PART 3A: CLEARING THE TABLE, ROUND II

Autonomy is a funny thing. The presence of it empowers you with the authority to make decisions, while the absence of it strips you of control and the ability to inform change. True autonomy is only effective when you have a free license to move. If or when your mobility is limited, it can be particularly challenging to find grounding. It can be even more disorienting to have adjusted only to realize you have little to no power in the first or second place.

As the person in charge of developing and executing Lynk Academy’s vision, I’d become accustomed to being the key decision-maker. From set-up to operationalization, decisions on what, when, how, where, and why, were majorly self-determined. Little to no red tape, a license to move freely. Each quarter we learned more about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of our efforts and even more about the gaps we needed to close. While the outcomes weren’t realized until around month 6, I loved every minute of it! We’d fostered a sense of belonging, streamlined service delivery for more consistency, developed systems to evaluate performance, and strengthened workers’ commitment to fulfilling the Academy’s motto “To get better every day”. And because we held up our end of the bargain — a steady stream of job opportunities and income — workers trusted and were dedicated to doing things the Lynk way. By month 8 we were beginning to reap the benefits. Our first two graduates had completed their 9-month incubation and started receiving external asset financing (in the form of a loan) to establish their businesses! Adversities of entrepreneurship are now a reality (e.g. difficult landlords, flaky workers, hiked cost of materials, customer acquisition etc), and graduates leaned heavily on Lynk for technical and advisory support. If we could tweak our incubation and post-graduate initiatives further to enable graduates to operate more independently, we’d not only be able to make a case for micro franchising and more investment, but double our impact — more businesses, more entrepreneurs, more work, more income! The real work was just beginning…

Planning is always important. It curbs some of the panic that comes with running around aimlessly all the while enabling you to make decisions with a little more confidence. Yet, no level of planning can prepare you fully for chaos. In March 2020, nine months into my enrapturement at Lynk Academy, everything came to a drastic halt. We’d just recorded our highest revenue in the same breath as the country coming to a collective standstill following the first reported COVID-19 case. Dichotomy at its most perplexing…celebration on one hand and mass anxiety of the unknown on the other. The Government of Kenya was taking things very seriously. Mandated curfew, banned movements outside county borders, isolation regulations, and social distancing. We needed to comply quickly but understood that the luxury of policies like Work from Home (WFH) wasn’t an option we could adhere to. To keep the business running, we’d have to put our customer-facing workers (e.g. plumbers, electricians, beauticians, cleaners) and project staff (managers, site supervisors etc) on the front line. Unsettling, hard, but real. We lost over 80% of our business within weeks of the first reported COVID-19 case. Given the state of uncertainty and economic downturn, most clients were either moving to WFH, pulling out of major construction or fit-out projects and/or redirecting cash flow to their top business priorities. Fewer to no projects and little likelihood of collecting against work completed and invoiced…the worst position to be in as a business, no guarantees, no safety nets. With little position or bandwidth to push back on any contractual terms (e.g. force majeure), we refocused our efforts on what was within our control…

