Just ahead, we kick off season two of WTVP's Leadership Lessons for Home, Work and Life.

Tonight's critical conversation brings discussion from four great Central Illinois leaders.

While the pandemic lingers, we've got advice to help you lead during uncertainty, and it all starts right now.

(exciting music) Good evening.

Thanks so much for joining us.

I'm Amy Burkett.

I'm thrilled to be back hosting season two of Leadership Lessons for Home, Work and Life here on WTVP.

I've been a student of leadership my entire life with over 30 years of broadcast television experience and a certification as a John Maxwell Trainer, Speaker and Coach.

I know you can never stop growing your leadership skills.

John's written more leadership books than anyone else on the planet.

He says a leader is one who knows the way, goes the way and shows the way.

You don't have to be a corporate CEO to be a leader.

Everyone has leadership responsibilities, and the hardest person you will ever have to lead is yourself.

Tonight, we learn and grow together with tips to help us lead during these ongoing uncertain times.

We've got a great group of guests to help us discuss the issue, so let's meet them right now.

We begin with Margaret Hanley Williams.

She's the President, A. Lucas and Sons.

Margaret, talk to us a little bit about the biggest challenge that you've had during leading in this uncertain time.

- Leading during COVID has definitely been a challenge.

People are scared.

Employees are scared, I'm scared, and I think one of the greatest things that we figured out at my business was that as long as we're communicating and being open with one another, recognizing that we're all in this together and it's all new and nobody knows how to navigate it, as long as we work together, we can accomplish anything.

Being a small business, that has really helped, just communicating and keeping the lines of communication open and recognizing at the end of the day, we're all human beings and we all have struggles and everyone just needs to try and do their best.

- Thank you for your vulnerability.

I think to say that we're not scared wouldn't be real, so the fact that we all have some fear during this time.

Next up, let's meet Leigh Ann Brown.

She's the Executive Director of the Morton Chamber of Commerce, and she's also the CEO of the Morton Economic Development Corporation.

Leigh Ann, same question.

How have you dealt with these uncertain times as a leader?

- We are a small organization, a small team, and we serve many, wide array of businesses, and that was what we quickly went to, of information.

Information is knowledge, is comfort, and how can we come together and comb all the information that was coming from so many directions, rapidly changing and make sure that information was readily available, and we were reaching out to our businesses, our community to bring people together.

I always say connecting people and resources is vital in getting through any opportunity, but certainly during challenging times.

- Thank you, Leigh Ann.

Next up, Dr. Seamus Reilly is President of Carl Sandberg College.

Dr. Reilly, talk to us.

Leading a college, hello, goodnight, Lucille.

Uncertainty all around.

How have you handled it?

- Well, the first thing was to revert back to core principles, what we were trying to do, and the second thing as the other panelists have said is to expand the number of people that are part of the leadership solution.

Everybody was in the same boat in that nobody knew what was going to happen next.

We were trying to work week to week.

We sort of said we'll wait week one, then week two, then week three, and before we knew it, it was the whole year.

One of the most important things that we had to do was to make sure that we were protecting everybody, keeping everybody safe, and then being open to learning new things and listening to everybody because the broader the input you had, the better chance you had of making sure everybody was safe and that we were gonna be able to keep the operation running.

- Thank you, Dr. Reilly.

Next up we have Dan Kouri.

He is Owner of Lariat and Kouri's Pub and Chair of Discover Peoria.

Dan, talk to us a little bit.

How have you navigated these uncertain times?

- These uncertain times were probably the most difficult of all the years I've been in the hospitality industry.

It was a matter of telling all of our employees that we have to shut down, not knowing really why we have to shut down.

Many of our employees work day to day or live off their paychecks from week to week, and so it was a matter of navigating them through these economic times, shutting down our restaurants and then opening them back up and bringing staff back in.

- Tough times, folks.

Let's kind of bounce our way back through and see if there's just one new nugget that we can help.

I'm just gonna start with you, Dan.

Your industry was decimated by this, by having to shut down.

As you've been able to come back, the first year had to be really uncertain, but we're in the second year of this.

Have you had to make more changes even though you're able to have your facilities open?

- In the beginning when we reopened, we had shortened staff.

Nobody was coming back to work.

The government took care of a lot of people, so the people who decided to stay unemployed stayed unemployed, and the people who wanted to come back into our restaurant, everybody wanted to come in 'cause they were caged in for a year and a half.

