How to Not Be an Asshole in a Crisis
Hello out there. How are you doing, right now? Wherever you are, however you’re feeling, words connect us. They’ve done so for centuries, on and off the page, and we need extra helpings of stories during hard times.
Whose words are you welcoming during this pandemic? As with food, we can fill up on junk and empty calories, or we can be intentional about the ideas and thoughts that we put in our bodies. We can nourish ourselves with inspiration, comfort, wisdom, and beauty, or we can ingest supersized portions of fear and anxiety.
Right now, I’m listening to The Wailin’ Jennys on repeat—something about the harmony and simplicity soothes me as I work in the garden and find a sense of completion putting together a jigsaw puzzle. These things nurture me—a kind of medicine for the spirit. During crisis, it is critical to know which remedies bring relief.
I also need steady doses of courage as I listen to clients plan for layoffs and watch friends shuttering their storefronts. My privilege is laid bare during this crisis, along with my strengths and my fuckery; you see it too.
As we watch world leaders provide direction and offer protection—or the lack thereof—Mandela’s words come to mind: “A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
Are you taking notes?
Your messaging matters
It’s unlikely that world leaders are reading this post, but you are, and we all contribute to the discourse in our communities. Your words leave an impact on the people who are sheltering in place with you and those in your circle, which suddenly gained a six foot radius.
What you post on social media and how you treat the woman checking out your groceries communicate your values and your coping skills. What are you promoting?
Prior to the outbreak in the US, I scheduled the first monthly newsletter for Radius clients and colleagues. Blasting that out, without acknowledging the extraordinary sudden and unprecedented changes we are facing would have been insensitive at best and fuckery at worst. If my goal is to build trust and relationships, timing and messaging matters. All of us know how flooded our inboxes got with business responses to COVID-19; I pivoted and sent out Leading Through Crisis instead.
Pivoting with purpose
Watching the Portland small business community brace for an economic emergency, I was compelled to take action. I did what some of us could—bought gift cards for local shops, ordered take-out from neighborhood cafes, and wrote online reviews for stores in my community. That felt insufficient, so I was grateful Switchboard provided a space to make an offer to other founders and businesses in town. I volunteered to be a sounding board and thought partner; I have 25 years of listening to clients needs and triaging crisis. It felt like an easy choice.
What isn’t easy is figuring out how to propose your services without looking like a schmuck. Nothing is for free, right? There’s always a catch. We’ve been trained to sniff out the Bait and Switch. We’re well-versed to marketing gimmicks and sales tactics. Why should we believe pro bono consults are anything other than exploitation? It’s hard to spot generosity and trust sincerity when our nervous systems are activated and working overtime.
There’s nuance to this and no playbook. For those of us who freelance or operate a service business, how can we contribute our expertise to our community without being an asshole? How do we give back to those in need and still find a way to pay our bills? What is the line between showing up to help versus flying in like a vulture to prey on vulnerability? Sure, sometimes it’s obvious, but more often than not, the fuckery is subtle.
I had a plan for these articles, but that plan has necessarily had to change. For the foreseeable future, my goal is to help others limit asshole moves while their stress is high and our collective threshold for bullshit is low.
This will evolve into a series of posts because one is not nearly enough to save you from yourself. I’ll continue sharing my own perspectives, but also bring you words of wisdom from other thought leaders and subject matter experts. Because if one thing is becoming increasingly obvious as we watch this fuckery play out on the national stage, we would do well to seek the wisdom of everyday leaders in our local communities.
SERVANT LEADERSHIP 101
First up, is Üma Kleppinger—writer, ghostwriter, creative director and content strategist. Üma is the owner of allied+indie, a Portland-based boutique creative services agency with a strong emphasis on storytelling.
Üma has been a brilliant partner for me and I asked her to share her counsel.
Lori Eberly [LE]: Uma, you’ve offered pro bono services to help women and minority-owned businesses impacted by this crisis. Why did you do that?
