Michele: Hello, everybody, welcome to another edition. I’m Michele Heyward. And today with us, we have KC Atha. And she is the founder of Sembramos Welcome, KC.

KC: Thank you.

Michele: So can you tell us why you started SemBramos? Like, what was the burning need to create this organization?

KC: The burning need for me to start this organization is that I messed it up the first time. So this is my second organization. And I had the best intentions to make it the best organizational culture ever. I had a co founder who had a fantastic idea and we built out this great organization that worked wonderfully for the people we were serving outside of the organization. So when I thought about that, and reflected whenever we closed down the first ordinance I said, you know, I’ve learned so much, so many things that I did, right and so many things that I did wrong. And I want to help other entrepreneurs that also have good intentions, and aren’t seeing the impact or the results of they want.

Michele: Wow. Yes. So learning taking the, again, a pain point and, and building out another solution to it. I love it. I love when founders come and do that. And it because, again, you’ve been through it once in your life. Do you want to continue down that path or not? So today we’re talking about helping founders. I’m sorry. We are talking about helping leaders communicate during crisis and to right now we’re in the midst of a pandemic COVID-19. So when you first talk about and look at communication strategies for leading period when you’re not in a crisis, right? You’re not in a pandemic, what does that look like?

KC: It looks like a lot of planning. And secretly, if I’m honest, it looks like a lot of analysis paralysis. It looks like a lot of wordsmithing. It looks like user experience even I’ve, I’ve done a lot of stuff whenever we roll out new material, user guides, etc. You know, we go through it, and we say, How are people going to experience it, and sometimes we take a long time and do a lot of iterations. So that’s what it looks like whenever you’re working, you know, at those higher levels of rolling out big, you know, change that you can see coming. At least that’s my experience when I’ve done it.

Michele: So, what changes with your communication as a leader in the midst of a pandemic?

KC: So the first thing that changes is a lack of control. So We don’t have control a capitalist society thrives on control. We know when we’re going to get to work. We know when we have our lunch break, we know when we have our 15 minute break. We know when things are going to roll out. We know when to expect information to come in from different sois sources. So we know certain things ish. All right. So yeah, there’s a few people that we have to follow up on every time or we just never know. They’re going to change their mind at the last minute. But, but in this case, this is different. We don’t have that control. So that’s the main thing. They do have to give up right away. It’s just knowing that you’re not in control. And I think part of that control has to do with making it perfectionism or being perfect or doing the best. And what we’re in now is not about doing the best. It’s about doing our best.

Michele: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely agree. So We have leaders in the midst of this pandemic, they don’t have control. How should they be communicating with their teams, their employees, their organization?

KC: frequently is the first thing I would say. Oftentimes we don’t have the answers. We don’t have the solutions. It doesn’t mean you should pause it does not mean that you should go silent. If anything, the pause and silence gives room for rumors and misinformation, and disinformation, which is rampant right now. So to me, that is the one thing I would definitely want to highlight.

Michele: Oh, yeah, that Miss information. So you’re saying communicate often? Mm hmm. Seems so a bit overwhelming. Because Because you’re thinking pre COVID like, Oh, we sent out a monthly news. Letter when we do a quarterly Town Hall, what do you mean? I need to do a weekly Town Hall and send out daily emails and do a company wide phone call or you know, every morning, why is it more more communication at this point?

KC: Okay. So enter the stages of grief. So what happens is, something happens, we are thrown off, and we are in shock or denial. And what happens there is a lot of mental noise and we can’t hear, we cannot hear because we’re planning or we’re not planning or we’re thinking about other things. And maybe this isn’t even shot, maybe in shock and denial. We’re actually pretending it’s business as usual. But we’re still not hearing because actually, we know that something is off and something’s happening and we’re, our brain is protecting us in shock. It’s protecting us. It’s supposed to keep us you know, in denial and shock and We can slowly enter reality. Once we’ve slowly entered reality, those first few communications, maybe we weren’t even really processing. They weren’t landing. And so we need to be frequently and consistently communicating. And so that when we finally do come back on board, it’s like, oh, wait a second, where was that, you know, link to working from home rules? Or where was that link to the CDC thing where it has all the proper information that I could go get, you know, so you’re just, oh, I’m out of the denial and shock. But where’s that info? So I really need information to be coming at me consistently and frequently. The second thing is, once we get out of denial and shock, we’re going to be a little upset. And when we are upset, we start blaming, and we’re going to be blaming our leaders, and we’re going to be blaming everyone else, and possibly blaming ourselves. So what we need to do all So as to get some more information that helps us understand what is happening, who is in charge? how decisions are being made, what is the architecture of that on? So we want we have questions. And if we can feed answers to those questions, it’s going to lower the stress and anxiety it’s going to increase the trust and leadership. So this is huge. That’s why it’s so important in the first stages to communicate frequently.