So the onslaught of business, the business was great.

The staffing was minimal, and so we had to learn to adapt with minimal people to get the job done.

- Tough times.

Leigh Ann, let's talk a little bit with your CEO of the Morton Economic Development Corporation.

Put that hat on for a minute.

Was it extra hard to try and draw new businesses to the area and keep that focus on the economy when things were just crazy?

- We spent a lot of time with our existing businesses.

That's where growth happens.

Yes, business attraction and bringing new business and people is incredible and a good aspect of economic development, but the vital area is focusing on your existing businesses and make sure that they're sustainable and strong, and very proud of many businesses in our region and leaders of leading in times and innovation.

This uncertainty really turned the tables and it was just fascinating to see the innovation and how people came together to leverage our local resources.

I think we learned a lot from that, of what do we have available right here in our backyard and how can we come together and help people through opportunities.

- We love opportunities.

Dr. Reilly, let's talk about that.

That second year, you made it past the first year of COVID where everything was beyond crazy, but we're still in uncertain times.

What are you learning and how are you navigating?

- One of the things we're learning is that we're not going back to any sense of what normal is because the world has changed.

For our students and for our faculty, the panic around the K-12 and what's happening there, the uncertainty around daycare, the uncertainty about what their lives are like has really influenced how we're thinking about it.

I would say that one of the interesting things about it has been the creativity and innovation that came about from our faculty and staff who are forced then to think differently and to react to the world.

I think in many ways, we managed to make some great decisions on the fly, but then with continued training and continued professional development, to make sure that people feel supported in these new ways of learning and working.

I think that's been a really, really important factor in going forward.

I think people are now thinking this is the way we are working, as opposed to waiting to go back to where we were.

- Thank you.

Margaret, let's talk small business owner.

I mean, it has to be a little terrifying.

You mentioned fear in the beginning, but as we are in the second year of this, how have you been able to pivot and move forward?

- I think for us as a small business, being nimble and everyone had to step up.

I learned how to operate a lot of different pieces of machinery at my business, because as people were getting sick, you had to step up.

I still had customers that needed their products.

We did innovate a little.

Everyone learned how to do everyone else's job, and we were there for each other.

We had a piece of equipment we had for about 10 years, and we learned how to do things on it that we had never even known were possible.

We never would have explored those without the pandemic hitting, saying we don't have any bodies.

We need to figure this out.

We need to be able to run this piece on this piece of equipment.

All of my employees stepped up and we managed and we innovated, and that was kind of the name of the game, is to be little and nimble, because it was scary for people to come to work with COVID everywhere, and you didn't want your employees to be sick, and that was very scary to think about their families and the fact that you had to think about their kids and what were they doing in front of a screen, and my own child in front of a screen all day.

I think having empathy was very, very critical during the whole stage.

I hope that that's one of the things that people do take away from this pandemic, is to have a little more empathy towards fellow human beings.

- Thank you, Margaret.

Well, Margaret Thatcher said you may have to fight a battle more than once.

This pandemic is certainly teaching us that lesson, and the crisis just won't seem to go away.

So we've gotta make adjustments.

What adjustments have each of you made over the last two years?

And we've talked a little bit about it, but let's jump in, and we're gonna start with Dr. Reilly.

- Empathy was a really important part of making sure people were safe, but one of the innovations that we made going forward was to reexamine the outcome of what people were doing in their positions.

And so thinking about work differently, thinking about how we structure things differently and really thinking about how do we continue to do the work that we're doing but in a completely different way.

Those were really important structural changes individually for people as they began to reimagine themselves, but also for the institution as we began to deal with the challenges that are coming along, that are not going away.

We still need to educate people and everybody needs to do it differently.

- We're gonna head back to you Margaret, right now.

I know you've shared a lot, but what other changes have you made?

- I would say we are a very different company than we were at the beginning of the pandemic.

It's very difficult to find employees and you have to be willing to take a person and mold them into a great employee.

It might not be the person that you wanted to hire, but as long as they're willing to work and try hard and do their best and learn how the whole operation works, that's a great employee.

Someone that's willing to step up.

People we might not have looked at before, we're saying you know what, anyone can do this as long as we can train them.

That's been a novel approach that we wouldn't have taken 10 years ago in the structural fabrication business.

- Leigh Ann, how about you?

- I always view life and the journeys we go through as a marathon.

You run into different obstacles and there's different tools you need to bring to the table and different lenses to look through things.