The simple answer? I want to be helpful during times of crisis. The longer answer is more complex.
As a self-employed woman and a solopreneur, I know first-hand how hard this economic crisis is going to impact others who are in the same boat. Women entrepreneurs receive a mere three percent of all VC funding and we often are excluded from business financing or pay higher fees and interest rates than male founders. People of color receive even less—about one percent of all venture capital was directed toward BIPOC-owned businesses last year.
I like working with mission-driven startups because there is usually greater creativity and I can make a bigger impact than I can at a large corporation. When I say mission-driven I mean businesses that are founded and operate with triple bottom-line values at their core. Businesses that value people and planet as much or more than profit. In other words, B-Corp values.
However, these organizations often have budgets that are inherently smaller due to the funding and wage gaps I mentioned. Lack of access to capital trickles down—if they have less funding they have a smaller budget for their marketing and brand communications. That often means they go without critical communications or they attempt to cobble together DIY strategies—all of which pull them away from their own strengths.
I can’t rescue anyone’s business from a recession or possible depression. But I can’t help but think that as capitalism is turned inside out, I am reminded of Robert Greenleaf’s concept of the servant-leader which focuses on other people’s needs. The servant leader, as I understand it, is someone who asks “what can I do, with what I’ve got, where I am?”
This crisis reminds of the collective trauma Americans experienced during 9/11. While I was freelancing as a creative professional, I taught trauma-informed yoga and meditation. I was helping to manage a studio in San Francisco when the World Trade Center came down. The owners of the studio were paralyzed and uncertain about how to react. That kind of collective trauma is crippling for the psyche when it’s encountered so acutely. But I asked myself what my community needed and I knew—we had to open the studio. It was much more of a church-like vibe than a fitness studio; people went there to practice self-inquiry and learn tools of self-regulation. I volunteered to open the studio and teach all the classes if other teachers weren’t able to hold space. I also brought in leaders from the Muslim community to guide meditations and offer Q&A in an attempt to build bridges of understanding and connection. People needed a way to process grief and shock, they needed leadership and I stepped in to serve as I could. This feels remarkably similar in many ways.
[LE]: And can you share some of the responses you received, questioning your approach?
[UK] I’ve gotten a few takers for pro bono communications strategy and writing. But surprisingly, I’ve also gotten pushback. I wrote a controversial post that basically stated this is not the time for “selling”; it’s time for leadership, empathy, and collectivism. My point was that businesses that choose to just keep marching along with their scheduled sales campaigns are tone deaf and out of touch with the reality we’re facing.
Of course, businesses should continue to sell their goods and services if they can. We’ve all got to keep the lights on and food in our bellies. But messaging needs read the room and be adjusted to be much more thoughtful, authentic and delivered with sensitivity. This is the key difference between communication and marketing: communication is a dialogue without expectation of gain. We don’t need more businesses selling us crap we don’t need and can’t afford. We need an infusion of humanity into our business dealings on a massive scale.
This is the key difference between communication and marketing: communication is a dialogue without expectation of gain. We don’t need more businesses selling us crap we don’t need and can’t afford. We need an infusion of humanity into our business dealings on a massive scale.
[LE]: What advice do you have for those of us juggling civic duties to help our neighbors with earning wages to pay our bills?
[UK] I’m not sure I know the answer to that. Everyone operates on different tolerances. I keep my workload deliberately light and my business very lean in order to be able to play my strengths rather than managing a larger staff. This inherently makes me more vulnerable to economic downturns. Whatever government bailouts are given to airlines and cruise ships aren’t coming my way and I’m already hurting.
At the same time—in a somewhat ironic twist—I’m finding businesses who recognize the need for more focused, transparent, and humanistic communications are reaching out to hire me. At the risk of sounding woo-woo I have faith that by helping I will in turn be helped with new revenue sources. This is the key difference between collectivism and Ayn Rand’s objectivism, which stipulates that greed is good and collectivism is a weakness (she actually calls it a disease of savages). By offering free or sliding-scale pricing or extending terms, I’m able to help businesses who wouldn’t have access otherwise. I get rave reviews and happy clients. The service comes first; the benefits follow.
