Stressed By Work? You Can Tap Your Own Resilience

Work.

That’s where many adults spend the majority of their waking hours.

Not with their families. Not with their hobbies. Not doing what they would likely prefer to do if earning a paycheck weren’t necessary.

But at work.

And even if they like their work, many people are feeling the pressures of relentless change, a shaky economy and other dynamics that are taking a toll on their relationships, their mental health and even their physical wellbeing.

In navigating today’s uncertain world, many people need all the help they can get. An excellent resource is a new book titled TOMORROWMIND: Thriving at Work with Resilience, Creativity, and Connection—Now and in an Uncertain Future.

Authors Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin Seligman draw on their original research to show how people can meet the challenges ahead while flourishing at work.

Kellerman is an advisor to healthcare and technology companies. Trained in psychology, she earned an MD with honors from Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Seligman, who earned his PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, is former president of the American Psychological Association. He’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Positive Psychology Center.

Rodger Dean Duncan: There’s no doubt that the world of work is undergoing a lot of change. Why are those changes so hard for so many people?

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: Both the nature and the pace of change around us are unlike anything our brains have experienced prior to this era. The change is constant, it’s volatile, and it’s complex, so we are uncertain what it will mean for us. In the face of uncertainty, we are wired to prepare for bad outcomes. All of which means that we end up with a constant sense of threat to our psychological stability—the feeling that the other shoe is about to drop.

Duncan: While many people feel anxious about the future, you say the human brain actually evolved for this kind of environment. Tell us about that.

Martin Seligman: Our brains evolved to support the work of hunting and gathering. Those activities entail high levels of curiosity, of cognitive agility, and of creativity. For many centuries, curiosity and creativity were liabilities rather than assets at work. Today these skills have returned to prominence.

Duncan: You write about your deep exploration of the history and science of the human brain at work. What are the key lessons you derive from that study?

Kellerman: First, it’s important to understand that the only world of work that is “natural” to us is hunting and gathering. Every other kind of work requires that we adapt our minds to a new reality.

In previous labor transformations, our species has not been proactive about attending to the psychological risks of the new forms of work, and has suffered as a result. Today we can leverage our unique historical advantage—behavioral science—to understand the risks and also to build the skills we need to prevent negative outcomes. Also, we see in today’s world of work an opportunity to reclaim some uniquely human skills like creativity and prospection that have fallen out of use but were important in previous eras.

Duncan: Resilience, you say, is “the bedrock of thriving through change.” How do you define resilience, and what are its key building blocks?

Kellerman: Resilience is the ability to bounce back from change without harm. At its strongest, it’s the ability to even grow stronger through challenge.

Our analyses of data found five key drivers of resilience:

• Self-efficacy, the self-belief that we can accomplish what we set out to
• Cognitive agility, the ability move back and forth between broad opportunity scoping and focused activity
• Self-compassion, the ability to afford ourselves the kind, forgiving perspective on our failings that we afford others
• Optimism, the tendency to foresee positive outcomes for even very difficult situations
• Emotional regulation, the ability to pause and reappraise emotional reactions before deciding how to respond

Duncan: What seem to be the links between resilience and creativity?

Seligman: Once upon a time, people thought creativity was done by a lone creative genius who was struck by profound insights. In fact, innovation requires a fair amount of trial and error and often happens in teams. We have seen that resilience allows both individuals and teams to not be unduly set back by failed trials and to persist with further iteration.

Duncan: What role does social connection play in people’s engagement and performance in the workplace?

Seligman: We have known for many years that social connection is an essential ingredient of wellbeing. Without relationships we wither. At work, social connection leads us to feel more connected to our companies and more energized about our efforts. When teams have a high degree of connection and belonging, they are more innovative as well.

Duncan: What seem to be the most common barriers to social connection in the workplace, and what can leaders do to help break down those barriers?

Kellerman: There are three. The first is time. We are always in a rush. But studies show that even ten seconds of kind words can help another person feel more connected to us, and that when we show kindness to others, our perception of not having enough time converts into a sense of time abundance.

The second barrier is space. We are separated geographically from one another. Here the key is synchronicity. Prosocial acts are more impactful on our sense of connection when we do them via phone, video, or in person live, so we experience shared time together.

Finally, there is the barrier of Us/Them. This refers to the fact that our brains process almost everyone we work with as a stranger, along some dimension—they speak another language, are of another race/ethnicity/religion, work for a different function, are much older or younger than us, etc, etc. Once we knew and worked with a homogenous group of people for our whole lives. Our brains processed those people as “Us”—affording them certain benefits—and everyone else as “Them.” Critical to building connection at work is understanding this automatic processing and consciously working to overcome it.

Practices like individuation, where you get to know what makes someone unique rather than just thinking of them as a member of a different group; or recategorization, where we seek out groupings within which we and this new acquaintance both belong, are examples of strategies that help us quickly overcome this barrier by rewiring our brain to process our colleagues as “Us.”

Duncan: Creativity, you say, is no longer reserved for people in traditionally creative fields—that everyone is a creative today. Please give us some examples to illustrate what you mean by that.

Kellerman: Everyone on the front lines is first to sense important changes, and to have the opportunity to creatively respond. Imagine a customer service agent suddenly fielding several complaints of a new bug in the company’s software. They will share news of this with the software team, but also have the opportunity to respond in a number of creative, and highly valuable ways. For example, they might try to piece together what unites those calling in to complain about the bug by asking about the computer they are using, the internet provider, other software they are running. This could unlock a critical insight about what is going wrong and why. Or, they might develop a set of responses to this new customer complaint that work particularly well, and which they can then share with their peers. Compare this to the traditionally scripted approach to customer service, where agents are following a defined flow. Today the most valuable agents are creative, agile, curious, and compassionate.

Duncan: You identify four different types of creative thinking. What are they, and how can understanding this typology help both workers and their leaders?

Seligman: First is integration, the idea that two things that seem different are actually the same.

Second is the opposite kind of thinking, splitting, where a single thing turns out to be more usefully analyzed in parts.

Third is figure-ground reversal, wherein the most important information turns out to be in the background.

Fourth is distal thinking, where the idea is so different from the here and now that the challenge is in bridging the gap. It’s important to understand which of these four most closely describes our own creative strengths, and which are more challenging. We can then surround ourselves with team members with complementary styles to minimize blind spots and maximize opportunity. At the organizational level, leaders can analyze their firm’s innovation to determine where they are strong and where, by contrast, supplementation is needed.

Duncan: What are the two or three most important things leaders can do to help people thrive in the workplace?

Kellerman: First, build your own resilience. Resilient leaders have resilient teams. Just by modeling how to respond to challenges with confidence and equanimity you will help your team members do the same. Second, make sure your teams know why their work matters. Even if—especially if—they have to stop one project and move on to another, make sure they know why both the old and the new work matters, or they will stop caring.

Finally, help them build their creative self-efficacy. This is our self-belief in our creative abilities. Managers have a tremendous impact on this self-confidence, and can build it simply by recognizing small innovations. Think of incremental progress in processes, in products, in sales methods, and more. Notice it, and praise it. Higher creative self-efficacy correlates with higher quality creative output.