Doha: In a rapidly changing professional world, where the pandemic changed the rules of the game, careers may feel like roller-coaster rides. To better respond to turbulence and take ownership of our careers and lives, we need to move into the driving seat. How so? By learning and nurturing resilience.
Squiggly, stop-start, hi-potential, clear trajectory, hustles, gig working, full-time, part-time; what best describes your career? Our careers today are not linear – we can change careers up to seven times during our working lives. Change creates immense opportunities but can also be quite overwhelming, particularly when inundated with too many options. We need clarity over what drives our choices.
The pandemic has created exogenous shocks to the organisations – challenging the heart of how we work. As a result of recurring lockdowns, the ongoing debate about working from home, the stop-start processes have created significant uncertainty and stress at work. It is hardly surprising that one of the buzzwords over the last two years has been resilience, particularly the importance of career resilience.
Resilience is our ability to adapt to stress and adversity. We adapt through our reactions, learning new behaviours and actions. To mitigate the stress arising from uncertainty, career resilience can help identify opportunities and navigate your career.
Over the last few years, during the pandemic, we experienced the effects of work and personal lives merging without foresight or forward planning.
In a recent event with Gwen Hines, CEO of Save the Children UK, and Nazreen Visram, Head of Charities for Barclays Bank, the discussion on purposeful leadership focused on the overlap be-tween work and personal lives and the impact on how we work. Purpose aligned with a career can be a powerful driver to achieve momentum. However, as Nazreen Visram highlights, outputs still need to be aligned with organisational goals. This means having valid measurements in place to track progress; in other words, what gets measured gets done.
Other complexities have risen to the surface, such as multiple generations working together, bringing different expectations and perspectives into the workplace. This can provide opportunities for creative discussions on work. However, this situation can create tension when teams are under pressure to deliver under challenging circumstances and colleagues are not aligned. This leads to burnout and fatigue. Understanding resilience and integrating it into your career is essential to reduce the risk of burnout.
Developing resilience involves taking a different approach to our working and personal lives.
As CEO of Save the Children, Gwen Hines is very familiar with the demands of colleagues and volunteers working in challenging situations under intense emotional pressure to protect children. Developing resilience is an essential skill for individuals working in these situations. During the pandemic, these humanitarian skills and behaviours were shared with frontline staff in the UK health sector to help reduce the impact of burnout on individuals. Nurturing resilience helps individuals withstand stressful situations, but handling emotions also create conditions to shift thinking to find opportunities.
Resilience is not something you have or don’t have; it’s learned over time thanks to our brains’ neuroplasticity. Building memories of recovery and retrieving these experiences helps to strengthen neural connections that support resilience. The speed of signals between our prefrontal cortex and the amygdala (where our memories are stored) determines how quickly our brains recover from a turbulent or stressful experience. The more neurons (white matter) between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, the greater our resilience.
Developing resilience involves taking a different approach to our working and personal lives. Resilience is more than just getting back on track. It’s how we learn to recover successfully and become more robust. In the book I recently co-authored with Dr. Naeema Pasha, we explain the critical building blocks of career resilience-building: Positive self-view (how you assess your skills and ability to move forward); Adaptability and risk (how you respond to changes and become comfortable with the chance of failure); Self-reliance (proactivity and autonomy in generating new ideas and actions); Ambition and networking (creating connections beyond your immediate network); and Motivation to learn (commitment to ongoing re-skilling to adapt to innovation and new practices).
Each of these areas requires conscious attention consistently. When handling turbulent and complex situations, the default can be to get through from one emergency to the next without developing specific patterns or ways of thinking about the situation.
The author is an Associate Professor at HEC Paris in Doha, Qatar. She is an expert in the fields of innovation, leadership and diversity; and works with organisations and teams to build leadership capabilities to create strong innovative cultures in teams and high-performing teams.
