Summary
Leading a team during the pandemic may seem impossible given it’s likely the most stressful time of your team’s lives. Recently, I lead our team through a design sprint where we explored improving unemployment benefit access in the middle of the pandemic, which required us to shift how we work. In this talk, I’ll share how we reimagined collaboration, communication, and processes to reduce the stress load while maintaining forward momentum. Together as leaders, we’ll explore how to ethically lead our teams while keeping their resiliency in mind and bring these learnings into the post COVID work life.
Key Insights
-
•
Resilience differs from survival by aiming to maintain steady energy rather than exhausting oneself to get through crises.
-
•
Using the battery metaphor helps teams visualize fluctuating emotional and mental energy levels and the need to recharge.
-
•
Clear, co-created communication norms reduce remote work stress from excessive or duplicative digital messaging.
-
•
Regular check-ins and check-outs that share headspace, heartspace, and needs foster psychological safety and trust.
-
•
Allowing flexibility such as video-off meetings respects emotional bandwidth and prevents burnout.
-
•
Leaders need to understand individual signals of stress, which can vary widely, to provide appropriate support.
-
•
Talking openly about mental health, racial justice, and personal challenges at work creates inclusion and resilience.
-
•
Resilience practices must evolve as external conditions change; what worked pre-pandemic may not suffice now.
-
•
Nurturing a team's resilience includes fostering autonomy, shared decision-making, and prioritizing wellbeing over productivity.
-
•
Leaders must consciously cultivate their own resilience to sustainably lead and support their teams through ongoing stress.
Notable Quotes
"Resilience is being able to maintain self needs and effectiveness at moments of change, tough demands, and adversity."
"Survival can feel like a roller coaster with big energy spikes and drops, often leaving us completely depleted."
"When the pandemic hit, those in the resilient 'yellow' zone had enough reserve to readjust and come back."
"People were taking vacation days just to homeschool or take care of a loved one."
"Creating space to name what we’re experiencing without guilt allowed us to unload some of that emotional weight."
"We co-designed our environment and expectations around what we needed as a team during these times."
"On days with many user interviews, the team wanted internal meetings video off to take a break from 'smiling all day.'"
"Check-outs and reflections normalized pausing and being honest about what we don’t know."
"Mental health, systems of oppression, and racial justice should have been normal conversations at work all along."
"The whole give yourself an oxygen mask before helping others metaphor is very true here."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Design operations is really about how we’re scaling the work, thinking our practices, and serving cross-functional teams."
Alison Rand Sarah BrooksScaling Impact with Service Design
March 25, 2021
"Our technical leads started attending other teams’ meetings, helping break down integration barriers."
Carl TurnerYou Can Do This: Understand and Solve Organizational Problems to Jumpstart a Dead Project
March 28, 2023
"Marketers don’t try very interesting things when their confidence in data is low, which can create a downward spiraling reinforcing loop."
Sarah FlamionComplex Problem? Add Clarity by Combining Research and Systems Thinking
March 31, 2020
"Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. You have to keep moving forwards even if the destination keeps changing."
Silke Bochat5 Antifragile Strategies for a DesignOps 2.0
September 23, 2024
"The lipstick on the pig—cosmetic fixes give little impact without addressing deeper usability and business value."
Uday Gajendar Lada Gorlenko Dave Malouf Louis Rosenfeld Dan Willis10 Years of Enterprise UX: Reflecting on the community and the practice
June 18, 2025
"I’m worried you aren’t up to it, frankly."
Dan WillisEnterprise Storytelling Sessions
June 8, 2017
"Communities are the glue that bring together work across silos, people, and practice."
Kara KaneCommunities of Practice for Civic Design
April 7, 2022
"Our shift is structural, not because of personalities — it was needed to influence earlier, more business-centric decisions."
Nalini KotamrajuResearch After UX
March 25, 2024
"The most highly rated part of the conference every year are the facilitators making the cohorts sing."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
October 1, 2021
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What practical steps did Flight Center take to scale research participation without sacrificing insight quality?
Why do traditional KPIs and scorecards often fail in complex adaptive environments?
What are best practices for implementing guardrails that ensure safe and ethical democratized research?