On Optimism and Team

This time last week, I felt compelled to write about optimism. Why? Because I felt optimistic. More optimistic than I have done in a long time. Optimistic personally, optimistic professionally. 

I started to write this piece, then stopped. Should I say it out loud? Does optimism have a place at a time like this? –when life as we know it has ceased, people are dying, others selflessly risking their lives to serve and save others. What right do I have to write about optimism? What am I doing to make a difference? Not a lot: working from home, isolating myself and my family, trying to be a good citizen and not become a burden to our amazing NHS –only what we should all be doing; the bare minimum. 

Yes, the world is an uncertain place at the moment, but what’s made me feel optimistic is what I have been observing and learning about the other human beings that I work with. 

As a company shifted online and connected only by video conferencing, like so many others, we have a policy of two communal online coffee breaks and one Friday beer break a week. These three half hour punctuations, within our busier than ever working week, have become little oases in the vastness of what we are all dealing with. What started as a bit of fun has become a lot of fun and, like an oasis, an essential place of respite and rejuvenation for us as a team. 

Cambridge Management Consulting is a company founded on the principals of connectivity; not just in telecommunications where so many of our team have worked, but human connectivity with our clients.

Covid 19 has made manifest our connectivity. We cannot see the virus that has so altered our everyday lives. Yet if we can metaphorically substitute the impact of the virus for positivity, we can trace the consequences of our actions as they ripple out from us, across the world, both in business and personally.

This virus has made visible our effects on each other and in amongst all the chaos it has caused, has given some unexpected windows of clarity. It has taken away layers of formality that the world of work can place upon us all. I have always respected and admired our team for their extraordinary capabilities in the workplace, but now I admire them for the extraordinary humans that they are too; the parents, the partners, pet owners, mountaineers, artists, runners, cooks, musicians… their facets are endless. I don’t just know them as technologists, managers, financiers, colleagues, but as people now. This is one of the things that this strange time has shown me and a gift that it has given me. We have been forced to slow down, take stock, consolidate and consider and we are doing those things together, as a team and for the team. 

Our current enforced lack of personal interaction has magnified the threads of society’s fabric. It is no longer acceptable to be inward looking and introspective –now we must build a cohesive web if we are to come through this period intact. We should no longer think of our actions affecting only ourselves or our own business, but we must become integrated into something that, without us all pulling together, will fall down. 

Individual freedom is crucial of course, but if we only focus on ourselves then we lose track of the bigger picture. This temporary loss of freedom is for the greater good. We must have a new perception of the world and the impact of our actions; keep our heads high and look to the future.

The awfulness of Covid 19’s impact cannot and should not be underestimated, but it is important to find a light in the darkness and to learn if we can from this universal crisis. We need others, need our communities, our teams in all their forms. We need them for the very basic human interactions that inform so heavily on our wellbeing. How vulnerable we are when we exist in isolation. We cannot discard the freedom of the individual, but at a time like this, we have to look to our human networks for support and add strength to build foundations for the future. 

We must learn lessons about importance of community now, for when this crisis has passed. We must take those lessons forward into a world which will undoubtedly be changed, and use them to be better. We must nurture the new and deeper relationships we have found within our teams and take the greatest care of those precious new elements. 

Good or bad, our words and our actions affect others in our business and in our personal lives. We must choose to make them good, because the humans inhabiting both those lives are one and the same. And they are the reasons for my optimism.