What’s stopping you from reinventing your career?

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by Heather Cairns-Lee and Bill Fischer

 

 

A recent Microsoft study of 30,000 people revealed that 46% of workers are considering a major career pivot or transition after the Covid years. For many, this search goes beyond just a change of role and into the realm of personal renewal or reinvention. In our experience, many of the professionals who express such an interest in reinvention ultimately fail to follow through.

The hardest part, we’ve found, and where many professionals get stuck, is simply getting started on leaving the status quo. This is particularly true for senior executives. Personal reinvention requires reappraising life choices and imagining alternate paths — but this becomes more difficult when the path a leader is on is seen, at least outwardly, as successful. Because leaders’ identities are so dependent on their work, it can also be hard for them to consider different possibilities. And while these executives have been educated in strategic planning and change at the organizational level, reinvention at a personal level is not part of the curriculum at most business schools.

More ironically, there are also habits that are core to executives’ success that stand squarely in the way of personal reinvention. In our work teaching and coaching thousands of managers, we have identified four traps – self-sufficiency, overthinking, procrastination, and searching for the answer – that prevent leaders from taking the first steps necessary for considering and exploring possible new versions of themselves for the future.

In our work, we have found ways to help leaders recognize which traps they are falling into and start imagining a way out — largely inspired by design thinking principles such as rapid prototyping, making ideas visual, and getting quick feedback. Understanding what these traps are can help you take those first steps — and succeed in your quest for reinvention.

Self-sufficiency
Leaders often talk of their self-sufficiency with pride. These leaders rely on their own contributions, work well independently and seldom require motivation or management from others – behaviors that have earned them their senior roles. However, self-sufficiency has a flip side: It can limit connections with others, resulting in restricted access to new ideas, feedback and encouragement. It can also hide a leader’s doubts and insecurities from others. Individuals who are highly self-sufficient need others to help them overcome this trap of self-sufficiency and asking for help may seem obvious, but it also takes courage, especially when admitting to career vulnerability. Continue reading →

How to find a job that energizes (rather than drains) you

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BY JOSEPH LIU

 

If you have to work, it might as well be fulfilling.

 

 

Doing work that doesn’t feel meaningful can be a drain. You wake up, clock in, put in your hours, then clock out. Rinse, repeat. Although this sort of routine may feel dreary, you may still find yourself hanging onto it for the sake of maintaining consistency and predictability.

However, who says work necessarily has to be a struggle? Can your work be both financially rewarding and fulfilling?

One way to find work fulfillment is to achieve a state of flow. Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the original architects behind the concept, describes the state of flow as being completely absorbed with an activity where nothing else seems to matter.

Achieving flow state means matching a challenging task with a person whose high skill level is relevant to the task. For example, both musically inclined and mathematically inclined individuals would deem solving a scientific formula challenging. However, the latter would more likely be equipped with the interests and skills to solve the problem to tackle the challenge with positivity and enthusiasm.

Therefore, job fit plays a big role to being in flow. Knowing your strengths and interests can spell the difference between doing energy-generating and energy-depleting work.

FINDING ENERGY-GENERATING WORK

Many years ago, when I was a college student planning to eventually go to medical school, I spent one summer working as a fellow in a pharmacology lab doing cancer research. Working at an esteemed lab seemed like a good experience-building activity for my medical school applications.  Continue reading →

Why Empathetic Leadership Is The Best Strategy For Retaining Tech Talent

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by Jon Flaherty, Chief Executive Officer – Americas, Revolent Group.

The tech sector is infamous for its high attrition rates. Recent research by LinkedIn reveals that the average turnover for tech roles currently stands at 12.9%. While salary and bonuses will be important, money isn’t everything. The shifts in priorities we’ve seen during the pandemic and the “Great Resignation” have shown us that today’s professionals are looking for more than just a paycheck from their employers. This has put a spotlight on the empathetic leadership style, as it can go a long way toward retaining tech talent.

What Is the True Cost of Employee Retention?