As an organization, both the Chamber and the MEDC, focused on our why.

How are we truly serving our mission and how is this truly meeting the needs of our businesses in our community?

- Dan, and you?

- For us, it's a matter of finding out where our strengths lie within our labor.

We're basically a labor-based organization, and so we just figure out where our strengths are and then we utilize those people and then help train everybody else to bring them up to speed.

- Well, John Maxwell says leaders need a backbone, not a wishbone, when leading during uncertainty.

Crisis leadership requires adjusting, pivoting and agility.

He suggests leaning into change, not away from it, and here are three more tips he says can help during these uncertain times.

Now first, you've gotta think options, not direction.

Think fluid, not form.

Think detours, not familiarity.

John recommends being on the detour tour and that we should embrace it and not resent it.

Look for opportunities, because they're everywhere.

So let's tell me about some of the opportunities each of you have found over the last two years.

You talked a lot about innovation.

I want to begin with you, Leigh Ann.

What are the new opportunities that you've found?

- A lot of businesses, they reformatted how they operate.

You looked at outdoor opportunities.

I think specifically for Morton, but I think everywhere, they looked for those new experiences.

How can we safely experience and offer products and services to our clients?

That was just fascinating to see as businesses and your retail, your hospitality, and just as a community, how can we still safely come together, 'cause we still need people and we still need those interactions and we still need those relationships.

That's something that I was very proud of as a community and certainly throughout our region and our businesses, of how do we safely still serve and connect with our clients and customers as a community.

- Okay.

Dan, opportunities in that hospitality industry.

- Right now, I feel there's a lot of opportunity out there.

Unfortunately because of the pandemic, we lost a lot of competition out there, but I think that our biggest hurdles are bringing staff in once again.

What we are trying to do, the challenge is as part of the hospitality association, we're exploring ways to work with the local junior college.

We're hoping ICC will come on board with this, but we're trying to educate a lot of the kids out there into the hospitality industry, into other areas other than the chefs.

The chef's the biggest item right now, but really and truly the training of staff, simple as getting somebody to work the counter at a hotel, we're looking at ways to try to get the high school kids more involved in our industry to bring them back into our area.

- Margaret, let's talk about those opportunities in your small business.

- Well just like Dan said, I think for us, we recognized that the high school kids were the ones that would possibly help us through this when we were having difficulty finding employees, and we still laugh about our greatest employee was a 15 year old.

He showed up every day and he worked hard and he job shadowed with each and every one of us, including myself, and we've welcomed him back every break that he's had and asked him if he's had friends.

That's one area we never would have explored before, because these are very skilled, trained workers at my company and we never would have opened our minds to that thought.

We smile when we think about Chance being our greatest employee.

- Dr. Reilly, in education, what opportunities have you seen?

- There was a lot of talk about online education for many years.

We've been doing it for about 20 years, but there were lots of barriers, things we could never imagine doing in an online environment, things in career, technical education fields or in healthcare fields.

What we found out was in fact that if we were innovative, we could do it.

Once we broke through that, then it made it possible for us to maybe serve people in a different way.

For example, instead of thinking I have to go to school at a certain time in a certain parameter that the college dictates, are there ways in which we can be more flexible?

Because I think to kind of follow on from what Margaret said, our biggest need right now is an expansion of the people getting skills, especially soft skills, customer skills, work ethic skills.

That's been a major part for us, of sort of reimagining how we deal with our community.

We've got to bring education into the community, not just be waiting for people to come to us.

And that way of rethinking how we work, how we build classes, how we deliver classes, how we recreate the academic year, what does that look like now in this new world, we have to go back and start again.

It's been really powerful in the ways in which people have stepped up to the challenge, especially in leveraging that technology and ways in which we can really make a difference in people's lives.

- As we've hit almost two full years, and who knows how many more years of this will come?

None of us has a crystal ball, but let's talk about now that we've experienced this leadership during this most uncertain time of our lifetimes, Margaret, I want to talk about, are you starting to be able to look ahead a little bit?

Before we were all just survival in the beginning, and then sort of a new normal, but are you able to plan for the future?

- There's a lot of uncertainty in the planning, but absolutely.

I think if you're not planning, you're not surviving.

You're not thriving, and like I said, recognizing things like hiring younger employees and being nimble, and if someone is nervous about coming to work because there's COVID in their house, typically that would not be allowed in my industry, but you have to accept it because everyone is scared about what's going on.

