A Leaders Learning Plan for the Post COVID-19 Future

With the world reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is a bit hard to make sense of our current place. In this regard, our present is unknown, which is a bit of an unnerving feeling. For me, the unknown of our present put me in a place where I was struggling with a vision for how to lead in a forward way. I am sure many others are having this same experience.

At some point, I came to the conclusion of what I believed was most known: that our business, and the needs of our clients, would be significantly different in the future; it will need to be more socially responsible but, beyond that, I have no idea what the future holds. It may seem strange that this created clarity of vision for me, but it did. It created clarity of vision because I believe that we will be entering a very dynamic period where organizations will rapidly transform how they work, and social responsibility will accelerate and elevate in importance. This is the world I need to prepare for.

As a continual lifelong learner, I realized I needed to enter a learning cycle to fuel my personal growth. I need to advance my knowledge beyond its current place: a place to lead better in the unknown, a place to be able to meet the needs of rapidly accelerated transformations, and a place where we must recommit to the common good. Below are my self-prescribed learning plan goals.

3 Learning Plan Goals

1. Evolve my Innovation skills to Design Thinking methods
2. Elevate my analytic base from Macroeconomics to Futurism
3. Expand my understanding of Social Responsibility to include the principles of Social Consciousness

I believe further development of my leadership knowledge in the above manner will allow me to lead and create a vision for whatever shape our future takes. I am a passionate learner, and fundamentally believe that the advancement of knowledge is how we advance as individuals, organizations, communities, a nation, and a world. For those of you that believe the same, I welcome you to join me.

Lastly, in my doctoral work at USC in Organizational Change and Leadership, I learned a great deal about leadership techniques and how to deal with crisis situations. However, what I think we learned most importantly was the need to look at these situations as opportunities to advance organizations and people. I believe this is the most critical thing that I learned at USC. This is a spirit to never turn away from a chance to lead. This spirit is embodied in the USC saying of “fight on.” It is how the Trojan community greets one another, regardless of where we are in the world. Channeling this spirit, I will continue to develop articles that I hope are meaningful in our collective ability to fight on. Most of these articles will be on the topics listed in my learning plan. I hope by sharing some of these articles I can aid in a small way to your future successes.