When the Ceiling Falls in on You…
(Author’s Note: I was recently scrolling through our blog archive, and found this post from May 2022. It still resonates, so I share it again with you now.)
I was recently getting ready to run a virtual coaching session from my office at Latimer headquarters. The session was due to start in about five minutes. And I ran to our learning studio (where we teach our virtual sessions) to get ready. As I walk past our printers around the corner from our studio, I hear the sound of a steady stream of water hitting a hard surface. I slow my walk, thinking to myself “no way…” I peer around the corner, and in our little studio, with our best equipment, there is water streaming out of the ceiling. Ceiling tiles have collapsed onto the desk. And all of our equipment is soaking wet. A mixing board… two high-quality microphones… three large screens… and of course the computer itself. It is a space we invested in, because we are teaching virtual sessions constantly.
I stand there for a moment, to process what I am seeing. I am in the office alone, because most of our team is remote on most days. And I now teach in four minutes…
When was the last time you saw a 50-something adult throw an absolute temper tantrum? If only we had a video feed from our office, you would have seen such a tantrum yesterday.
I did what I always do when things get tough at work. I reached out to my awesome colleagues, with a plea for help. They jumped right to it: one of them rushed to the office to help me deal. Another raised their hand to teach the session from their home office. And our fantastic landlord came right over to help us triage. We moved the equipment, figured out what caused the leak, and made a plan to reshuffle our office and put our studio in another room.
The point of today’s post is that business is a constant stream of issues — some predictable, and many unpredictable, and it sometimes feels like the unpredictable things tend to come in bunches. I can’t prove that to you. It just feels that way. And yesterday was one of those days. We have had a busy stretch inside our company, dealing with some organizational changes, managing multiple client needs at the same time, and feeling more stretched than normal.
And then the ceiling literally fell in…
It is at those moments, when the ceiling falls in, that you most need to have a strong team in place. That is not the time to think about building a good team, and it is not the time to wish you had a good team. That is the time when you need a good team. Which means that you need to be building a strong team all the time, even when times are good. Especially when times are good. Because you are going to need that team when times get bad, and when that moment comes you won’t have time to start building it.
You build the team in the good times. You rely on the team in the bad times.
Have a great day.
