A guest post by Professor Paolo Gallo and Professor Dave Ulrich, reveals why it is key to care in your career and the workplace.
The article begins by referencing a study that began at Harvard University in 1938 and is still ongoing, asking the question, what makes a good life? Of the 724 men surveyed, when it came down to a fruitful existence it wasn’t money or fame that kept participants happy, it was good relationships and the connections they made.
They note the adverse effect the pandemic has on this strive for happiness. We have all had to cut out a lot of people, not even being able to visit family, and when we could, we could not even touch them.
This bleeds into our professional lives, this disconnect and freeze on relationships and life can lead to anxiety around the workplace and the job itself. With sectors dying, companies struggling and budget cuts across different industries, this anxiety damages the ability to work.
Gallo and Ulrich break down how to deal with this by 1. Self Care, 2. Serving others: your role as Leader and 3. Institutional legacy.
Self Care
To start, Self Care, in order to care for the self you must look at change and think, “What do these changes mean for me?”. This can range across several questions as posed by this article, how will the pandemic affect me and my own? How do I make a stance against social injustice? How can I upskill in this ‘digital 4.0 world’? How can I adapt to this economic crisis? How can I deal with the current political landscape?
One of the most important questions posed is how do I develop and maintain the emotional reserves of energy to cope with the demands of today’s world?
In response to these issues, Gallo recommends leaders change, and master the 5 C’s, chaos, crisis, complexity, confusion, and change. This being able to find your way through the chaos, have strong people in charge in a crisis.
Complexity refers to building the technical expertise to learn, adapt and make sense of the ever-changing world and its complex issues. It relies on the basis of trust and cooperation to solve problems along with the authority to impose someone’s views upon others.
Confusion refers to nothing being black and white in today’s world, this ambiguity in a workplace means concepts, ideas and situations have different meanings to different people. This is why it is important to reconcile these differences by having everyone included in the conversation.
Change is such an integral part of life, as Gallo states that change is ironically the only real constant in our lives, and how it is imperative to not resists but be open to adapting, as we have all had to do with the pandemic.
Ulrich also advocated for leaders to become empathetic meaning makers through three principles. Personalization, meaning the focus on the person, their emotional needs, and a leader having the ability to engage with their employees as real people.
He also pushes for harnessing uncertainty, in a time where there are more questions than answers, how to navigate through that and account for the turbulent world we live in. This is done via having realistic optimism, using uncertainty as a point of note to reinvent, transform or reimagine and to co-discover and co-create a more positive future.
Finally by offering guidance, in which you correctly and effectively organise your company, focusing on different factors like talent, leadership, capabilities, and HR.
This all to say, that when leaders take care of themselves they can care for others better. The article notes to do this you must define success for yourself, through your own passions and values, this may change over time but the challenge of defining what you want will persist.
It also notes to create resources to enable yourself to move forward toward what you want most. This can be physical, intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual, they may come from within or can be external.
Finally, for self-care, you must focus forward and be agile, ...
