Leading in Extraordinary Times

By Marian Barcus, Blandin Foundation Board of Trustees Chair and 2000 BCLP alumnus

We’ve heard it all before.  “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”  “A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor.”  “When you get bucked off, get right back on the horse.”  Now, we are living in times where those clichés are all too applicable.

While the current economy affects some more than others, no one is unscathed by the hardship.  We are literally all in it together.

Rural leaders, particularly those who’ve earned the prestigious Blandin Community Leadership pinecone, are better prepared than most to deal with this adversity.  Our rural roots have equipped us with a strong sense of self-sufficiency, pride, and determination.  We value integrity, humility, and hard work.  Balancing our self-sufficiency, we have a strong tradition of helping others.  Woven into our fabric of core values are our BCLP competencies in framing opportunities, building social capital, mobilizing resources, and embracing diversity.

So what does this mean in the current extraordinary times in which we live?

During adversity – economic or otherwise – two universal, yet contrasting, behavioral patterns help us survive.  First, we turn to our familiar values, beliefs, and coping strategies to get us through. So as we struggle with reduced income, job loss, budget cuts, and business closures, we tend to retreat inward to the familiar and to those things that matter most.

However, humans are also most open to learning new behaviors in times of crisis. In these adverse times, we are most primed to learn new “survival” skills, refresh existing ones and creatively apply BCLP principles.

A struggling business owner collaborates with a competitor or supplier to keep both operations viable.  As rural leaders, we take the risk of building new social capital by including those who are different than us.  In our personal lives, we barter childcare services with reliable neighbors, carpool with coworkers, or take a new class for increased employability. Collectively, as communities, we partner with neighboring cities or counties to share expensive equipment and services.  We build new partnerships to position our communities for stimulus funds.

What we’ve learned, and reapply creatively about surviving and thriving, is the productive tension between turning inward and risky networking.  We’ve learned that we get the best outcomes from diverse input.  Our skills in framing issues so that diverse interests can identify their own self-interest in improving communities are critically important.

In The Rise of the Creative Class, author Richard Florida theorizes, with sturdy data analysis, that “regional economic growth is powered by creative people who prefer diverse, tolerant places open to new ideas.”   James Surowiecki, in his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, makes a strong empirical case for “collective decisions being wise only when they incorporate lots of different information…cognitive diversity.”  Now is an excellent time to review the teachings in these resources, not only for personal leadership renewal, but also for scientific reassurance of our intuitive values and skills.

Because building healthy community seems an even steeper climb when funds are limited, now is the time to reach deep into our leadership training. Listen to your neighbors and learn about those who are different.  Welcome creative new approaches and develop partnerships for mutual gain and community growth. We must prepare ourselves, our communities, and our causes for at least three options:  What if I (we) succeed?  What if the worst happens?  What if nothing changes?

Now, in the fire of economic distress, we possess all the seeds of renewal. We are grounded in our core rural values.  We possess vital leadership skills.  We are motivated to sustain and grow our communities.  (That’s how you got to the last paragraph of this article!)  And with the economic lemons this episode of life has provided, we can choose to make lemonade.