Michele: Oh, great. All right. I love it. Um, so what I want to talk about our myths people have about communication when you’re a leader.

KC: Okay, so the myth number one that I want to bless for everyone, I’m going to pull them up because I did take some little notes that I wanted to share. Um, the first thing I want to say I had to take stock as well when this happened because guess what, what I’m going to share with you is a myth that I just recently learned. Experience is not the most valuable quality. I’m gonna say it again, experience is not the most valuable. I read this. And it struck me because I thought, Oh, you know, my experience and change management and communications for change management is really gonna be helpful. Hey, Michelle, let me talk about it when you interview me. And then I was thinking, Oh, my, these tools are not exactly great for what I’ve been doing in the past. Yes, it has worked and it goes in and some of these tools I have used, but I’m going to use it a little bit differently now. Um, so experience isn’t always helpful. And what does help is character and understanding your Northstar. your mindset. You guys stay calm. If we’re leaders, that means we have to manage ourself and our team. So we got to do even more checking in on ourselves and keeping ourselves afloat and reading filling our cup. So what that is mindset, the second thing is base. Bring up those ethics bring up those morals, what is our North Star? That’s really hard and crises, right? whenever things happen. What do they say? It’s like you see people’s true colors, and whatever things aren’t going well, okay? So ground yourself because when you look back at this time, I want to see that I did my best, it may not be the best, it may not be perfect, but I did my best. So ground yourself in your own stuff. So that to me is the number one pitfall is just thinking, I got this because I have experience in x or y or z, like none of us have experienced this that I know of maybe if you’re 100, and something years old, and you experienced the last pandemic, but I don’t have an experience with pandemics.

Michele: And like you said, people are going to be you’re going to see leaders coming from different places and organizations right now. So a lot of er G’s are more active in some of those may not have been, or or they may have been. But the upper management C suite wasn’t paying attention. And now they’re like, Okay, what are they doing? Why are they doing it? Should we be doing it other places because they’re leading a smaller group or a location and helping those employees. So I agree we’re going to see leaders pop up. And people that we, we say are leaders and I put them in air quotes because organizations to me tend to confuse management with leaders and leadership. They are separate things. We as people as individual, choose who we follow, we may play orders and directions from management. But a lot of times we are going to be guided by ethics and morals. Those leaders are often people we follow because number one, they champion us but they also aligned with ethics and morals. And as you said, um, I can’t think of the term now your big the big lofty goal, right? What is that? And the or the why, and when they really recognize what it is and they gravitate towards it, those are the leaders and, and to many on our leadership team, I like people, nobody fall on me like you want to change that to management. But anyway, that’s a whole other story. Okay. So we are looking at leaders communicating during crisis, right. So we haven’t been through a pandemic, but we’ve been through the Great Recession. We have been through 911 we have been through the.com burst, some of us I just missed that one. Right. So but this is truly different, and I think a lot People have learned different skills and different things coming through those experiences. But what I really want to focus on is what have we learned as far as leaders and communicating through those through 911? Through the Great Recession? I believe the bubble burst the tech the.com. bust it, no, some of us we don’t quite get it. But what did we learn, especially for those that are middle management because it was Oh, eight? That’s still a little bit early for me. Right. So for us, late Gen Xers and early millennials who are talking about offline, what does that look like for us?

KC: You know, I was actually on Wall Street in New York City in 2008. When I found out and I was hosting, I was working for the financial services industry. And I was hosting an event with some how you user group meeting every quarter because I was working on a platform for online trading. So I was there with some folks from Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers companies that went under and many people in that room were losing their jobs. And in front of me during my meeting, and I was, you know, 20 something at the time, when I’m one of my first, you know, what I thought was a big job that I was really excited about and really eager to do my best and to impress my boss, and I had no idea what to do. And so I called my boss and I said, Hey, uh, well, so stuffs happening, there’s a lot going on, people are drinking a lot and it’s noon. So that’s happening a lot right now and she’s like, let them do what they need to do. I don’t know if you know what’s happening but they’re selling, you know, insert company’s shares at like, $2 a share why I could not believe this. So I went back and what I did was be a human. I was a human and I said, Hey, stuffs going down, drink, eat what you want, we’re going to talk I’m here for you, we’re going to get through this. I don’t know how and what that looks like. But I know that we are committed to supporting you. I was working for the association so the association does support the industry. Now this isn’t my like dream job, but it was a really great experience and understanding something out of nowhere can just happen like this. And I didn’t know what to do. We didn’t have we didn’t have a protocol for this. So to me, I think have a protocol.

