Rebuild, reskill and renew

With many businesses still recovering from the economic damage caused by the Covid-19 crisis, employers have to find innovative ways to maximise the potential of their staff. In many industries the priorities of entire workforces have totally shifted in the last 12 months, resulting in employees having to adopt new and refined roles.

It is critical that your managers become ‘adaptive change champions’. 

Here, we’ll discuss how businesses can present their employees with a vision for success, encouraging them to embrace and react positively to change.

The success formula

In order for employers to motivate their staff to adopt new roles they must first overcome two psychological factors that cause people to resist reskilling and taking on new roles:

1. Humans are creatures of habit, so we all feel uneasy whenever asked to act outside our normal comfort zones
2. We don’t like change because it creates uncertainty, and uncertainty is a demotivator

These two factors combine to act as a ‘psychological brake’ on people’s willingness to take on new roles, so managers need a way of taking off the brakes. Managers should learn, teach and talk about ‘the five-part success formula’, and its evil twin, ‘the failure formula’. As the names suggest, the success formula leads people to succeed, and the failure formula causes people to fail, and each person gets to choose which formula to live by.

The success formula can be summarised in five words: purpose, plan, action, setback, change:

1. Purposes are the goals we want to achieve
2. Plans are how we intend to achieve our goals
3. Actions are the daily implementation of our plans
4. Setbacks are the inevitable things that go wrong and that mess-up our original plans
5. Changes are the adaptations, adjustments, modifications and updates that we must make to our original plans and actions in order to achieve our purpose and to prosper

We must understand that setbacks and change are inherent in the system and cannot be ignored.

The failure formula is the exact opposite of the success formula:

1. No purpose = drifter mentality
2. No plans = dithering and the repetition of obsolete methods
3. No action = inaction, apathy, delay
4. Ignore setbacks = evasion, willful blindness, head in the sand
5. No change = stubbornness, refusal to adapt, modify, evolve, respond or retrain