Four Future-Thinking Ways To Foster Innovation
@GETTY from Forbes
This article was originally published in Forbes and is republished here for my community.
Cities, companies, C-level executives and senior leaders are often focused on building resilience into their operations. What junior professionals and individual contributors may not realize is that they too can build a level of personal resilience into their careers. Knowing how to adjust to unforeseen obstacles and stay steady and calm through periods of uncertainty is key to a sustainable and satisfying work life.
One of the best ways to learn how to build career resilience is by listening to the insights and experiences of seasoned experts. Below, 12 members of Forbes Coaches Council share their best tips for professionals who want to ensure they can navigate the ups and downs of their careers while remaining personally stable, strong and capable of evolving through any changes that come their way.
1. Define ‘Resilience’ For Yourself
A way to become more resilient is to define it for yourself. Resilience is made up of a combination of things such as self-awareness and self-management (including caring for yourself, knowing what you want and don’t want in life, setting boundaries and so on), building and managing healthy personal and professional relationships, and being intentional about finding balance. Balance is not stagnant; it is a constant journey. - Michelle Braden, MSBCoach, LLC
2. Stay Attuned To Your Environment
The most resilient people see opportunities where others cannot. Bearing this in mind, junior professionals would do well to stay attuned to the environments and systems they find themselves in with a sense of openness and curiosity. This level of attention has the potential to shift their perspective on any situation that may present itself. Possibilities to bounce forward emerge as a result. - Linda Aiyer, InfinitU Consulting
3. Build And Cultivate Your Network
One thing a junior professional can do to build resilience into their career is build and cultivate their network. Cultivating your network is more than connecting on LinkedIn; it’s something that you invest in over time. Developing a practice of nurturing your relationships is a critical component of building career resilience. - Caroline Vernon, Intoo, USA
4. Seek And Harness Personal Disruption
Seek and harness personal disruption rather than avoiding it. Whatever you put your attention toward expands. So when we obsess about avoiding something, that thing expands—and it does so without our consent or participation. When we seek disruption, we can use it to drive our path into areas where we want to grow. By disrupting ourselves, we dive into learning and growth and learn resilience. - David Taylor-Klaus, DTK Coaching, LLC
5. Understand Your Neurological Design
Understand your neurological design and natural intelligence preferences. That, along with using the correct levers to optimize your brain’s performance, helps to grow one’s neuro-agility, adaptability, problem-solving skills and creativity. This level of conscious awareness can even alter career aspirations and outcomes as one creates fulfillment based on purpose and doing what they love. - Arthi Rabikrisson, Prerna Advisory
6. Become An Active Lifelong Learner
The world of work is changing so fast, and it will continue to do so in the years ahead. To keep up with change and develop resilience, everyone must become a lifelong learner—beyond giving it just lip service! You need to actively approach it by actively learning every single day. If you’re not doing that, you’re not growing, and worse, you’re probably going backward. - Lital Marom, UNFOLD Media Group
7. Create Content That Has Lasting Impact
Treat thoughts as things. I advise my younger leaders to create content that has lasting impact and value. I also suggest growing your personal brand as you grow your career. If you don’t write articles, build out your speaking capacity and, at minimum, journalize what you learn and your insights, you will lose a lot. You never know what taking yourself seriously will produce now or in the future. - John M. O’Connor, Career Pro Inc.
8. Keep Track Of The Big Picture
Don’t be preoccupied with your job today, this month or even this year. Envision what your career will look like in ten years and plot a course with a few different paths to get there. So, when you encounter the typical career snags, setbacks and bottlenecks, you’ll maintain your resilience because you will have different paths to take toward achievement and a forward perspective. - Loren Margolis, Training & Leadership Success LLC
9. Be More Self-Aware, Self-Caring And Cognitive
Being able to bounce back, recover and adapt is rooted in self-awareness, self-care and being more cognitive. Coming from a place of purpose (mission), being intentional and strategic (vision) and aligning our personal core values allows us to create a foundation where character, talents, skills, knowledge and experience inspire us to be productive and realize more moments of enjoyment in our work. - Lori Harris, Harris Whitesell Consulting
10. Focus On Emotional Intelligence And The Seven C’s Of Resilience
I dedicate a good amount of time to working with executives and leaders on the seven C’s of resilience: competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping and control. For junior professionals, I’d highly recommend working on their self-awareness and emotional intelligence first. That will help with developing a more accurate perspective, greater confidence and the ability to learn from mistakes or failures. - Asha Mankowska MA, Your Favorite Business Coach & Consultant
11. Feel The Feelings Before Making A Plan To Move Forward
Many people believe that resilience is about not letting things bother you. Not so—resilience is about being able to move forward when things are difficult or upsetting or when there is a loss. Feel the feelings. Take the time needed to acknowledge the failure. Then, make a plan to move forward. Trying to hide, diminish or sweep away difficult feelings ensures that they will eventually resurface. - Cheryl Czach, Cheryl Czach Coaching and Consulting, LLC
12. Build Transferable Business Skills
Personal resilience in business occurs when an employee has the ability to move anywhere in a company. This means they must build transferable business skills such as process improvement, problem-solving, business intelligence, change management, project management and communication. This doesn’t mean they need to become an expert in these skills, but that they must become competent. - John Knotts, Crosscutter Enterprises
About Lital Marom
Lital Marom is a keynote speaker, AI visionary, and strategic advisor who empowers executives to work smarter and scale faster with AI. An engineer-turned-entrepreneur who has lived in 10 countries and founded four companies, she helps leaders turn disruption into growth and build future-ready organizations that scale and lead. A Forbes Coaches Council contributor since 2018, she advises Fortune 50 leaders on AI, innovation, leadership, and business transformation.