If you have recently hired a tech specialist, chances are they’ll leave within the first two years. It’s nothing personal—even household names like Zoom and Reddit are struggling to hold onto their employees for more than 18 months on average. The cost of replacing just one employee is staggering—ranging from one-half to two times their annual salary, according to Gallup. Plus, the more senior the role is, the higher the cost of replacing it.

While there are many reasons why an employee might decide to leave (salary and benefits often being top of the list), staff can also leave due to an unsatisfactory working culture that doesn’t provide them with enough autonomy and flexibility. With the current skills crisis to contend with, especially in the increasingly sought-after cloud technologies, employers simply cannot afford to overlook making improvements to their working culture. One effective way of doing this is by rethinking your leadership approach.

Employees Want A Leader Who Cares

We often make the mistake of assuming that our employees leave because they are better paid elsewhere. While this is true for some, it’s also true that people want to belong to an environment where their voice matters, their contribution is valued and where they can see clear career progression opportunities ahead of them. Taking up a better offer elsewhere is often the result of these expectations continuously not being met in their current workplace. Continue reading →

How a culture of wellbeing can help end ‘quiet quitting’

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by Andi Campbell

 

Over the past few years, many factors—including the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, supply chain issues and worker shortages—have presented challenges for both employees and employers. These challenging situations have led to poor mental health, burned-out employees, and increased stress levels in workplaces in nearly every industry. Fed up with the lack of support from their employers to compensate for additional tasks and time spent at work, employees have created their own system to achieve better balance and improve physical and mental health. Social media has sparked workers to turn to the internet to share their own stories of “quiet quitting.”

Quiet quitting, the act in which employees set clear boundaries without leaving their jobs, is a Gen Z-fueled trend that appears to have started on TikTok. The movement has gained traction on the platform, with #quietquitting gathering more than 20 million views. Many who support the practice label it a misnomer since it does not actually involve quitting, but instead, encourages workers to stop going above and beyond the work and time they are being paid for in their professional roles.

For employers, this new trend may be a cause for concern. Fueled in many cases by “American workers’ guilt,” employers have for many years benefited from the so-called “hustle culture,” which encourages employees to do more than what they have been asked to, work longer hours than needed, and assume their corporate identity as their personal identity, without added compensation. However, this glorification of non-stop work as a lifestyle has reached its peak, opening the door to quiet quitting and widespread pleas for support. Continue reading →

Embracing Diversity with a Growth Mindset

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by Ko Kuwabara, INSEAD, and Jiyin Cao, Stony Brook University

 

Getting along with others is about more than just having things in common.

When it comes to falling in love, people – broadly speaking – tend to fit into one of two categories. Those in the first category think the best relationships are formed quickly, spontaneously and organically. Fireworks and instant chemistry are par for the course, while trying to “make it work” is a sure sign that the relationship perhaps isn’t meant to be.

Individuals in the second category place less of an emphasis on natural compatibility and reject the notion that it’s only true love if you don’t need to work for it. They think of relationships as muscles that can grow and stretch with the right recipe of effort, care and compromise. Even if two people don’t click immediately, they can cultivate a bond by setting differences aside, attending to mutual needs and committing to each other.

Those in the former group are likely to have a fixed mindset when building relationships, where the basis of compatibility is natural chemistry or whether you click effortlessly. Meanwhile, those in the latter group often have a growth mindset and believe that compatibility can be nurtured over time. And while neither approach is necessarily better than the other, possessing a fixed mindset can hold people back from interacting with those who are different.

Extending these concepts to the workplace, our research with co-authors Soomin Cho and Paul Ingram investigates how differences in people’s beliefs in the nature of relationships – what we call lay theories – affect how they foster connections with dissimilar individuals in a professional environment. This has crucial implications for diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Interactions in diverse teams

Workplace interactions often require people to establish relationships with others from diverse backgrounds. These differences can be surface-level or demographic qualities – such as race and age – as well as deep-seated, dispositional attributes including values, attitudes and psychological traits. Although it’s vital to get along with people who look different, it’s perhaps more challenging to achieve compatibility with those who think differently. Indeed, the full benefits of building cross-cutting ties across demographic boundaries can be curtailed if employees continue to favour those with similar deep-level attributes. Continue reading →