Adaptability in the Workplace

“While knowledge and tangible skills are important for everyday life, you can really excel at your job by demonstrating your invaluable soft skills. Teamwork, leadership, integrity, and more are all vital. These are the skills that you may not even notice that you’re using on a day to day basis – using your communication skills to speak with clients, your critical thinking skills to make quick decisions at your desk, and your team working skills when attending meetings or brainstorms.

As the world of work changes, the skills you need to successfully navigate the working landscape change with it. With this new hybrid work sphere where nothing is certain and change is always on the horizon, it is more important than ever to be ready for anything. To do this, you will need to rely on your adaptability skills.

What is Adaptability?
Put simply, your adaptability is how good you are at conforming to alterations and changes in your surroundings. With good adaptability skills, changes in work processes or leadership methods will come as no challenge to you – you will be able to adapt quickly and efficiently with no detriment to your work or work ethic. Particularly over the past 2 years, the UK workforce has had to deal with change after change to their routines and work processes, such as learning to work from home effectively, meaning your adaptability skills are most likely excellent.
Why are Adaptability skills important?
If you are good at your job but like things to be kept a certain way, you may be wondering why it is important to adapt to change. While we may control many aspects of our working lives, change is inevitable, whether it comes with forewarning or as a shock to you and your colleagues. When we recede from changes and remain in denial about alterations to our daily lives, we are capping our growth opportunities and rooting ourselves to our current set of skills. Being receptive and open-minded to change will allow you to excel and grow as a person and as a professional.
Adaptability skills is an umbrella term for several other soft skills, including the following:

Curiosity

Research

Critical Thinking

Resilience

Motivation

Innovation

Open-mindedness

How can I develop my Adaptability?
A willingness to try is the best start you can make – being open-minded to new things and having the self-awareness to note poor adaptability skills makes it far easier to develop this vital skill in the future. But the best way to develop this skill is to experience it in action. The following are some tips to remember to help you best deal with new information and act accordingly.

Research
When something new is on the horizon, it is in your best interest to know as much about it as possible. Instead of burying your head in the sand or waiting for direct instructions from superiors, learn all you can about the incoming changes. Asking the right questions to the right people will show a willingness to adapt, which could put you in good stead with your colleagues and managers.

Be Proactive
In a stressful situation, there are often a lot of elements that are out of your control. A great first step when you are worrying about something is to identify the things that you can influence and focus on these areas. Cluttering your mind with problems that you cannot solve is a waste of your time and energy and will do you no favours when it comes to tackling the big problem.

Take Big Steps
To open yourself up to more changes and stressful situations, big steps are in order. Taking yourself out of your comfort zone and volunteering for a new responsibility or project might be challenging at first, but will force you to develop new skills. With more responsibility, new information, problems, and changes will come thick and fast. Being faced with so many new changes will teach you how to adapt quickly and effectively, one problem at a time.

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