Read and watch a story about Loftis Partners working with a client to build team capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic as published in the November 2021 AI Practitioner.

New partnerships and alliances are one best practice from the last 18 months. However, how do you sustain these relationships? And when is it time to build new ones? Three local nonprofit leaders were asked to share their experiences and summarize the needs, goals, and measures in a recent webinar that I facilitated.

How do measure your internal capacity? Do you know when transitions are requiring more than your team can give? Maybe your organization needs a down swing to make critical adjustments. The accordion of capacity is always playing these days. Conducting a capacity assessment may be a helpful next step for growth and change.

For years, I thought that internship programs were posh experiences in financial firms for Ivy League college students. I never thought an internship program was a possibility at our business. Well, I was wrong. Internship programs are great opportunities to recruit talent in highly competitive market.

Today I’m talking about my favorite topic – pay equity. The USWNT have been fighting for better pay and working conditions, just like so many women have been fighting for decades. As of 2020, women make 82 cents to every dollar made by men.

Beyond the physical and mental upheaval of workplace sexual harassment, women must face economic uncertainties, too. These may include job loss, lower earnings, missed opportunities for advancement, and loss of benefits such as health insurance and retirement savings.

Women’s participation in the labor force took a significant dip due to the pandemic, specifically the lack of childcare. However, the issues impacting women were present before this situation and will still be present afterwards.

I’m excited to share a new series called This Woman’s Work, which highlights the different challenges that women face as we are asked to bring our whole selves to work. Women are not monoliths, and we bring a deep and varied experience to every role. We also bring intersectional identities that enhance our perspectives.

No matter what training or certification one HR professional might have, nothing could have fully prepared us for the COVID-19 pandemic and the rapid movement to a changing workplace. HR professionals, which includes people who may manage HR as one of many responsibilities, have been making critical, life-changing decisions for employees for 15 months. And the change continues.

Managing a board can be a full-time job for a nonprofit director. Board meetings require large amounts of preparation and planning. The board members may rotate every year, so a nonprofit director is constantly bringing on new people. Plus, nonprofit boards are volunteer positions, which means that board member engagement can wane in busy times.

When the bank leader came out in our retreat, I thought that was the only time that she needed to come out. Little did I know that coming out is series of decisions made over a lifetime. “Coming out” is just one term within a new vocabulary I had to learn.

Virtual teaming requires a special effort within the entire group to build and sustain virtual connections in a new way. After our student committee worked together virtually and across continents for five months, here are our recommendations for virtual teaming.

Today I am providing information about reflection for personal insights and professional learnings. Reflection is looking back and looking inward. Below is a “how to” for creating your reflection practice as an individual and team.

Health care leader Chris Aiken offered this personal experience, “Initially, I was concerned that deeper intra- and inter-personal work would be impossible to facilitate in a virtual setting. Fortunately, I was mistaken. I now have full confidence that the deepest intra- and inter-personal work is possible online as long as you set and reinforce norms around managing personal wellness + potential distractions and are thoughtful about the design of the session.”

How do you design for a 14-day generative, international intensive that turns into a virtual experience overnight? When you have no precedents. In the middle of a global pandemic. COVID-19 was impacting our student cohort in various ways with different levels of intensity. These impacts spread across jobs, families, home life, and mental health. All of us were exhausted.

What prepared you for the changes we experienced in 2020 and continue to experience today? As you reflect on the last 12 months, what have you learned and what skills are growing because of these changes? I would enjoy hearing your answers, as I can imagine that the list is long. I asked my student colleagues the same question, and here are some themes that popped up for us.

I was not excited about designing for a virtual teaming experience. That felt like more work than I was willing and able to offer in the middle of a pandemic. However, we moved forward. Do you ever feel that way? Like virtual interactions just aren’t enough? This is the first blog post in a six-week series about virtual teaming.

Ironically, I fell asleep while writing this post and missed an important meeting. Hm – I think my body was telling me something. What is your body telling you today? What are your strategies for reclaiming your energy? Take a break today. The world will wait for you.

So often, we get trapped in deficit-based thinking, which is rooted in colonialism. We focus on what’s wrong and get frozen by the overwhelming evidence of the problem. I call this the “white people frozen effect,” where white people learn about the wide and deep systems of inequities and don’t know how to move forward because they don’t want to make another mistake.

Our sweet Rocky still frustrates me. When we go on our daily walks, I am reminded of the personal growth that still awaits me if I am willing to look around and learn. Here are a few lessons from Rocky.