For HR, people, and learning and development professionals, it’s a time of major changes in these fields. The leaders we speak with every day are navigating hurdles like:
- Changing workforce skills and demands
- Tightening investments in talent development
- Strategic upheaval due to mergers and acquisitions
- Uncertainty around return-to-work and hybrid policies (yes, even still!)
- Recent drops in DEIB investments
It’s a lot! For many HR and learning leaders, it feels like the pace of change escalated during the pandemic—and hasn't stopped since.
This is why my Co-Founder, Sergio Rosas, and I were thrilled to co-host a webinar on cultivating adaptability with Stacey Long-Genovese and Morgan Williams, who brought their experience from Amazon, AWS, Snap Inc., and PeakHR to help us explore this topic.
We put on our learning design hats to structure the webinar so it would be as impactful as possible, framing the event around storytelling, creating space for authenticity, and driving audience engagement.
The results were fantastic! We loved the energy and insights from both our panelists and attendees, who made this a rich, vibrant discussion.
Check out a recording, as well as a few key highlights and takeaways below.💡
We really appreciated the many stories Stacey and Morgan shared as they walked us through their perspectives on fostering adaptability. Stories are a powerful tool for sharing wisdom and deepening learning. And at Next Shift Learning, we’re all about using stories to illustrate concepts and help our learners put ideas into action!
Here are a few stories from the webinar that we found particularly insightful.
The Power of Saying No—Even to Your Teammates
Stacey wanted her team to grow more comfortable saying “no,” but setting boundaries isn’t always easy, even with a supportive leader. So she decided to create a new ritual: her team would begin their weekly meetings with a round robin where each team member described something they said “no” to that week.
Gradually, this began to shift the team’s culture, and setting boundaries and prioritizing began to feel more natural. Stacey noted that sometimes, the person the team member had said “no” to was also in the meeting. Hearing this perspective helped everyone empathize with and understand the circumstances. Even if they hadn’t gotten the answer they wanted!
In Stacey’s words, this provided an opportunity to “humanize someone else in this experience and realize that tradeoffs sometimes require that we do one thing and stop another.”
Learning from Others during Challenging Times
Morgan was just settling into a new job as a Human Resources Manager at Casper, shortly after the company’s IPO. It was an exciting new opportunity during an exciting time—but then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Talk about needing to be adaptable!
“Immediately,” Morgan said, “I knew this was going to be a big deal.” She did her best to make decisions and communicate them with clarity, even as circumstances were changing rapidly.
But there was still no roadmap to follow, creating a difficult environment for good decision-making. Morgan came up with a solution: she began looking to educational institutions’ policies to understand the best course of action. Often, these institutions were a few steps ahead of corporations when it came to making calls on policies like masking, social distancing, or switching to all-remote work when possible. In this way, Morgan was able to think creatively about her inputs for decision making as an HR leader, helping her adapt more quickly to a deeply complex situation.
Building Adaptability with Psychological Safety: Techniques for Good Listening
Stacey underscored the importance of helping teammates be open about the struggles they’re facing. To foster a thriving, highly adaptable team, people need to be able to not only share their struggles, but also the reasons behind them. Do they need access to different software or certain technical skills they may be missing? Or is it something different, like burnout or exhaustion?
But these conversations only work if team members truly feel safe when opening up. This can be a challenge, however—especially when work is stressful. When times are intense, Stacey noted, “it’s hard for people to show up as their best selves.”
She shared one strategy that helped her create this space: listening with curiosity. In conversations with her team members, Stacey started focusing on thinking of questions, rather than answers. This simple shift helped them feel much more comfortable getting vulnerable.
In her experience, you don’t even need to ask the questions you think of. Simply listening in this “mode” changes the whole vibe of the conversation, and helps your team open up and say what’s really on their mind.
In Conclusion
Thanks to our incredible panelists, who got vulnerable themselves in sharing their wisdom and perspective from the curveballs they’ve faced in their own careers! We also wanted to give a huge shout out to our attendees, who shared invaluable insights, too. We especially loved this mic-drop quote from one of our attendees, Mary: “Acknowledging that you don’t know something is the highest level of confidence.”
We certainly believe that at Next Shift Learning, which is why we love creating these opportunities for people to come together and continue building their knowledge and learning from each other. Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you at the next one!
In the meantime, if you have any questions for me, don’t hesitate to get in touch at sergio.rosas@nextshiftlearning.com.
Are you looking for ways to help leaders at your organization cultivate evergreen skills like adaptability? Get your free copy of our practice-forward guide on how to create an effective leadership development program, built around skills like adaptability––the evergreen capabilities that will help leaders thrive, no matter what the world throws at them.
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