Resilience became a buzzword early in the pandemic and continues to be top of mind in conversations about leadership. Prospection is not a word many managers are familiar with, let alone a buzzword. It refers to foresight – looking forward to the future. But these two skills – one we’re tired of hearing about, the other rarely mentioned – deserve your attention.
They came up as critical to thriving at work in research conducted by psychiatrist Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and renowned University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Seligman, father of positive psychology. Resilience is the bedrock of thriving through change. Prospection positions us ahead of change.
Some people struggle with challenges. Folks who are resilient grow stronger, adapting and improving. The duo’s research found 150 behaviours and mindsets that contribute to high-functioning, emotionally thriving adults. Of those, five factors are particularly important in building resilience: Emotional regulation, optimism, cognitive agility, self compassion and self-efficacy.
Dr. Kellerman and Prof. Seligman say our ability to manage our emotions is one of the first steps in taking control of our psychology so we can achieve our goals. Next time you find yourself flooded with emotion and jumping to extreme action, they advise you to slow down, creating space between the emotions you are experiencing and any actions those might push you to take. Use that space to reappraise what your emotions are telling you, which parts are helpful, which are a hindrance and what options you have. “You may have to repeat this two-step process many times for particularly charged situations,” they write in the book Tomorrowmind.
Optimism is involved not only in psychological but physical resilience. One of the most effective interventions is the “Best Possible Self” exercise in which you pick a future time frame such as 15 years and imagine yourself successful, then spend some time writing about that future. That heightens optimism, as does exercising gratitude regularly and savouring hard work.
Cognitive agility involves mentally moving back and forth between many possible scenarios before acting on the best one. For resilience, you need to avoid catastrophizing, allowing your fears to dominate. They recommend when that occurs, drawing a line with worst possible outcome at one end and best possible on the other end. In the middle of that line write three likely explanations of the situation that can lead to a positive result.
For example, Dr. Kellerman and Prof. Seligman note, a Friday noon e-mail that your boss wants to meet with you at 4:30 p.m. might spark fears you are to be fired. On the other hand, the best possible scenario might be you are getting a raise. Middle-line alternatives might include your boss needs help on a project.
Self compassion is the ability to be kind about our own suffering, failures and perceived inadequacies. They suggest you imagine whatever you were struggling with is happening to someone else, and support yourself as you would that other person. Self-efficacy, the fifth driver of resilience, is the belief we can succeed in a particular endeavour. Developing mastery in a given area – and reminding us of the progress to that state – is the best way to build self-efficacy and find it again when it wavers. You are successful, history proves.
Dr. Kellerman and Prof. Seligman describe prospection as a defining psychological capability of our era. “Prospection metabolizes the past and present to project the future. Like digestive metabolism, the prospecting mind extracts the nutrients from the past and present, then excretes the toxins and ballast in order to prepare for the future,” they write.
Their research found that teams whose leaders score higher in prospection perform better in a number of important dimensions: Team engagement is 19 per cent higher, team innovation scores are 18 per cent higher and team agility, as measured by a cognitive agility scale, is 25 per cent higher. Leaders with high prospection are planners, spending 159 per cent more time in such work than less-prospective peers.
So imagine and plan, deliberately and in moments when your brain is daydreaming. Identify interesting patterns and relationships. Play with odd juxtapositions of ideas, trends and activities. Don’t be deterred by the negative emotions thinking of the future can stir up. Mind wandering, Dr. Kellerman and Prof. Seligman stress, is a helpful feature of the mind – often where our best ideas come from.
Research by Minnesota marketing professor Kathleen Vohs and New York University psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen suggest prospection is a two-stage process. The first, a few seconds, is exploratory – “what do I want the future to be” or “what hopeful outcomes might lie ahead?” After that, you need a more deliberate and realistic look at how you might get to that future.
Cannonballs
- Consultant Ron Friedman recommends asking this question at your next team meeting: What are you stuck on?” But be willing to answer it yourself, as a way of building an environment for collaborative problem-solving on your team.
- Two other handy questions, from consultant Michael Kerr: “What’s the No. 1 thing that is making work less fun” and “what’s one thing we can do to make it more fun for our customers to do business with us?”
- Amazon recently launched Leadership Liftoff, an effort to go beyond just promoting somebody to a supervisory position and leaving them to struggle alone. Sandy Gordon, its vice-president for people, when asked what new managers need to know, says: “I want them to know we have their backs. Management can be lonely, and it’s nice to have other managers experiencing it in real time with you and have that additional support to make decisions.”
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.
Harvey Schachter