While it is important to use our past experiences to inform how we might tackle the next unexpected challenge, being adaptable is about remaining open and flexible in our approach, accepting that we may succeed or fail along the way. In fact, in a world that is going to continue to throw new situations to navigate through, the need for adaptability is critical to future success.
What is adaptabilty
Being adaptable means being a constant optimist and showing extraordinary resilience. Adaptability skills can be possessed both in both attitude and action, and one cannot exist without the other. In fact, there are very few successful people or organisations who got to where they are by simply doing the same thing.
For this reason, great leaders seek out change and pursue it feverishly, understanding that to be truly innovative and ahead of trends, you must embrace change. But being adaptable is not just about embracing change.
Nevertheless, adaptability is something we can all benefit from in a changing world. However, everyone’s journey towards adaptability is different and depends on their specific strengths and development areas.
Following, you may find a few key tips which could help you improve your adaptability skills in the workplace:
#1 Be confident but open to improvement
Leaders need to become aware of any gaps between their actual performance and desired performance levels, as this insight will drive behaviour change. However, self-awareness must be balanced with self-belief, because without it, increased awareness of development needs can be demotivating and disheartening. On the other hand, leaders with very high levels of self-belief may dismiss or underestimate the need to act on development feedback.
#2 Focus on improving not proving
Goal orientation describes whether you focus more on what you can learn from it, on performing well, or on avoiding failure. Despite the fact that it is typically subconscious, our goal orientation has a strong impact on how much we will learn from our experiences. As such, leaders with a learning orientation tend to see challenges as opportunities to improve, and so are more accepting of failure as a necessary step towards better performance.
#3 Think about your thinking
Metacognitive ability is the ability to think about the way we think, and it is crucial for maximising learning. In fact, seeking feedback and reflecting on it are key elements, enabling us to extract critical lessons from our experiences.
This means that leaders should be aware that not all reflection is conducive to learning, because self-reflection can be helpful or unhelpful. Helpful self-reflection accelerates leadership development because it is characterised by openness, positivity, and a learning, goal-orientated perspective.
#4 Practice deliberately, not mindlessly
Those who excel in their field take a much more deliberate approach to trying to implement new learning to improve their performance. To achieve this, they make much better use of strategies such as goal setting, and adopt more specific goals about how they will improve their performance as well as just what performance improvement they’re aiming for.
Thus, deliberate practice involves highly structured and intense activities, adapted to each individual to stretch their performance beyond its current level, with immediate feedback focusing on errors or weaknesses. Despite a wide belief, errors are important in helping everyone to adapt since “failing to fail” restricts individuals from exploring alternatives, potentially leading to complacency.
The fact is that effective leadership not only requires technical and contextual knowledge and skills, but also increasingly calls for higher level competencies such as the ability to adapt.
Benefits of being adaptable
Taking all of the above into consideration, it is important to consider how important can being adaptable be and what are its benefits. Below, we present three benefits of having strong adaptability skills:
#1 Better embrace of challenges
Being adaptable means working without boundaries, and being open to finding diverse and unexpected solutions to problems and challenges in the workplace. Without limitations on your thinking and actions, challenges become something not to dread, but to seize and enjoy working through.
What is more, as someone who is adaptable you will also be willing to engage a variety of people with diverse skills to get the job done, establishing broad networks of highly engaged and capable people as you go.
#2 Better leadership
Great leaders know that change is inevitable, and they don’t shy away from it. To do so, they remain positive in the face of adversity, keeping their teams and employees focused and motivated through tough or lacklustre periods.
This is why great leaders are also open-minded and considered, knowing that solutions and brilliance can be found in many places. Such leaders are never quick to disregard solutions that might be viable, as all these important leadership qualities have adaptability at their core, and rely on an ability to adapt to, and embrace change.
#3 Always be relevant
People who are willing to change, or shake up conventional ways of doing things will remain relevant during their working lives due to the fact that they’re comfortable experimenting. Whether it means testing with something new better adapt to a skill, or completely reengineering how you deal with a specific situation, be willing to trial different tools, strategies and techniques to achieve the best outcomes can only be beneficial.