Let’s talk about this preemptively talk about these things. Now we’re in the middle. It’s you know, we coulda, shoulda woulda, but hey, let’s just use this opportunity to say again, does some dogs have a crisis plan? You know, I had to ask myself, what is my crisis plan. I had a meltdown. Because I didn’t have one. And I should have learned this from 2008. I was on Wall Street. But oh, well, here we are, let’s remind This is reminding us have a plan in place. And I’ve been reading also, what did we learn from those things. And what we learned is that we have to operate differently, we have to have a different structure, we can’t do command and control, like we feel, you know, is the best, most efficient way to do things. We actually that’s not the best, most efficient way to do things in a crisis, we actually have to change that and give command and control to other folks and allow them and give them the Northstar priorities like these are our priorities. You are the expert in this space. You make those decisions and try and get us to these priorities, please. So you know, there’s ways to do that. I’m not the expert on it. I’m learning how to do it right now. But to me, that’s the number one thing, have a plan for next time. So I’m building the plan right now while I’m flying. All materials I’m making for myself. I’m going to be sharing with you Michelle as well and folks who are watching this And I want to share it. I want people to have a plan in place and to have some things they can think about.

Michele: Oh, I agree. We’re building the plane while we’re flying it. And it’s it’s scary, but you don’t have a choice. Mm hmm.

Right. So what are some resources that you or advice do you have for leaders who are trying to figure out the best way to communicate within your organization?

KC: Okay, so I would definitely say I’m going to say this multiple times, probably but you have to anchor yourself anchor yourself in your why. And what I’m proposing my why to be and I hope is similar to yours is three. Number one, we want to save lives. We don’t have an economy if we don’t have people here anyway. So let’s save some lives. Let’s improve the well being of our staff because we know this is a hard time, what can we do to improve? It doesn’t have to be perfect. We don’t have to be happy, you know, but we got to have some well being we got to have something in our cup. And then the third thing is how can we support collaboration, this has thrown us off, we’re out of control, we don’t have control of space, sometimes we don’t have an office at home, or maybe there’s a kid who has needs that doesn’t, you know, know that mom is going to work from this time to that time or whatever. So, you know, we have to understand that we have to do things differently to support the collaboration that we want to keep going on. So to me anchoring, the why and not only anchor yourself, but share the why out know, share it out. Let people know say it frequently say it often said at the end of every email, put it in your signature like these are coated why this is well this is our North Star right now. Whatever it is. And then the other thing is a three step process is what I’m going to be using during this time for myself, and I Would recommend it to others and I put it into the PDF that I created to share, which is assess, you’re going to assess yourself and others I gave folks the grieving process outline. I also gave like a feelings wheel because I don’t know my feelings. I don’t know what that means, you know, what am I feeling right now I don’t know how to Google what feelings are and have to understand where the root causes are. So I can get myself what I need to bust out of that negative feeling. So I need to assess myself. I need to be able to assess and recognize where other people are. Okay, so that’s assessment. That’s the first thing.

The second thing I’m going to focus on is communications, frequent, empathetic, honest, transparent. Communications. If I don’t have the answer, I’m going to say I don’t have the answer, but you’re going to still hear from me. If I don’t have a decision made, I’m going to tell you how we’re going to make that decision. So at least you know, okay, well, that’s why they haven’t made the decision because this thing hasn’t happened yet. This is their formula. Um, and then the third thing that I’m anchoring in is feedback. So I’m building the foot plane fly flying while flying. I need feedback constantly. And that helps the folks communicate to me if I create great feedback channels where they can come to me. And I’m, of course delegated appropriately, because I’m not command and control anymore. We are going to be able to improve. So get those feedback channels coming and going. And then update folks so that they understand the evolution why things are changing. great leadership isn’t right the first time and sticks with it great leadership, sees what’s happening is aware, and adjust accordingly. So if you can show that you’re doing that, even if you get it wrong, they’re gonna trust you because guess what you’re communicating, you’re aware of what’s happening and you’re adjusting. And you’re, you’re not going to be perfect. You’re doing your best. So those are the three assess communications and feedback.

Michele: Love it. Yes, I definitely agree with all three of those. Casey, how can people find you What what’s your information? Where can they find you on social connect with you to learn more about your services, apps and promos?

KC: Awesome. Well, I’m on some of the socials, I am on Instagram. I am on Facebook and I am on Twitter and I am popping with Michelle over on LinkedIn, because we have amazing videos as well. And I tried to share some things on that platform. I also have a website for signing up to my newsletter right now. I as part of this COVID transition, I am going to be sharing out some information through you Michelle and folks who are watching or listening to your interviews, and they can find out more information through there and they can email me as well.

Michele: Can you spell some Sembramos for everyone?

KC: Yes. So it’s S E M B R A M O S. and it means it’s a Spanish word that means we sew together. So some but it means to sew. And most means that we’re doing it together the conjugation.

Michele: Great. Everybody was it is fantastic. Thank you, Casey so much for joining me. We will be back with another edition everybody have a great day and we’ll see you soon.

KC: Thank you