Explore Lital's AI keynote topics.
Entering a new year can become a time for reflection and introspection of what we have learned so far. 74.02% of Americans and 19% of Brits are determined to make a resolution to learn something new or make a lifestyle change in 2021. True innovators, those who are game-changers, know that to be successful, we must harness the energy of resolutions and transformations year-round to be successful and not only in the new year.
New Year’s resolutions are so common because change is inevitable. The future is inevitable. The past is concrete. Dr. Simon Sherry, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Dalhousie University, notes that “Humans enjoy temporal landmarks like New Year’s because it’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to forget about the struggles, failures, transgressions” of the prior year. But innovative businesses go against the grain in this thinking. We remember our struggles and failures and use them as a launchpad for bigger, more empowering things, realizing that failure is not the opposite of success. In reality, failure is a fundamental part of success.
It’s easy to remain “stuck in your ways,” and those who don’t desire to be a game-changer usually do. To usher your business into the future confidently and productively, you need to make resolutions to transform the way you think and act. Innovative businesses are ultimately the ones that survive and thrive. After all, as Confucius said, “The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.”
So how do you start to make these transformations to align yourself with the thinking and actions of innovators and game-changers?
Moonshot into the future and trackback to envision new ideas.
To create the future, start from the future! Innovators envision future possibilities, explorative disruptions and wild new ways of product/service developments. They think years into the future and then apply it to the here and now. Begin with envisioning new ideas farther into the future, beyond the boundaries of your own thoughts and limiting beliefs. Then ask yourself: How can I make this future a reality? When you broaden your thinking, you open up your mind to much bigger possibilities.
For example, Arrow Electronics encourages its employees to live in a world that is “five years out.” This means that their work is fueled by dreams and desires of what the future could be. Given the popularity of voice-driven artificial intelligence tech, Arrow Electronics has already envisioned a world where power users will want a more do-it-yourself, hands-on approach to their digital assistants. Hence, they created the Google AIY Voice Kit — a customer-friendly kit that walks users through creating their very own voice-activated home assistant.
Connect social queues to unlock new opportunities.
Social (data) queues drive business innovation — and they are everywhere. The future belongs to innovative leaders who will connect the dots of what customers think, feel, want and need. Become a keen data analyst to gain valuable insight into where markets are headed and what new trends are emerging to unleash new opportunities.
For example, you might think that millennials desire cheap products to complement their income and high living cost. Put your ear to the ground and start connecting the dots, and you’ll learn that 73% of millennials prefer sustainability even if it comes with a higher price tag. That’s why we have a new wave of ethical consumerism companies like Patagonia (clothing) and Equal Exchange (coffee). Thinking even further than that, HowGood is an app developed to scan items and give a real-time sustainability analysis. Now that’s innovation.
Leverage your network to create new value.
Every company has an expected and reliable network of stakeholders, owners, employees, partners and consumers. This makes up the community you deal with on a day-to-day basis. Innovators who are game-changers always look to expand this circle. Often, this means fishing for network connections in unexpected places to create new value.
For example, innovative companies like Amazon, Shopify, Facebook, WeChat, eBay and Etsy have leveraged external networks far beyond their own developers, employees and users. Each has empowered self-employed individuals and small and medium-sized businesses to actively participate as producers of value on their online marketplace (digital platform), giving them reach they may not be able to achieve on their own. In exchange, each company enjoys additional profits and promotions through the value and efforts created by this network.
Continuously empower and explore your business.
Leading your business confidently into the future relies on two things: empowering your core business within its current marketplace and making room for creative and curious exploration of new growth engines. You want to remain rooted in what you do best and simultaneously explore cultivating next-step thinking to set the foundation of your future enterprise.
A great example of this is Google. Google remains a steadfast leader in search engine software and productivity apps, making revenue primarily through Ads and AdSense. However, the company headquarters allots 20% of its developers’ paid time to work on passion projects and new ideas. In fact, Google’s email service, Gmail, was created by developer Paul Buchheit during his 20% of free-thinking time. Amazing things can come from allowing yourself to explore, develop and expand upon what you already do.
Whether you are an innovator, a game-changer or looking to become one, the key ingredient that will propel you into the future is a future mindset, fueled by an imaginative, curious and open mind that will relentlessly focus on unlocking new opportunities to improve your customers’ lives. Connect the dots, expand and leverage your network and use your core competencies to power experimentation. The future is yours for the taking once you learn to elevate your thinking in this way.
This article was originally published on Forbes.
About Lital Marom
Lital Marom is a keynote speaker, AI visionary, and strategic advisor who empowers executives to work smarter and scale faster with AI. An engineer-turned-entrepreneur who has lived in 10 countries and founded four companies, she helps leaders turn disruption into growth and build future-ready organizations that scale and lead. A Forbes Coaches Council contributor since 2018, she advises Fortune 50 leaders on AI, innovation, leadership, and business transformation.
Explore Lital's AI keynote topics.