Something to look forward to

- Hey everybody! Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week, I am coming to you from my home, and this is my seven continents wall. So several years ago, my daughter and I were on a trip and it occurred to us that we had visited a couple of the continents, and maybe it wasn't such a crazy idea that before she finished nursing school, we could visit all seven continents together. And this last December, with our trip to Antarctica, we achieved that goal. And you know, the idea of that goal and working towards that goal, saving towards the goal, hoarding points towards the goal, and just planning all of those trips was amazingly good medicine for us. It got us through some very difficult personal times; the loss of both of my parents and some other challenges in our family, but it gave us something to look forward to. And it was a huge sense of accomplishment when we actually stepped foot on Antarctica ground and knew that we had stepped foot on our seventh continent. And now we have all of these mementos to celebrate and remember, and just cherish the time that we got to spend together as we achieved this goal together. And you know what? I think that's a very good thing for us to be doing right now with our team. For most of us, we are working from home, we are isolated, we may have gone through some tough times in the agency in terms of lay offs or pay cuts, or certainly, most agencies have experienced some client loss or at least some pauses. So, there's a lot of heavy weight around the agency and things don't feel quite right. So what I'm going to encourage you do is I'm going to encourage you to set an agency goal with your whole team; something that you guys can do together. Maybe it's a weekend trip somewhere, maybe it is building a habitat house together, whatever it may be, whatever fits the culture of your organization. I want you to set a big goal of something you guys are going to do when we get through this crisis and we're sort of back to normal. And then the other thing I'd like you to do is I would like you to sit down with everyone of your employees on a video call where you can see each other eye to eye, and help them create a plan and a picture in their mind of a goal for themselves. It might be something they want to do with their family, it might be something they want to accomplish on their own like running a marathon, and they're just anxious to start training for it. But when we set big goals and when we share those big goals, because then what I want you to do: So I want you to get everybody on the agency's goals together, again, assuming that they give you permission to share them because some of them might be personal, but share them all, put a big board up when you get back to the office, or if you've always been a virtual agency, on your virtual whiteboard, a list of, first of all, here's the agency goal, here's what we're going to work towards, all of us together, sharing in something that we can celebrate and be excited about. And secondly, here are all the goals for everybody on the team, and we're going to encourage each other, we're going to celebrate each other, we're going to support each other until everybody, every single person accomplishes that dream. Give them something to look forward to, give them something that reminds them that this isn't permanent, and that you guys are going to come together as a team, not only to do something together the team goal, the agency goal, but also that you're going to come together as a team to support each other in your individual goals. All right? Give it a try. I think you're going to find it's a great boost to morale, and it's something for all of you to look forward to as soon as we get around this bend, okay? I'll talk to you next week.