Harvard Business School professor Joseph Fuller has spent the better part of a decade studying – and working with – some of the world’s most successful people, from Fortune 500 executives to Nobel Prize winners.
What sets top performers apart from others, Fuller discovered, is not their confidence or business acumen, but their ability to adapt.
“They’re not tied to a predetermined career path that they defined when they were students or when they started their first job,” he told CNBC Make It. “They are open to unexpected opportunities and embrace change instead of fearing it.”
It’s great to set career goals and create deadlines to achieve them. The danger, Fuller says, is leaning so heavily on your preferences that you close yourself off to a sudden detour or nonlinear path.
For example: You might turn down a job at a small startup that you’re passionate about and that pays well because you always planned to work for a large, well-known company.
Or, you might be tempted to look for a new job, even if you’re happy with your current role, because you’re not getting promoted as quickly as you thought.
In both cases, “you ignore what motivates or interests you and instead let rigid expectations guide your career,” Fuller says. “That kind of stubborn mentality won’t get you far.”
If you focus on a specific career path, you risk neglecting other rewarding options for your professional life, Fuller adds.
A skill in high demand but “rare to find”
Adaptability is a soft skill “increasingly in demand” across a wide range of industries, according to a recent LinkedIn study.
According to LinkedIn, the need for flexible and resilient employees in the workplace is a direct result of changes in the post-pandemic workforce: the rise of AI, widespread adoption of remote work and hybrid as well as five generations, each with different communication. workplace styles and jargon, now working together.
Employers want to hire people who can quickly adapt to these ongoing changes, says Aneesh Raman, vice president of LinkedIn. “Adaptability is currently the best way to have some capacity for action,” he notes in the report. “Developing the muscle of adaptability is at the heart of change management.”
And yet, “it’s a skill that can be rare to find,” Fuller says. “People are afraid to try new things and fail. But you can’t grow without stepping out of your comfort zone.”
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