<img src="//bat.bing.com/action/0?ti=5739614&amp;Ver=2" height="0" width="0" style="display:none; visibility: hidden;">

Watch Part 2 of our four-part series and learn how to Ditch The Drama During Annual Enrollment with these Reality-Based Leadership Tips.  

 

 

Watch Part 1 here.

Watch Part 3 here.

Watch Part 4 here

Video Transcript

It’s the start of Annual Enrollment season, and you’ve just made a personal commitment to do whatever it takes to have a successful AE. You know there are going to be challenges, so you should start learning how to build up your resilience.

In this video series, we are looking at the four components of personal accountability; Commitment, Resilience, Ownership and Continuous Learning.

The quality of resilience is absolutely necessary to successfully follow through on your personal commitment to succeed at Annual Enrollment. During every AE season something unexpected comes up. That’s just part of the challenge that we face in this line of work. But knowing in advance that there will be problems gives us the opportunity to start making plans now for how we will handle them. Even if we don’t know what the exact problems will be, we can prepare our teams with strategies to succeed in the midst of and in spite of potential adversity. 

Unfortunately, an unexpected crisis can often bring out the worst in people. Many times, such emergencies are greeted with surprise, panic and blame. The natural reaction for leaders is to respond with a heroic effort to save the day. "Drop everything! All hands on deck! This is everyone’s top priority." These heroic responses may resolve the immediate crisis, but they are not a sustainable strategy for thriving throughout the Annual Enrollment season. In fact, personal heroics like that quickly lead to burnout; people just can’t live in crisis mode for months on end. 

Instead of last-minute heroics, make plans now to build in Resilience. A resilient team member knows what resources are available and recognizes, early on in the situation, when it’s time to leverage those resources. If the team prepares a strategy in advance for responding to emergencies, then a crisis can be dealt with quickly and without a lot of drama.

Imagine how this would look in the real world. One team member discovers an error that will impact 50 employees right now and it could be affecting more every day. On a resilient team, once the problem is discovered, they can adjust their workloads to respond as a team. Nobody has to stay until 2:00 am, manually correcting the records one at a time, because the team plans to respond in a way that doesn’t put the whole burden on one person.

Maybe instead of one person working on the problem all night, the whole team works on it until 7:00 pm. That kind of experience will actually draw the team together in mutual support instead of burning them out one at a time. 

The key to making it work is to get resilient now, before the crisis hits. Talk about how you will handle emergencies. Commit to supporting each other and resolve to stick together as a team through the highs and lows of AE. 

Annual Enrollment is going to test us again this year, just as it does every year. This year as you are making your plans and developing your strategies, take time to plan out how you are going to be resilient. Not just you, but get the whole team thinking about it. How will you as a team pull together to overcome any obstacle, especially the unexpected ones?

Being resilient is crucial to meeting your commitments. If you know you are going to own the results of this Annual Enrollment, whether they are good or bad, then start building up your resilience now to be able to handle the outcomes.

In our next segment, we will talk about ownership and how ownership sometimes gets a bad reputation but is another key component of personal accountability and achieving AE success.

Thanks for watching the second chapter in our Ditch the Annual Enrollment Drama video series. You can watch Part 3 here

Don’t want to wait? Download the full, Ditch the Annual Enrollment Drama Guide below!

Get the Full Guide Here

View all Posts by Dave Plorins