by Cyndee Miller
Resilience: the most in-demand, most talked-about and likely most used super skill of the year. The coronavirus has forced everyone to throw out the playbook and dig deep to forge ahead. My team and I picked up a few lessons learned along the way, but I was ready to hear from some real power players: Olympic Games executive director Christophe Dubi and Olympic champion gymnasts Laurie Hernandez and Nadia Comaneci. Confession: I’m old enough to remember cross-legged in front of the TV watching Comaneci as she scored the perfect 10.0 performance—the first in the history of the games. (Yes, I tried out the pigtails. And yes, there may have been a poster hanging on my bedroom wall for a bit. And yet, I couldn’t even nail a cartwheel.) Fast-forward several decades and here are few tips I picked up from the leaders at the latest PMI Virtual Experience Series: “Going the Distance: Forging Our Path Forward.
It’s about progress, not perfection—even for Comaneci. “Having a good base is very important. Everyone wants to tumble and do those difficult skills, but if you jump from point A to Y, you won’t be able to progress in the right way and you’ll have holes you’ll have to cover.”
And those skills she applied in sports—planning, discipline, flexibility—help in life, too, Comaneci said. For the five-time Olympic gold medalist, preparation is just part of the process. “Gymnastics is not a sport you learn in a month, it takes you years to put all of it together,” she said.
For Hernandez, it comes down to zooming in and zooming out to see the big picture. “It’s about making sure you’re focusing on the details, but also not letting that stop you from moving forward,” she said.
The 20-year-old gymnast knows all about refining details—and persevering. Hernandez competed as a member of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team at the 2016 Summer Olympics, scoring gold in the team event and silver on the balance beam. The rising star was set to make her comeback at the 2020 Tokyo Games—which then had to be rescheduled because of the global pandemic.
It was a tough decision for Dubi and his team: “You’ve made so much effort and you’re so close, but you have to make that call.” The two biggest tasks: recognizing the disappointment and keeping athletes and stakeholders informed.
“There was very little resistance to the decision, actually, because everyone understood the situation,” he said. “People were confined, they had friends with the virus, they were reading about shutdowns in the news. And we had overwhelming support from partner organizations.”
So the project—number 7 on PMI’s 2020 list of Most Influential Projects—continued on, with Dubi keeping the team focused on the essential moving parts, while uniting them around a common goal.
“If you can mobilize energies around the greater good, you can make sure everyone understands the role to be played,” he said. “It’s about what you can create with positive energy, when you can embrace the diverse energy. In the end it’s all hands on deck.”
While the games have been bumped to 2021, Dubi is looking ahead to what they’ll bring to Tokyo in the future: “The very first question we ask is: What is the legacy plan? Every public investment that goes into it has to be meaningful, not just for the games themselves, but afterward.”
The decision was a bold one—and part of being a leader is having the courage to stick the landing. “When you want to invent something no one has seen before, you get criticism,” said Olympic historian and graphic artist Markus Osterwalder. “When people get something they don’t know, they reject it at first. They need time to get used to it.”
It’s no doubt been a strange and ferociously challenging year, but leaders can’t be complacent.
“The future of work is not five to 10 years out, it’s here now,” said Alison Bakken, of Thomson Reuters. “Leaders need to actually model the behavior they want to see and create an environment that’s trusting and open and where people can grow and develop.”
X0PA AI founder Nina Alag Suri agreed that the new work-from-anywhere mentality is here to stay. And that will put the focus on power skills like self-discipline, time management and collaboration.
If you missed out on the action or you want to check out some #ExperiencePMI moments again, you can find virtual experience content from the full series on demand, now through 31 January.
What do you think? Are you ready to go for the gold in 2021?
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