Pānui

As I sit here tonight, teachers and health professionals around the country are inching closer and closer to the strike of midnight when they can no longer go on to the site of their workplace. Unvaccinated parents will be unable to help on school trips, watch their children in school concerts, and attend school meetings. In the months to come we may see our unvaccinated friends and family restricted from going to restaurants and cafes, or perhaps from community events, churches, or theatre.  We are living in uneasy times.

This thought piece is not an attempt to dialogue about the various viewpoints, to counter any arguments, or to make any judgement on the Government’s Covid response – there are more than enough opinions out there for us to wade through. Rather it is a reflection on a threat that to me looms potentially larger than Covid …. a divided community.

For the foreseeable future mandates and the Covid Protection Framework (traffic light system) is here. This is a reality we will have to live with – living alongside each other with different restrictions and freedoms. A recipe for division and polarity.

So how do we as leaders respond to this threat of division? What we know from the literature is that connected, engaged, and empowered communities where people have a sense of belonging and identity, are important for our individual and collective wellbeing, and foundational in our ability to be resilient in the face of a changing world. So how do we bring connection, belonging, engagement to a community divided along lines of belief and physical lines of access?

What might it look like to gather our communities around the threat that we see – the threat of division, of isolation, of disconnection? What if we focus our attention on how to combat this threat – no matter what camp we sit in? What might conversation and connection across the lines of division look like? What might emerge as we set aside any need to convince or criticise, and instead seek to value our relationships with fellow community members and colleagues over these philosophical differences and physical barriers? The invitation I am hearing is to get creative, to zoom out to the bigger picture of our shared humanity, to set as a foundation the value we have for one another and the importance of relationships, to connect and communicate, allowing community-led solutions to emerge that can help us be communities, workplaces, families that can demonstrate care, compassion and creativity and most importantly, togetherness.

Sooze Harris | Consultant and Strengths Coach, Leadership Lab