Celebrating with Audrey! (And the Story of how “Fast Company” Failed Me)

In fact, I clearly remember the day last fall when she called me and told me that running for Congress was something she wanted to do. My immediate reaction was two-fold, “How brave to put yourself out there.” and “I bet she’ll be successful.” After that call, though, my next thought was, “How will we, the leaders of Vivayic, handle this?”

I’m a voracious reader of “Fast Company” and “Harvard Business Review.” I don’t recall a single article with advice for business leaders on how to manage a situation where a valuable member of your team runs for a national political office.

Since Doug, my co-CEO, and I are both educators and not business-school types, we did what we do every time we run into new situations. We lean on our values, our purpose, and our operating principles. We figure out what seems like the right thing to do given who we aspire to be as an organization. Our mentors and friends in the Small Giants community taught us this critical lesson of business leadership, and it’s never failed us.

One of our core values is finding the balance between Excellence and Practicality to ensure a focus on meaningful results. We worked with Audrey to identify the account relationships where her continued involvement was critical to success and which tasks we could shift to other team members. We use agile design thinking in our solution approach and that same approach served us well in this situation. We tried something, we monitored the response, and then we continued to revise plans until we reached a place that was successful for Audrey’s campaigning needs and our need to continue taking care of our clients.