I think the more you can be a real person to your employees, the more they're a real person back to you.

- Thank you.

Dan, let's talk about that looking ahead in your industry.

It's highly unlikely you'll ever make up the lost revenue from before, but how are you able to look ahead?

- Right now, to look ahead, I see that our biggest problem is getting, I think that Illinois taught us that we're losing a lot of people, and so looking ahead is we have to figure out a way to get people back into Illinois and back into Central Illinois.

I think that's gonna happen in a couple years down the road.

I see a lot of job growth.

Once that happens, then all of our businesses will flourish.

It's just a matter of population.

Our population is down.

The pandemic taught us that we were very vulnerable in Central Illinois, and I think that's gonna come back, but it's gonna take another two years.

- Okay.

Dan, future of education, what do you see happening?

- I think we're going to change.

I think the focus is going to be on a reinvention of people.

A lot of people have come to a conclusion.

You've got the great resignation.

This maybe isn't the life I'm supposed to be.

How do I fully develop as a human being, and those people coming back and reinventing themselves, getting new skills, education becomes a day to day, year to year piece, not a one-time opportunity.

As far as looking forward with uncertainty, we're always dealing with uncertainty.

Sometimes you can look back and say how far have we come and realize wow, we were always reinventing ourselves.

I think part of what this has taught everybody in education is how vulnerable we were, but also there's an opportunity to try something, and to try something, and even if it doesn't work, we'll continue to innovate and iterate because I think that's the way we're constantly moving forward.

In many ways, I think a lot of education institutions were more strategic in thinking about it because thinking strategically became much more important than being tactical, and I think that's been a good lesson to learn, even if we'd prefer maybe not to learn under those stresses.

I think we're all somewhat better off for having been able to reimagine ourselves as leaders and also think differently about the work we do.

- Leigh Ann, you get the last word on this part.

What's your crystal ball telling you these days?

- I wish we all had a crystal ball, but we don't, but there are a lot of things that we do know, and that's an area that we have focused on, is industry clusters and how can we gather people as industry clusters to build on the strengths and to come together and forecast together what does it look like ahead and what strengths and assets do we have to build on to leverage those opportunities and build on from what we've learned.

Remote workforce, how can we attract people here to support our businesses because of the remote workforce and the way that we live today?

I think there's a lot of opportunities to still build on.

- Excellent.

Well, we are quickly running out of time.

I want to give each of you a chance to give your final thoughts on the greatest asset that you have during continuing to lead during uncertainty, and I'm gonna begin with you, Dan.

- As far as leadership goes, we have about 300 employees underneath us, and it's challenging the fact to keep them all going, to deal with those people, to work with those people, to work with their daily lives, to keep them going.

I think that helps foster a lot of good relationships.

- Next up, Margaret.

Final thoughts.

- I think recognizing that everyone has their own struggle.

Yours might be going to work when you don't feel good.

Mine might be leaving my child at home.

I think again, empathy is a big one for me.

I think we have to get back to our humanity.

We lost it, and I hope if we gain anything because of the pandemic it's getting our empathy back.

- Leigh Ann, your final thought, what you want people to know about leading during uncertainty.

- Ask questions.

I think like several have already said, you don't know where people are coming from.

You don't know how their day started.

You don't know what else they're dealing with, and ask questions to be able to lean in with them and come alongside to help move them forward.

- Dr. Reilly.

- Empower people around you.

You're only as strong as the people in your organization.

Encourage them, support them, allow them to try things and allow them to speak up.

The more people, the more points of view you have, the more you are supporting people in the broader sense, the more successful you're going to be as an organization.

You're not gonna do it alone, and being vulnerable and open to new ways of thinking about it are crucial.

- Okay, this is a true or false.

Final question, 'cause we're gonna be kind of rapid fire here at the end.

True or false, do you see yourself as a better leader today than before COVID, and let's begin with you, Margaret.

- True.

- True.

- True.

- True.

- Impressive, my friends.

It is amazing how you have all navigated these uncertain times and continue to serve your communities and meet the needs of the businesses that you lead, and we're so very grateful for your time.

Well, let's wrap things up tonight with a quote from Bob Marley.

You never know how strong you are until strong is your only choice.

Well during this pandemic, I think we've all proven just how strong we are.

I want to thank all of our guests tonight for sharing their experiences and expertise to help each of us lead better during these uncertain times.

You won't want to miss next week when we talk about the leadership we need to implement change.

Good night, my friends.

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