2020 was a long year for everyone. It was even longer in Nashville, Tennessee. The week before the COVID-19 shutdown, an EF-3 tornado moved through downtown. Nine months later, a bomb went off in the same area.

Until March 2020, my team worked in person in the heart of downtown Nashville. The day before the tornado hit, we kicked off a challenging multi-year project. None of us knew our kickoff dinner would be the last time we were all together.

There isn’t a book or a guide about managing a team through a pandemic, a tornado, and a bombing. I don’t claim to have all the answers. Some things worked, others not so much. We’ll discuss lessons learned from a truly strange and unsettling year in this talk.