Every year, thousands of visitors and hundreds of students come to ruggedly beautiful Appledore Island to learn about the work of the Shoals Marine Laboratory. The island weaves an alchemy of the mind and soul, transforming learners into scientists—the leaders who will see us make wiser and more sustainable use of our marine ecosystems.  

That mission to nurture next-generation leadership is why Alnoba has been a longstanding supporter and strategic partner of Dr. Jennifer Seavey, Executive Director of the Shoals Marine Lab. With roots going back 11 generations to fishermen working the rocky shores, Jennifer has Appledore Island in her blood.   

So much of Appledore’s impact has been in its geography—the granite coastline, wind-swept and rich with history. The Shoals Marine Lab is an organization deeply rooted in its physical place. What happens to its mission when access to that place is cut off by a global pandemic?  

Dr. Seavey was responsible for answering that question earlier this year when COVID-19 shut down the island. For Jenn, the crisis wasn’t a disaster but an opportunity to put strong leadership principles into practice.  

“This moment has truly been a gift,” Jenn says, echoing one of Pinnacle’s first Keys to Leadership in Crisis. “But that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. It‘s a profound challenge that has given us an opportunity to truly innovate.”  

Faced with the shutdown, Jenn fell back on a smart leadership decision her organization had already made—a redundancy plan that provided an alternative way for the lab to fulfill its mission.  

“We had a back-burner idea that was perfect for this moment,” she says. That idea was to bring the Shoals curriculum and experience online, translating their work on the island into a virtual format in the most active, live and engaging way possible.  

“It was something we had always been really hesitant about,” Jenn admits. “I mean, we’re a place-based organization. The pandemic pushed us to change our perspective and face this idea we’d been talking about for so long. We realized it doesn’t have to be ‘either–or.’ We can be both placed-based and digital—we can bring the place online and make that virtual experience really unique.” 

If you don’t emerge stronger, you have only survived, not succeeded. That’s the third of Pinnacle’s Keys to Leadership in Crisis, and Jenn’s plan exemplified it. Not only did it allow the lab to continue to serve its existing students, but it broadened their reach to tap into new audiences who couldn’t have made the physical trip to the island. Expanding their programs internationally opened up new grant opportunities. “We have lots of growth potential here,” Jenn says. “This is an exciting new frontier for us.” 

Read a recent article in Science about the Shoal’s shift to digital learning 

The lab is also using the shutdown as an opportunity to put more resources and time into their physical facilities, so that they will be ready and stronger when people return to Appledore.  

Recognizing these opportunities and making brave leadership choices has another positive impact: it has brought Jenn’s team closer together. “What we’ve done is extraordinarily hard,” Jenn says. With her team still working and living together on the island, they sat down and wrote up an agreement about what their shared life in a pandemic would look like. Ground rules were laid, and every team member made a commitment that was necessarily deeply personal.  

Looking forward, Jenn recognizes there is still a great deal of work to be done finding ways to mingle the lab’s strength for in-person, hands-on learning with their new distance learning innovations. There will also be challenges adapting to a changing public health landscape. Jenn knows this will require her organization to be flexible and nimble as things play out.  

When asked what wisdom from this experience she would like to share with emerging leaders, Jenn has a ready answer. “Be brave and believe in your team,” she says. “Make a plan and go all in.”  

Pinnacle is dedicated to developing courageous leadership and sustainability models to help change people’s lives, create stronger communities, and save the earth we share.

We also know a great deal about leading through times of turbulence. Just ask our founders, Alan and Harriet Lewis, about leading an international travel company through terrorist hijackings, the 9-11 attacks, major recessions and now a worldwide pandemic.

Josh Ewing is another leader who knows how to face a crisis.

Alnoba’s strategic partner Josh Ewing is executive director of Friends of Cedar Mesa, which works to ensure that public lands in San Juan County, with all their cultural and natural values, are respected and protected.

To do this, the organization partners with a coalition of Hopi, Navajo, Zuni and Ute tribal leaders, the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, and the Glen Canyon National Recreation area to create local, regional, and national support for greater protection of Cedar Mesa through education, advocating for national designations, supporting smart local policy-making, and organizing research and volunteer service activities. (Work for which the coalition won the 2019 Alnoba Moral Courage in Leadership Award.)

Josh holds a huge vision for a vast new, large, culturally rich landscape conservation vision and played a key role in nurturing the vision and broad support to establish Bears Ears National Monument.  And, he has spent the past two years fighting the Administration’s attempts to radically reduce its scope and size.

In the midst of this fight, he had the conviction to create an education center to welcome visitors to a monument that no longer existed in the eyes of the government. He has been 110% committed to a positive vision for this embattled region, teaching respectful visitation of the landscape.

Facing a time of turbulence with courage

Now he’s battling federal efforts to drastically reduce the size of the Bears Ears National Monument while also tackling an overwhelming threat to the indigenous communities for Cedar Mesa: the COVID-19 pandemic.

As coronavirus spread through the region, Josh identified a key area of need – a shortage of EMTs – and stepped up to serve. He has also been galvanizing support for tribal areas in Arizona and New Mexico that have been hard-hit by the pandemic.

Recently, we asked Josh to share the biggest lessons he’s learned about leadership during this unprecedented time. Josh cited one of our 10 Keys to Leadership in Crisis: “Crisis is a gift”.

“One of the gifts of difficulty, if you are willing, is to rethink what you are doing.   For us at Bears Ears, we opened an education center.  Our focus was myopic – get tasks done, run it well and make it great.   With the center closed we’ve realized that we can also to meet our mission online.

“A lot of folks just want to get out onto the land without stopping at the Center, but they are checking websites.   Unfortunately, there is a LOT of bad information out there, such as directing people to very sensitive areas.  This ‘gift’ to get out of day-to-day logistics allowed us to be more robust to help people visit with much more respect.  Our goal is to outrank the bad info out there.  I’ve often said Bears Ears is not managed by land management agencies; it is managed by Google.  So now we reach not only a larger audience, but a new audience of folks that don’t naturally educate themselves.

“I am a passionate go getter.  I hire good people and then trust them to get stuff done.   For my personal leadership, this crisis has taught me that way beyond the mission and the work are the people.   It shouldn’t have taken a pandemic to make me realize that I need to be vulnerable, transparent and honest, especially when people are worried.   I check in way more with each member of the team.  I listen more and that will make me a better leader.”