What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: How Adversity Can Be a Good Thing
At the beginning of the pool season, a sudden departure of the Aquatics Manager left the parks and recreation team scrambling to fill a crucial role. Despite initial challenges, the team’s director took on the added responsibilities of pool management alongside regular duties, revealing gaps in both business processes and leadership styles. The situation turned into an opportunity for growth, strengthening team cohesion, and fostering stronger connections with the community. Reflecting on this experience, the director emphasizes the importance of embracing adversity as a path to progress and looks forward to the future with a renewed focus on personal and team development.
Imagine this: it's week two of the pool season, and you find out that another organization has lured away your exceptional Aquatics manager. This isn’t just a hypothetical scenario; it's a situation we faced this year. The sudden departure left me and the rest of the Parks and Recreation team in a scramble to fill the void for the rest of the summer.
Losing a manager at the start of the summer is a massive setback for a small organization with a significant camp and pool program. When I first heard the news, I had mixed emotions—I was excited about my previous manager's new opportunity and I was also thrown into crisis mode all at the same time. How would I make this work without a significant impact on our members? In a small administrative team like ours, there isn't always someone who can step in to manage a 6,500-member aquatics complex with a staff of 134 summer employees.
I’m sure many of us in municipal government can relate to this. We often must do a lot with very little, and finding a suitable replacement can seem impossible. Despite the ups and downs of this summer, I now recognize, as the season winds down, that taking on the pool management role in addition to my regular duties as a Parks and Recreation Director—while unsustainable—provided a valuable opportunity for growth.
This experience, while challenging, revealed gaps in our business processes and my leadership style. It served as a catalyst for my personal growth, enabling me to foster stronger connections with residents and our Parks and Recreation team. It helped me identify areas where I might have been over-delegating or not delegating enough, and ultimately, built a more cohesive team spirit as we navigated the challenge. As the season draws to a close, I reflect on the valuable lessons learned, inspiring me to delve into the concept of growth through adversity in this blog.
We face adversity all the time in our positions, whether you are working to get something approved by a board, struggling to meet your budget, finding and retaining good staff, not feeling valued, or trying to move up when there aren’t any opportunities. We even have personal adversity outside of work. How you use these challenges will help you develop into a strong leader. This is for everybody. It doesn’t matter where you are in your career.
When you find yourself in a challenging position—and we all will at one time or another—it is crucial not to lose your footing. I’m not sure I did this well at first this summer, but I am still a work in progress, as we all are. You can let this eat you up or tackle it head-on. Maintaining a positive outlook while you are going through a tough time is hard but seeing it as a potential opportunity for growth helps you hang on.
In the first couple of weeks, the rest of the Parks and Recreation team and I tried to tackle one thing at a time: scheduling staff, organizing events, making sure everyone was up to date with their training, spot-checking the pool, managing maintenance, handling state and county inspections, and communicating with members. It was a whirlwind, and we had very long weeks at first, but we gained our footing and divided tasks—all while our other normal tasks took a back seat.
As we close out this summer, it's clear that the challenges we faced have not only tested our resilience but have also highlighted our capacity for growth. What seemed like a crisis turned into an opportunity to strengthen our team's bonds, streamline our processes, and refine our leadership styles. Each obstacle we encounter is an invitation to learn and grow, and this summer was a testament to that.
The words of Mahatma Gandhi resonate deeply with our experience: “Adversity is the mother of progress.” Embracing this mindset, I look forward to the coming year with renewed optimism and a commitment to continuous improvement—for myself, our team, and the community we serve. As we move forward, we do so with the confidence that our shared experiences have prepared us for any challenge that lies ahead.
Thank you to my team, Lynn Todd (operations), Rob Vandegrift (programming), Kathy Howell (membership), Soumya Belagodu (Administrative Assistant), the Pool Staff, and the rest of our Township Support Staff for making the summer somewhat manageable.