This video was prompted by events on January 6, 2021 but is applicable to any event that impacts your team, company, community or nation.
Transcript
Hey, folks, it's Jonathan. I just wanted to share a few words about what happened last week at the US Capitol. I'm I am so incredibly angry and frustrated. And I'm gonna do my best for a couple minutes just to share with you some, perhaps some perspective and maybe something you can do with your team this week, to make it a little bit better.
First of all, for those who don't know me, I started out my career in law. And when I was a first year, in law school, constitutional law was my favorite class, I loved the study of the Constitution, its nuances, and the most importantly the way that it operationalized. And it gave us a way to do this incredible thing, which is to protect checks and balances with three co equal branches of government.
And what happened last week, it was such a deep affront on so many levels, beyond being criminal, seditious, an insurrection. And of course, also a lot of people who got swept up in something that they're going to start to wake up to what was really going on. It's terrible on so many levels. It's a tragedy, and the people who committed these acts will be prosecuted and held accountable and all of that.
But that's not my role here. You have plenty of resources to talk about the politics and the criminal justice elements of this. At Refound where we're a positive company, we try to take an optimistic view. And I, even in this moment, I want to see if you can do this with your team. And I'll just want to offer something we tried was just to bring our team together for a half an hour last Friday, and an impromptu conversation, just to talk about it. Just to give people a space to share how they felt, seeing the images, seeing the videos.
And of course, the images and the videos got worse over the weekend. But find a way to do that with your team. And not just with people who agree with you. That's in some ways easier. Of course, most people if you look at the Reuters survey, most people the vast majority of people think that what happened last week was terrible and criminal, criminal and reprehensible. But there are also people who are on other parts of the spectrum and you know your team pretty well.
See if you can use this moment to reach out to people. See if you can use this moment. It's gonna be messy. But try to have a conversation with someone say, Look, I know we don't agree on a lot of things. But maybe we can agree on this. See if you can use it to create some bridges. There's so much information we're being flooded with right now, by the moment, and you as a manager as a leader, regardless of your seniority, you have work to do this week, and probably like a lot of us. We wish we could just you know crawl into bed and wait for the storm to pass, but we can't. So find a way to talk with your team. Find peers, find people who you you can share space with to get through this. Of course reach out to us if we can help in any way and I wish you well in this difficult difficult time.
Thanks for being here.