1. Gather, fact-check, and prepare documentation on COVID

2. Distribute sensitized information to workers and staff

3. Equip and train workers and staff on PPE use and other safety protocol

4. Restructure our offerings (e.g. introduction of deep cleaning)

5. Inform customers of safety precautions, revamped and/or new offerings, and extend discounts

6. Sunset and downsize high-risk and/or loss-making services

Even though we were proactive, there was still so much up in the air. Should we still spend our marketing budget or redirect it to other priorities? Will customers be more open to ordering services after a safety overhaul? Could we still connect workers to enough jobs to make ends meet? Not being able to generate or predict the volume of jobs meant a huge financial liability for the business, especially considering Lynk was already covering stipends and healthcare for workers in the incubation program. I knew this. We knew this. Internalizing the reality of it, however, was another thing. I found out my department would be sunsetted (made obsolete) on a leadership call with an external partner. I was distraught, caught off guard, and very upset. I knew that hard decisions had to be made, but never anticipated an executive decision about my department being made without me. At the very least, I felt entitled to the courtesy of a heads-up. We needed to move and to move quickly. All informal workers who weren’t working in a controlled and safely monitored environment (i.e. our production facility) needed to be let go. With our COO having left at the end of February, our CEO and co-founder being stuck in the US, and our CFO and other co-founders having welcomed a baby and being far removed from the day-to-day, the responsibility of relaying information to workers fell on me. After all, it was my department and my team. It was going to be the most difficult thing I’d ever done in my career. Workers had already started to experience the drastic impacts of COVID on their income..maybe they wouldn’t be as surprised? I also had support and coaching from the founders and our HR on how to circumvent and communicate clearly. I wasn’t in it alone. Despite these two truths, no one could have prepared me for the shock, grief, and backlash that comes with delivering very difficult news to nearly 80 people. The expectations of the messenger and anyone managing a team during a crisis are gargantuan. Finding the balance between being transparent but communicating with sensitivity, being emotionally available without coming across as emotional, and responding objectively and without reactivity is no small feat. Speaking to workers in groups was probably the best decision we made. It allowed me to communicate more succinctly each time while also gathering further insights into what needed to be addressed. It meant demonstrating our commitment to not only keeping workers informed but to engage them in a distributed (freelance) capacity should opportunities arise. Not a guarantee, but a sliver of hope nonetheless. I still get shivers thinking about that point in time. How arduous and dispiriting for all, but even more how difficult it was to let go of the people, of the dream, and of the promise.

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Who is Shuri without her tech? Without Griot? Without access to Wakandan intelligence? Dismantling the Academy was gut-wrenching. We’d invested so much into it and were only on the cusp of expanding its reach. Who was I without the Academy? Was there an opportunity to rebuild, even if in a different capacity? Could we still support workers meaningfully without an incubation model? Was I still needed? Who would affirm if or not I still had a job? Heck, who could give me a straight answer about what next? The days after the deconstruction of the Academy were very disorienting. No manager, no direction, not the faintest idea about what needed to be done. I was still so fixated on what we lost and had no heart to relinquish control or say goodbye. Instead, I threw myself at everything and anything that needed hands or legs…initiatives that needed to be closed or steered, SOPs that needed to be revised, and meetings that needed to be held. Whatever needed to be done, I did it. At the very least contributing to continuity would suffice as justification for my engagement post-Academy. Even before a formal promotion conversation with our founders happened, I’d fully assumed responsibility for overseeing all B2C operations…not because I wanted to, but because it was needed and no one else was doing it. I was spending most of my time maintaining the status quo and building back towards a baseline e.g. adapting systems, refocusing on consistency vs. growth, maintaining customer retention. Between March and November 2020, we pivoted the business a handful of times. Granted we didn’t expect to grow at the projected pre-COVID rate, but we reprioritized our goals accordingly - build the runway, buy time. We didn’t know when things would return to normal but had embraced a new way of doing things. Each month we progressed. We even managed to surpass our adjusted B2B revenue target in August 2020 and achieve KES 5.97M in B2C sales during the COVID period. It was slow, but with some end in sight, some sense of ease, and some predictability.

Seismic. That’s how grand and rippled the effects of COVID were on many businesses….even the most resilient. We hadn’t cracked the code, nor were we close to doing so. At the very least our business was afloat. We continued to postulate with hopes that the playing field would level out. Unfortunately, the reality of seismic events is that they rarely ever dissipate without an aftershock. I like many employees of Lynk at the time believed we’d weathered the storm. All financial reports and information relayed by senior leadership were indicative of stability. No one was prepared for the double aftershock that hit in November 2020…setback, failure, betrayal, and grief.

Periods of crisis are often vantage points to discover the parts missing, the parts needing repair, and the parts working as intended. COVID was a critical moment for us all. It was the first time I personally and critically started to question the direction we were being led, who was leading, and my role in it all. We gain so much perspective from chaos, but even more from the process of clearing the table.