Personal Effectiveness: Mastering Changing Environments

By Lucia Strazzeri

How can we consistently achieve effective, desirable outcomes and results, despite the current, incessant surge in organizational chaos?

ACCORD, a model comprising six essential elements that underpin personal effectiveness, is provided here to assist with developing those workplace attributes that drive sustainable success.

These elements encompass Agility, Confidence, Collaboration, Optimism, Resilience, and Determination. Drawing upon them, this book provides expert advice, tips, and tools for flourishing in the face of tumultuous times.

This book is for everyone engaged in evolving work environments, as well as HR and Organizational Development professionals, at all career levels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Release date: Nov 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781637424940

Lucia Strazzeri

Lucia Strazzeri has more than twenty years of experience in human resources and organizational development, facilitating success among work groups ranging from the shop floor through technical and scientific teams, all the way to the C-Suite. She has held numerous consultative and leadership roles in her field, serving as a primary organizational development and performance management resource for international and domestic companies of all sizes. Lucia holds SPHR and SHRM-SCP industry certifications, as well as an MS in human resources from Fordham University.

Book preview

ELEMENT ONE

Agility

How may we express our own personal agility most effectively, especially at this very challenging point in history? Let us first have a better look at some aspects of the current working environment that are relevant to the topic at hand.

It is safe to assume that we can all see that the need for critical communication skills, particularly in the virtual arena, has been clearly amplified. As such, some businesses further defined communications policies that could readily address the amplified degree of flexibility needed to suit what have been often chaotic circumstances. Some even provided training for this vital skill, and this is, indeed, a good thing, as this kind of skills training can help support personal effectiveness in a fairly universal, straightforward sense, regardless of whether or not someone possesses a natural inclination to communicate proactively.

So, in some cases, organizations have gone the extra mile to supplement any skill gaps workers may have around business and interpersonal communications. In these cases, organizational agility is demonstrated, and the agility inherent in this highly transferable skill can now be passed onto workers as either newly acquired or recently enhanced communications abilities.

Along those same lines, those learned skills that initially capture a specific job opportunity can often be more generally distributed than the attributes that help differentiate and support a healthy and functional organizational culture. For example, marketing skills could seem fairly transferable, at least on the surface. Depending upon the individual, however, where those marketing skills are actually put to work can make a massive difference in terms of how effectively someone can perform there.

Organizational values are critical to general operations because they shape the culture. And as the old adage goes, culture triumphs over all else.

To better illustrate this, let us refer back to our example of marketing skills. A startup nonprofit firm’s successful fund development executive may come to the table with that qualification, as well as healthy doses of natural altruism and personal candor. But consider that it is very possible that this particular combination of skills and attributes would not be as beneficial to the same individual if he, she, or they worked for a bank with hidebound policies and generally conservative leanings.

Ideally, we can leverage both our learned qualifications and the attributes that come naturally to each of us in an optimal way, hopefully dovetailing nicely within the dominant organizational culture of our everyday work life. But even under ideal circumstances, globalization and technology will eventually force us into organizational cultures where the workaday norms can appear downright alien—in the extraterrestrial sense—at times. Beyond that, there may also be layers of unknown, underlying interpersonal complexities percolating in the mix.

This is why agility is so important. It is our starting (and restarting) point because at this moment in business history, we need to be equipped with it right out of the gate.

Let us take a look at what goes into agility.

Components of Agility

Here, we will review open-mindedness, systems thinking, risk tolerance, innovation, and adaptability.

Open-Mindedness

No matter how skilled or experienced we are, we want to approach our work with the eyes and ears of an eager student, even when we are considered the subject matter expert, in order to keep an open mind.

This is because (a) we never know when someone can offer an invaluable and useful nugget of information that had somehow gotten past us and, perhaps more importantly, (b) to resist new informational resources quite often proves to be no more than an exercise in proactive ignorance.

If one has a fundamental belief that all the knowledge necessary for eternal success is already in one’s own head, it can become incredibly difficult to learn what is required to move forward as circumstances continually and inevitably evolve. Having a closed mind is perhaps the biggest potential derailer to agility, because on its own, it can shut a person down to any kind of effective progress at work, right at the seedling stage.

Further, many of us have experienced the kind of detrimental effect that closed minds have on our working life, on a more universal basis. This kind of intellectual shutdown can affect entire departments, even whole divisions. As work environments go through transitions, especially if there are gaps and/or inconsistencies in communicating upcoming changes, it is not unusual for teams to dig in to thinking and doing things in the manner they have always done them, no matter how ineffective their traditional methods are in the present.

When mindsets and opinions differ—as they often do—work groups can become polarized, if only to seek the comfort of feeling as though their team’s uncompromising opinions and ways of work are the most viable of all. With this polarization can come some entrenched negative perceptions—oftentimes coupled with unproductive behaviors—that can have a rather devastating effect on both progress and efficacy.

Experience dictates how necessary it is to keep an open mind, especially when everything around us seems to be in an endless state of evolution. Further, if we can do that on an individual basis, it can encourage collective open-mindedness as well, augmenting both personal and group efficacy.

So, how may we better strive to keep an open mind in any given situation? Several helpful tips are offered here.

Tips for Keeping an Open Mind

1. Discuss the issue at hand with a friend or colleague who is not involved in it. We have all heard the term skin in the game. Here, we want to talk to a good listener who has absolutely none—meaning, no personal investment in what is going on, and ideally, someone who cannot perceivably benefit from any number of potential outcomes. To reap the greatest benefit from the conversation, try to offer all information as objectively as possible, during the course of the conversation. Keep to this even if what is going on is something you feel a bit emotional about, as—remember—the discussion itself is in the vital interest of keeping an open mind. The very act of verbalizing what is going on in an unbiased manner can help one to be more receptive to new ideas and solutions. Then, be sure to see if your friend or colleague has any comments to offer. Keep in mind that even if the comments or opinions offered do not appear very agreeable or relevant at the time, there is always the potential for the perspectives drawn from fresh eyes and ears to provide the spark needed to feed the flame of progress and efficacy, in the longer view.

2. Practice the fine art of reassessment. If this initially seems too arduous, especially if you innately dislike what you are dealing with and/or feel as though you have already scoped out every possible angle, begin by pretending that you are an unrelated third party who really, really wants for you, personally, to do exceptionally well. Think about how this third party would describe what is going on, and your role in it. Here, we want to be sure to take the part of someone outside of ourselves. This is because fear of change may cause us to retreat into dysfunctional groupthink, and even more importantly, we oftentimes simply do not give ourselves enough credit to have the kind of solid confidence needed to keep an open mind (more on confidence a bit later).

For example, where on your own you may have been inclined to think I really don’t think I have the skills to do this, when approached with a challenging but intriguing assignment, someone who knows your abilities well—and who is not you—may feel a very different and much more positive way about it. That individual could likely say, I think (insert your name here) has related and transferable skills, as well as a wealth of applicable experience. There is excellent potential for success. Or, when you feel a matter is completely hopeless and utter to yourself, This situation is completely unworkable, someone outside of yourself might offer, "Let’s look at this from a different angle, so we can see where the hidden opportunities