In today’s rapidly changing world of work, your success increasingly depends on how well you adapt to changes and new demands. We wrote this book to help you do exactly that, no matter what field you work in or what type of job you have – we want to help you learn how to adapt and thrive at work.
In our coaching practice as well as in our experiences as executives in large organizations, we saw many people who were very skilled at steering through the changes they faced with work. One of our clients has successfully changed jobs and even careers several times throughout her 40-year working life. However, we have also seen other people [not clients!] downright fail, get fired or quit out of despair because they could not adapt to new demands.
Forecasts predict that the pace of work-related change is reaching unprecedented heights, and it is not going to slow down. Additionally, we are experiencing the most significant labor shift since the 1900s with one in four adults reporting that there is already a mismatch between the skills they have and the skills they need for their current jobs. Bottom line, the skills, knowledge, and perspectives that you have today are not necessarily the ones that you will need in the future – and they may not even be what you need today!
To help prepare you for this new normal of work in which rapid and often unpredictable change is the norm, we want to teach you how to be your own job and career coach. We provide a self-driven approach for developing your adaptive-ability so that you can more easily navigate any work-related changes – big or small – that may come your way. Based on years of experience from our coaching practice, we detail six critical steps that you need to take to maximize your success in navigating your job, career, and workplace changes and sometimes life changes that require you to think differently about work.
Additionally, for each step, we discuss the “secrets of the successful” – these are the unique characteristics of people who seem to easily transition through any new demand or change they face. Research suggests that more than two-thirds of people fail at navigating personal change at work. So, we also profile the “inability to adapt traps” – these are the common obstacles that we have seen trip people up from successfully adapting to new demands. Anchored in management and psychology research, and real-life examples, we offer a thought-provoking look into how you should recognize, assess, and ultimately respond to changes in your job, your workplace, and your career that inevitably you will face or that you’re facing right now.
No matter what you do, if you are serious about being successful in your job and career, this book is for you. Shift Happens is filled with concepts and advice that you can immediately put into action. Great careers and top performance don’t happen by accident – it takes a lot of insight, hard work, and ultimately, it requires that you adapt to things that come your way.
Read on….to survive and thrive.
