Your Kintsugi Moment

In Japan, there is a custom – “kintsugi” – of adding gold to the resin used to repair a crack in ceramic pottery. It is founded in the idea that flaws and imperfections are part of the work’s history, and the pottery is made stronger and more beautiful by embracing them.

You may feel a bit broken right now. Your firm may be split apart with many employees working from home. Your firm’s clients may be shut down, having made painful layoffs. Technology – email, chat, videoconferences – keeps you in touch, but it’s no substitute for a quick personal chat in the breakroom or going out with colleagues for a drink after work.

Perhaps most painful is that no one knows how long this distance will be imposed on us by the COVID-19 crisis. But one thing is certain. When you return, you – and your team – will be changed.

Think of your team as a piece of ceramic pottery. When you return to the office, the experience of working apart, of overcoming the challenges of isolation, will be the cracks that form part of your history, both as an individual and as a team.

This is your kintsugi moment.

As you have worked remotely and changed marketing plans on the fly, what are the lessons learned that you can embellish with gold when your team reunites in the office? What challenges did the firm overcome that will strengthen it going forward?

How can those changes be communicated in a way that makes your internal relationships, as wells as relationships with clients, stronger and more beautiful?

Certainly, a renewed awareness and appreciation of our common humanity imbues everything you do right now. You miss colleagues. You miss being around people. You miss direct eye contact. You miss the ability to reach out and hug someone, even if you rarely do those things in the workplace. And you probably understand vulnerability now more than ever.

How can you channel those feelings and experiences into your work?

Empathy

Don’t leave your empathy at home when it’s time to return to the office. If nothing else, this experience has built an understanding that team members are whole human beings with lives beyond work. There is no turning back.

Did some of your team members step up to the plate during the COVID crisis? Did they show leadership potential that wasn’t apparent before? Talk to them about what energized them and how they can channel those abilities during more normal times.

After the remote working experience, some employees may never want to work from home again, while others may want to do it part time or full time.

Is your firm open to discussing flexible work options for staff at all levels? Help leadership evaluate the pros and cons of remote work for all employees (not just practitioners). This most likely will be the new normal for many firms and their clients.

Empathy will play a role in client communications, as well. Some clients’ businesses will not survive the shutdown. Others will be economically crippled. Now is the time to coach your practitioners to talk – and listen – to their clients, to ask hard questions so they learn what they need to know to help the clients recover. Even if a client’s business fails, your firm will be there to help them pick up the pieces and figure out where to go from here.

Accounting firms often are buffered from disasters that hit other businesses and industries. Clients need their accountants in good times and bad. But this time, the crisis hit accounting firms as hard as it hit most of their clients. Infuse the empathy learned from that experience into every client relationship and interaction.

Innovation

You probably had to develop solutions on the fly when everyone started working from home. Learning new technologies, finding new ways to accomplish daily tasks and coming up with innovative solutions to communicate effectively with clients may have pushed you to dig deep for ideas. They certainly pushed you outside your comfort zone.

Now that you’re outside of it, stay there. Keep your marketing team there, too. Nothing feeds an innovative culture quite like a crisis. While you don’t want to remain in crisis mode forever, you do want to maintain the energy and the willingness to take risks that a crisis engenders.

How do you do that?

Look at the items on your marketing plan and your wish list. How can you take them to the next level? Can deadlines be more aggressive? How will you change them to fit the “new normal?” These questions will keep you on edge and could produce more impressive results.

Understand that your clients will come out of this changed, as well. Perhaps they will conduct business differently. If they allow their employees to work from home full-time, how will that affect your firm’s work with them? Will you need to look at moving the audit function to a fully remote platform?

Talking to clients about that now will show your firm understands what they are going through and how it might change their relationship with you in the future.

Creativity

Like innovation, creativity forces you to step outside of your safe space. It requires you to shut out the cacophony of daily demands, deadlines and KPI reports so you can explore new, compelling ideas about what marketing looks like and feels like, and where it can go.

Who has time for that?

You do.

If there is one thing the COVID crisis has taught professionals it’s that you can “drop everything” and change directions, reach within yourself and do things you never thought possible.

Imagine if you brought that ethic to work every single day.

Courage

It takes courage to change. To try. To Fail. To succeed. To show our scars.

But scars that are healed over with a touch of gold become a thing of beauty.