This situation is bad. Why candy-coat it? And yet, we all have an opportunity to examine our needs versus our wants. Are we living in alignment with our core values? Do we even know what those are anymore? In terms of balancing getting needs met and “being a helper”—to borrow from Fred Rogers—I think we all need to be open minded about pivoting to new income sources. We also have an opportunity—locked in our homes with all our STUFF—to examine our habits of consumption. Can we be happy with less?
[LE]: What are sure fire ways to make yourself look like an asshole on social media right now?
[UK] LOL. You should ask my antagonists who will insist my ‘anti-capitalist mores’ are designed to make them suffer. Seriously though, the best way to look like an asshole is to be utterly tone deaf in your messaging. People are going to smash the unsubscribe button faster than you can say “coronavirus” if you aren’t acknowledging their very real fears and concerns.
Brands need to build bridges of empathy right now. My client work over the last couple of weeks back this up; those who left their marketing campaigns on auto-pilot are experiencing near-viral (pun intended) unsubscribe and unfollow rates. Those who are demonstrating leadership with authenticity and empathy are building connections and having rewarding dialogue. Oh, and taking selfies of you and your five buddies doing yoga at the beach is another great way to look like an asshole when we’re supposed to be working to protect each other from a deadly virus. Just sayin’
[LE]: Do you have any examples of what the ‘right way’ to communicate online looks like?
[UK] Marketing 101 says know your audience. What are they feeling? What are their fears? Traditional marketing identifies customers’ ‘pain points’ and then exploits them to make a sale. I believe this is the time to instead lead with love. You don’t need to be gushy and flowery about it. Love is service. Check out a tiny book full of big ideas, called The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm. From suggests that we in the West are particularly guilty of confusing the feeling of love with love as a verb. Love, Fromm says, is an art and like all arts, it takes discipline and practice.
To my mind, love is service. It’s being a helper. Right now we’re all in the same massive uncertainty—some feeling the impact more acutely than others. Acknowledging the uncertainty without amplifying the fear will go a long way to actually creating community. It’s time to shift away from thinking of people as consumers and to start seeing them as human beings. This will be very hard for business owners and managers who have been using OG old-school objectivist business models and methods.
[LE]: Part of my job is teaching leaders to set boundaries and define practices that protect their mental health. How are you doing that during this crisis?
[UK] Although I retired from teaching yoga and meditation these are still personal practices that serve me well. I’m also a pretty hard core cyclist and mountain biker. I’ve hung up the mountain bike for the time being simply because it’s a high-risk activity. Crashing happens. Things break, sometimes on the bike, sometimes on the body. I don’t want to take up a hospital bed because gravity got the better of me during a recreational pursuit while hospitals are stressed and anticipating more drains on resources. I also am an avid gardener, so I’ve offered free gardening services to my neighbors. It’s not altruism, though; it’s mutuality. I get garden/dirt therapy and exercise and my elderly neighbors get a beautified landscape they can enjoy. I also stay well away from leaders who espouse GOOD VIBES ONLY and who promote predatory opportunism. While I believe there will be opportunity from this hardship, it won’t be there for all of us. I’ve exited several groups which are promoting a sort of denial of the reality we are facing. That good vibes only mentality may be a coping mechanism for some, but it’s also privileged and a toxic dismissal of the whole of being human.
[LE]: Thanks for those suggestions. I’ve been walking every day and spending a lot of hours in the sun; it helps.
[UK]: Thank you for asking me to contribute. It’s my pleasure.
If you’d like more of Uma’s take on servant leadership, visit her website, here.
And if you have specific suggestions or questions on how to not be an asshole in a crisis, drop me a note at lori@radiusecd.com