’t happening. We felt the grief that everything we knew was going to change. Leading through this amount of change isn’t easy. It is when you have to be out front having the hard discussions. You won’t have all the answers and you have to keep the team motivated. Being visible and admitting that I didn’t have all the answers wasn’t easy. In that moment however, it was what I needed to do for the team. They needed reassurance that I would tell them what I could when I was able to share more information.
This is a time when you have to build even more trust to help your team through the change. There is a lot of work to do and they need your support. You have to be there even when you don’t know what your own fate may be. Keep the focus on the future and support them with whatever they need so they can reach the goal.
I was so proud of what they did as a team. They came together as a group in a much stronger way and we made the deadline as a company. It seemed impossible, but we did it. It required so many leaders to focus on what needed to be done to make it happen. Change will come when you least expect it. You can’t always prepare for it, but you can take it as an opportunity to be a strong leader who makes a difference for your team. Would you be prepared for a big change if it was announced today?