The mountain in front of us.

Once a month I bring my team together for what we’ve called, going on years now, a “Team Training Day”. My former VP first started these even when we were peers on the team. These “Training Day” sessions have been under my ownership for the last two years.

The name is a bit of a misnomer honestly. Training often makes up an hour or two at most.

And really it’s the rest of the day which is the real substance.

The rest of the day is made up of tackling current issues and challenges the team is facing.

It’s honest discussions about the direction we’re steering the team and the Workshop product.

It’s the updates and discussions on ongoing product improvement and advancement.

Or sometimes it’s the tweaking and adjusting of processes to better meet the demands that the team is presently or soon-to-be facing.

We’re a team that’s grown significantly over the last 2 years (let alone the 4 years that I’ve been part of the team) in our results, our resources, and our skill and mentality. And we continue to set high targets for ourselves even before they’re set for us by executive leadership.

Though when our goals are set for us at the beginning of the fiscal year, it’s usually “Double it”.

Whatever frustration that statement is sometimes initially met with by the team, I think we also thrive in the challenge of the “impossible” goal. As a team I believe we’ve risen to the occasion in ways deeper than what only results can show. The results have been pretty good too though. ??

This March, we were on track to hit a new milestone, 49, maybe even 50 onsite #ITRG #workshops delivered to 50 different Info-Tech members all in a single month. That number crumbled after the announcement to suspend all business travel due to COVID-19. Of course, no matter the impact on our numbers, it was absolutely the right call for our people.

It would have been easy for our team to have stopped at this moment and thrown up our hands to the present circumstances.

We didn’t do that. Our team pivoted.

Not victims even for a moment, but transformers all at once; we delivered our first set of online workshops the very next week, and then another set the week after that. We have 15 and counting booked this month, and more coming for the months ahead.

Now we're seeing advantages to the online mode of delivery that we never saw quite the same way before. This is called a #beautifulconstraint.

In the 4 weeks since all travel stopped for our company and our product, we:

• Launched 4 new crisis focused topics (at the direction of our new VP)
• Crowd-sourced and developed a online facilitation handbook
• Initiated a collateral revamp project
• Launched workshop retrospectives to bring our product delivery to the next level
• Delivered and continue to deliver workshops with scores of 10/10 and $100,000 member-reported measured value
• The list goes on.

The image below is taken from the cover slide of my team’s “April Team Huddle” — the name change was due.

(Background photo credit: Anthony Da Cruz [@akhu] via unsplash.com)

This whole post began because I was thinking about what this photo meant to me, why I selected it for the cover photo for our team huddle, and everything that I hoped it would convey for the 30 seconds it would remain on the screen as I started our 3 hour session last week.

I have a late friend who said to me once during a church testimony service, “Why doesn’t anyone ever give thanks or claim the victory of their faith when they’re actually in the middle of a challenge or a struggle?”

There’s probably a lot of responses to that question. He was battling cancer at the time. He had his own response to that question.

Here’s one possible response: because victory isn’t secured yet. We just don’t know that we’ll make it through that particular challenge or struggle or at least not in a way that we believe we can celebrate at the time. Because we don't know.

For our team, we’ve had to adjust our goals because of the ongoing COVID pandemic. I'm of the opinion that even revised goals should feel steep — ours certainly do.

My team, you could say, is climbing a mountain together. A mountain I know we'll conquer in some way or another.

There's plenty I'm grateful for at this time, but one of the things is the team that I have the pleasure to climb this mountain with.

Together.

I’m not sure what type of work you’re finding yourself in through this new remote and physically distanced world. Hopefully, you’re fortunate enough to still have work. But maybe you’re not and that’s a different mountain in and of itself. Whatever your mountain looks like or feels like, know that we’re all in this together.

My charge to you is keep pushing, keep showing up, and keep pressing onward, upward, and forward!