Stories of Resilience in the Face of COVID-19

My family extends our wishes for safety and health to you and yours.  In the times we’re living in, the theme of resilience in the face of adversity becomes a top-of-mind topic.  But what is resilience?  A few years ago, the American Public Human Services Association and a team of our partners developed a thorough model of resilience drivers linked to similar drivers for executive functioning and adaptive leadership.  Some would prefer the definition, “bouncing forward versus bouncing back.”  A teen group leader just described it to me as “knowing that we can all come together as one community.”   

Sometimes it’s best to show and not just tell about such things, especially when we’re all living the lesson so to speak.  Twice last week I witnessed the resilience of the human services field in action, through the way that agency managers and leaders are reacting to the current crisis.  Or I should say, the way they are balancing reacting to the current crisis with reflecting on how this crisis can illuminate things about ourselves that we weren’t sure we could rely on, not only to get us through it but to grow stronger from it.    

In the first instance, I was facilitating from afar a 10-member project team within a county’s public agency - mostly middle-managers at the local level.  The project leads felt it would be right-minded to spend a bit of meeting time up front to recognize the stress people are feeling these days and invite some round-the-table vetting of home-based work life, social distancing, and hardships being experienced by family and friends.  While there were some nods in that direction, the members of this team spent most of this time suggesting ways the current crisis might support better ways of operating their agency and serving people.  

One member focused on the opportunity to track different funding streams more holistically and creatively flex them to the community’s greatest needs.  A second member connected this idea to her ideas for flexing the deployment of staff to support high demand services and supports, perhaps making such flex methods a long-term proposition.  Another reminded the group of their agency’s ongoing efforts to map the customers’ journey with them, and emphasized how the current crisis would illuminate inequities by race and place in the current state.  A fourth jumped in and pointed out how timely it would be to advance efforts to provide virtual kiosks to address both inequitable access and the current stay at home orders.  And a fifth member shared how the business community would be more supportive than ever to engage in partnership discussions, being that many of the agency’s customers are now going to be laid off employees of these businesses.  

Mind you- this was during the introductory, opening section of our agenda- a place for each team member to open up about their current stress and feelings of struggle, even despair.  In bringing the group to reflect on why they responded with innovative ideas, one person commented that their agency was learning it was “more resilient than we ever realized.”  Another commented that “I guess we’re learning about leadership from a distance, meaning when we reach for bearings while working from home, we have them in our shared values and priorities.”  

In the second instance last week, I was a participant on an all-state call organized to share experiences and interests, attended by many within our country’s health and human services leadership.  This one-hour call indeed established a set of focused issues for which the participants had pragmatic, often technical questions and suggestions for one another.  About half-way through the call the group was asked what other topics and themes should be included for the next call.  One leader praised the group and suggested how helpful it would be to devote a segment of the call time to “reflections on the resilience of our staff in the face of these challenges.”  Another piped in that “we’re more agile than we thought we could ever be.”  The call resumed with a heightened focus on employee pay equity and incentives, leaders creatively engaging with employees from afar, and novel ways of staffing for high demand services.  

Again, I simply “ran into” these stories of resilience last week, and I know there are far more out there.  This blog space invites any of you to share similar experiences, where you are witness to or leading this balance between effective near-term response and reserving the capacity to reflect, learn, and innovate.  What drives such capacity in the face of adversity?  How do we build it up before we need it in a time of crisis?  What other dividends would such a building investment yield to us?  Let’s find out together.